Thomas Mann and James Joyce never met in life but, especially in death, found much in common. Both were writers of challenging fiction who ended their days in self-imposed exile in Zurich. Both are buried there, at opposite ends of town.
During their lifetimes their respective homelands rejected them first with mockery, then hatred. The works of both men were banned.After decades of posthumous apathy, both were resurrected by their homelands for praise and monetisation purposes.
Just 10 days before another episode of Ireland’s Bloomsday malarkey, Germany is celebrating Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday in a state of nervous jubilation.
A new, hefty biography heads the long list of books, while critics and essayists have delivered fresh prophetic framings for Mann’s major works in the present.
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Is modern Germany and Europe, some wonder, heading back to the Zauberberg (Magic Mountain)? Mann’s 1924 novel tells of a healthy young engineer, Hans Castorp, who visits a friend in a Davos mountain-top clinic only to succumb to its self-indulgent charms of introspection, hypochondria, disease and death.
Running through the book, two polar-opposite patients - one a humanist democrat and the other a fascism-adjacent communist revolutionary - debate “power and law, tyranny and freedom, superstition and science”.
Mann was channelling the debates that dominated his world a century ago - and ours today.
For German writer Thomas Wiedermann, who wrote a novel based on the author, the Zauberberg is “about a pre-war world, a burnt-out society … where the smallest spark is enough to make the world explode”. A century on, he fears the modern world is “not repeating [the past] but at least mirroring it”.
Others see worrying contemporary parallels to Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks, drawing on his early years in the northern city of Lübeck where he was born on June 6th, 1875.
This debut novel, published when he was 26, sweeps the reader through the rise and fall of a wealthy merchant family whose business is built by the first generation, managed by the second and ruined by the third.
Last February, the Neue Zürcher daily suggested Switzerland was suffering from third-generation “Buddenbrooks syndrome”, happily living off the family fortune, “studying art history, working less, retiring earlier”. Rather than citizens, the NZZ argued, “the Swiss have become consumers of their own state”.
Similar arguments can be heard in Germany, trapped in a never-ending recession, and a recent warning from Chancellor Friedrich Merz that holiday-loving Germans “need to work more”.
Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 for his work, packed with universal, timeless themes that are finding new relevance and attention today.
His 150th birthday has become a dual celebration of sorts.
[ Colm Tóibín sells Thomas Mann back to the Germans. Not everyone’s buyingOpens in new window ]
It marks the reopening of the fabled villa that Thomas and Katja Mann had built in California’s Pacific Palisades. It was purchased and restored by the German state a decade ago - but it’s a miracle there is even a house left.
Last January, as wildfires raged through nearby Santa Monica and edged into Pacific Palisades, villa staff raced through the house, snatching the writer’s handwritten papers, paintings and beloved Goethe complete works - but had to leave behind thousands of personal mementos and rare books.
Much of the neighbourhood was consumed by fire but the worst damage to the Mann villa was a thick coating of soot on the facade, which has been scrubbed and repainted for Friday’s party.
Mann knew personally how quickly disaster could strike. He was on a lecture tour of Europe a month after Hitler took power in 1933 when he decided not to return to Germany and settle in Switzerland.
His denunciations of the Nazis from there saw them revoke his citizenship and burn his books. After their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Mann resettled his family in the US. Asked by a reporter there how he felt living in exile, Mann replied: “Where I am is Germany! I carry my culture within.”
It was here that Mann produced his perhaps most relevant works for our time. Not novels, but accessible and urgent essays and public lectures about democracy, its strengths and its enemies.
In 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Mann warned radio audiences that the greatest danger to democracy was the fascination and novelty of fascism. His observations carry eerie echoes today.
“Once [fascism] has subjugated the body through fear,” he warned from personal experience, “it can even subjugate thought.”
In 1943, with war raging in Europe, Mann warned, again on the radio: “It is a terrible spectacle when the irrational becomes popular.”
He eventually returned to Europe in 1952 but settled in Zürich, shunning Germany. His countrymen had never forgiven him – for fleeing, for surviving the war under Californian palm trees, but most of all for his BBC propaganda broadcasts into his homeland.
Many Germans who convinced themselves later they they knew nothing of the Holocaust resented how, even in far-away California, Mann knew as early as 1942 of the mass murder of Polish Jews using poison gas. It was, he warned, “an expression of the spirit and attitude of the National Socialist revolution”.
Even worse than him knowing: he knew they knew, a point he kept ramming home.
In another broadcast he lectured the Germans, literally, about the terrible irony of their situation: a dictator dangling before the noses of a people he viewed as “cowardly, submissive and stupid” a bright future as a “race destined for world domination”.
In an open letter, published four months after Germany’s capitulation, Mann insisted he would not return to a “stupid, empathy-free” German people who “would like to pretend that 12 years never happened”. The final kick came with his remark in the letter about the Allied bombings of German cities: “Everything must be paid for”.
No wonder, then, that his eventual return to Germany in 1949 was a chilly affair.
Many Germans saw Mann as a traitor, even more so after he visited East Germany to accept a literary medal of honour.
Two years later, learning that Mann had resettled in Switzerland, the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily denounced him as “an exponent of an aversion to Germany that goes as far as stupidity”.
Germany fell out of love with Mann but eventually warmed again to him in the 1980s. Mann didn’t live long enough for that reconciliation - nor to fall back in love with America.
A decade after taking US citizenship in 1944, Mann was dubbed a “suspected communist” and brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There he heard himself described as one of the “world’s foremost apologists for Stalin and company”.
A chastened Mann warned his adoptive homeland that, with its embrace of witch-hunts and “loyalty checks”, it was “well on [its way] to a fascist police state”.
To his diary, Mann confessed he was “shockingly touched by the dwindling sense of justice in this country, the rule of force”.
Considering that, it doesn’t take too much effort to imagine what Thomas Mann would have made of German-American president Donald Trump.
As for his literary legacy: given that he died exactly 70 years ago, Mann’s works enter the public domain next January to join fellow former Zürich resident James Joyce.
Brace yourself for the mash-up, Chat-GPT fan fiction: Leopold Bloom on the Magic Mountain, anyone?
