In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted. Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters. Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"During the period of his American exile in the 1930s and 1940s, the German author Thomas Mann became one of the most prominent anti-fascists in the United States, and in so doing forever transformed our understanding of what a modern writer is and should be doing"--

A classic, controversial book exploring German culture and identity by the author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, now back in print. When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation. Thomas took it as an unforgivable stab in the back. The bitter dispute between the brothers would swell into the strange, tortured, brilliant, sometimes perverse literary performance that is Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a book that Mann worked on and added to throughout the war and that bears an intimate relation to his postwar masterpiece The Magic Mountain. Wild and ungainly though Mann’s reflections can be, they nonetheless constitute, as Mark Lilla demonstrates in a new introduction, a key meditation on the freedom of the artist and the distance between literature and politics. The NYRB Classics edition includes two additional essays by Mann: “Thoughts in Wartime” (1914), translated by Mark Lilla and Cosima Mattner; and “On the German Republic” (1922), translated by Lawrence Rainey.

One of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, the novella “Death in Venice” embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in much of his work; the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering, and the conflict between the artist and his inner self. Mann’s handling of these concerns in this story of a middle-aged German writer, torn by his passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, resulted in a work of great psychological intensity and tragic power.

Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann’s comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies—among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues—amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two. Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.

A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat. On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns); the witty novella The Transposed Heads; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider, which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures—on Goethe, Freud, Wagner—attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values. In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.

This is the first up-to-date biography in English of Thomas Mann (1875-1955), perhaps the greatest German novelist of the twentieth century. Mann was the author of several classics of modern European fiction, including Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Trickster, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a staunch opponent of Nazism (which eventually drove him intoexile). Celebrated biographer Donald Prater traces Mann's life and work, from his upbringing in Lubeck, through his years in Munich, his exile in the US, and his last years in Switzerland. He discusses Mann's relationship with his novelist brother Heinrich, his homosexuality, his career as aprolific essayist, and the vast achievement of his novels. But the biography devotes particular attention to Mann's political thinking and his role in the rise and fall of Hitlerism. In Mann's development from nationalistic conservatism to a vigorous humanist anti-Nazism, Prater sees a fascinatingand crucially important illustration of the 'German problem' still so much of relevance to the Europe of today. Elegantly written, and always entertaining, Thomas Mann: A Life will take its place as the major biography of Mann.