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Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

Mann won the Nobel Prize, fled Germany when the Nazis rose, and spent decades in exile wrestling with the question of what German culture had become. His novels are deliberate, layered, and long. Buddenbrooks chronicles a family's decline. The Magic Mountain traps its hero in a sanatorium where ideas are debated while Europe slides toward war. He wrote about the tension between the life of the mind and the life of action, and he never pretended there was an easy resolution.

Concepts

absurd, agency, authenticity, freedom, loneliness, love, meaning, oppression, praxis, rebellion

Quotes (6)

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other ...” — Essays of Three Decades (1947)
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous...” — Death in Venice (1912)
“For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty ov...” — The Magic Mountain (1924)
“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” — The Magic Mountain (1924)
“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject ...” — The Magic Mountain (1924)
“A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if t...” — The Magic Mountain (1924)