Literary figure Thomas Mann is celebrated worldwide in 2025
Published: Wednesday, Dec 18th 2024, 12:10
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Next year, the literary world will be celebrating the 150th birthday of the writer Thomas Mann. The German-born author's novels shaped an era and are still read around the world today. At the same time, Thomas Mann was also a political author and lived in exile in Switzerland for a time. Numerous publications and events in several countries will commemorate this in 2025.
His children called him the "magician", his readers revered him as the "magician of words". With novels such as "Buddenbrooks", "The Magic Mountain" and "Doctor Faustus", Thomas Mann created world literature and became arguably the greatest German-language writer of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Next year, the "bourgeois prince of poets", as literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki called him, will be 150 years old. This will be celebrated in a big way in 2025, in Germany, Los Angeles, Zurich and Lithuania.
Among other things, Fischer Verlag is reissuing Thomas Mann's most important works as paperback editions in a new design and with afterwords by renowned authors. Various new publications are dedicated to the life and work of the great writer.
A stay at a health resort in Davos inspired him
Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875, the son of a senator from Lübeck. Soon after his father's death in 1891, the family moved to Munich, but Thomas Mann remained attached to the city of his birth for the rest of his life.
But the writer also had a lot in common with Switzerland. One of his grandmothers was Swiss. In 1905, Thomas Mann and his wife Katia went on their honeymoon to Zurich. He was inspired to write his novel "The Magic Mountain" in Davos, where his wife spent a spa stay and Mann got to know the world of the sanatoriums there.
An international Thomas Mann festival will take place on July 12. The venue is the cultural center in Thomas Mann's restored summer house on the Curonian Spit in Nida (Nidden) in Lithuania. On the narrow spit of land between the Baltic Sea and the lagoon, in a dune landscape known as the "Sahara of the North", the newly crowned Nobel Prize winner had the wooden house built in 1929 using part of his prize money. From his study on the second floor, he had a magnificent view of the deep blue of the lagoon - but only for three summers. After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, the way there was blocked.
Six children
Until then, Thomas Mann had his main residence in Munich, where he lived for 40 years. His six children were born there: Erika and Klaus (1905/06), Golo and Monika (1909/10), Elisabeth and Michael (1918/19).
He fled from the Nazis in 1933. He first went to Switzerland, where he lived in Küsnacht ZH until 1938. Thomas Mann then moved on to the USA in 1938. He held a visiting professorship at Princeton University (New Jersey) and later moved to the West Coast. Today, the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades is a transatlantic meeting place that hosts scholarship holders every year. The Nobel Prize winner spent ten years of his life here. His grandson Frido called it the "White House of Exile" in a book published in 2018.
Thomas Mann's radio broadcasts "Deutsche Hörer!", which he recorded there and which the London BBC broadcast to the German Reich, are linked to his time in California. On January 29, they will be published by Fischer in book form with a foreword and afterword by author Mely Kiyak. In his broadcasts, Thomas Mann left no doubt about the political and moral responsibility of Germany and the German people for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Many in his old homeland resented this, he was treated with hostility and when he returned to Europe in 1952, he settled back in Switzerland. He last lived in Kilchberg ZH on Lake Zurich and died in Zurich Cantonal Hospital on August 12, 1955.
Desk on display in Zurich
Switzerland is also home to the Thomas Mann Archive at ETH Zurich, which preserves and maintains his literary legacy. Like the Buddenbrookhaus in Lübeck or the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, the archive belongs to the Thomas Mann International organization. This organization has now created the initiative and anniversary platform Mann2025.de, which lists all the anniversary events.
In Zurich, for example, Thomas Mann's legendary desk can be discovered. Guided tours of the permanent exhibition in the Thomas Mann Archive in February, May and December 2025 will give guests an insight into the writer's workplace. And on May 21, 2025, there will be a book talk on "Dear Miss Heart" about Thomas Mann's most loyal reader. The book's editor, Holger Pils, will present the previously unpublished correspondence between Thomas Mann and the bookseller Ida Herz. He does this using original letters from the Thomas Mann archive.
Passionate advocacy for democracy
Literary scholar Kai Sina examines the role of "Thomas Mann as a political activist" in a book published by Propyläen at the end of November. Sina also writes the epilogue to the new edition of "The Magic Mountain". The Buddenbrookhaus also emphasizes Thomas Mann's timeless importance as a political thinker. "Mann's passionate advocacy of democracy and his warnings of anti-democratic and totalitarian dangers are once again gaining relevance today," explained its director Caren Heuer at the launch of the "Mann 2025" initiative.
Among the new publications announced by Fischer Verlag is "Zeit der Magier", a double biography of the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann by Hans Wisskirchen, President of the German Thomas Mann Society. Multi-talented Ulrich Tukur - actor, musician and writer - will publish the anthology "Mit Thomas Mann am Meer" in May, a selection of Mann's most beautiful texts about the sea.
"You can take a walk through the year with Thomas Mann with Felix Lindner. The German scholar is a profound connoisseur of Thomas Mann's diaries. In his booklet, published at the end of November, he has selected a sentence from them for each day of the year. Thomas Mann had described the diaries as "without any literary value" and they were only allowed to be published 20 years after his death. Here, the exceptional author shows his human side. "Tired at work", for example, is written on January 3.
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