Thomas Mann Novelist
- Gender: Male
- Citizenship: Czechoslovakia
- Born: Jun 6, 1875
- Died: Aug 12, 1955
Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in the novel Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, returning to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.
For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
beauty
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
peace & war
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
family
Everything is politics.
politics
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
death
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
death
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
truth
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
death
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
history
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
death
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
truth