Thomas Mann

Von Thomas Mann »Es ist eine hervorragende Arbeit, redlich, positiv und reich«, urteilte S. Fischers Lektor Moritz Heimann nach der Lektüre des Manuskripts über Thomas Manns ersten Roman, seinen wohl am meisten gelesenen, am meisten verbreiteten. ›Verfall einer Familie‹ – sein Untertitel scheint ihn einzureihen in eine bestimmte Gattung, aber »der Zug zum Satirischen und Grotesken«, der darin steckt, hebt ihn zugleich davon ab, gibt ihm einen eigenen Charakter, eigene Wirkung bis in die Gegenwart. Thomas Mann erzählt nur wenig verschlüsselt die Geschichte seiner Familie und ihrer Stellung in der Vaterstadt Lübeck, soweit er sie nachvollziehen, in Einzelheiten überblicken konnte, ja sogar noch miterlebt hat. Verwandte, Honoratioren und markante Persönlichkeiten seiner Jugend werden integriert. Den meisten Raum nimmt das Leben Thomas Buddenbrooks ein, »ein modernes Heldenleben«; sein Sohn Hanno wird einen langen Strich unter die Genealogie der Familie setzen und sich rechtfertigen mit den Worten: »Ich glaubte ... ich glaubte ... es käme nichts mehr ...« In denmehr als hundert Jahren seit seinem ersten Erscheinen hat der Roman unzählige Menschen in seinen Bann gezogen und hat bis heute nichts an Charme und Aktualität eingebüßt. Also available in English. Paperback760 pagesText in GermanFischer Verlag, 1991Originally published in 19014.7 x 1.4 x 7.6 inchesISBN 9783596294312Fiction

Buddenbrooks

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. Woods A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. “A remarkable achievement . . . In Woods’s sparkling translation, the reader encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom, and tone to the original.”—New York Times Book Review “Wonderfully fresh and elegant . . . Essential reading for anyone who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe.”—Los Angeles TimesBuddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature—the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity—seductions that are at variance with its own traditions—its downfall becomes certain.In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Also available in German.Paperback731 pagesRandom House/Vintage, 1994Originally Published in 19015.1 x 1.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679752608Historical Fiction

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. WoodsA classic of modern literature: Buddenbrooks is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. With an introduction by T. J. Reed.As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor.First published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles in its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.Hardcover776 pagesEveryman's Library, 1994Originally published in 19015.34 x 8.34 inchesISBN 978-0679417378Literature

By Thomas Mann “A classic novella about one man’s infatuation with a young boy’s ideal beauty as cholera sweeps through the canals of Venice, emptying the hotels and quieting the streets.” —Jillian Kravatz, Boston Magazine A "brilliant . . . perfectly nuanced translation" (The Boston Globe) of Thomas Mann's greatest short works Featuring his world-famous masterpiece, "Death in Venice," this collection of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann's stories and novellas reveals his artistic evolution. In a widely acclaimed translation that restores the controversial passages that were censored from the original English version, "Death in Venice" tells about a ruinous quest for love and beauty amid degenerating splendor. Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but lonely author, travels to the Queen of the Adriatic in search of an elusive spiritual fulfillment that turns into his erotic doom. Spellbound by a beautiful Polish boy, he finds himself fettered to this hypnotic city of sun-drenched sensuality and eerie physical decay as it gradually succumbs to a secret epidemic. Also included in this volume are eleven other stories by Mann: "Tonio Kroger," "Gladius Dei," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "The Will for Happiness," "Little Herr Friedmann," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Little Lizzy," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," "The Wunderkind," and "Harsh Hour." All of the stories collected here display Mann's inimitable use of irony, his subtle characterizations, and superb, complex plots. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Paperback384 pagesPenguin Classics, 1999Originally Published in 19125 x 7.7 inchesISBN 9780141181738German Literature

Death in Venice and Other Tales

By Thomas MannTranslated by H.T. Lowe-PorterIn addition to Death in Venice, this volume includes Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow, A Man and His Dog, Felix Krull, The Blood of the Walsungs, Tristan, and Tonio Kröger.These stories, as direct as Thomas Mann's novels are complex, are perfect illustrations of their author's belief that "a story must tell itself." Varying in theme, in style, in tone, each is in its way characteristic of Mann's prodigious talents. From the high art of the famous title novella ("A story," said Mann, "of death...and the voluptuousness of doom"), to the irony of Felix Krull, the early story on which he later based his comic novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, they are stunning testimony to the mastery and virtuosity of a literary giant.Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924, The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955. Also available in German. Paperback402 pagesRandom House/Vintage, 19895.2 x 0.7 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679722069 Short Story, Fiction

Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories

Von Thomas Mann Der nicht mehr junge Schriftsteller Gustav Aschenbach - mit den Gesichtszügen Gustav Mahlers - entdeckt für sich am Lido des schwülwarmen Venedig die Gestalt des apollinisch schönen Knaben Tadzio und strebt in seinen Gedanken zu ihm, steigert sich in eine unerfüllbare Liebe und verspielt damit, nach einem Wort von Heinrich Mann, »was ihm das wünschenswerteste schien«. Ohne seine eigene Intention zu verbergen, erklärte Thomas Mann später (1920 an Carl Maria Weber) Gustav Aschenbachs Sehnen nach Tadzio: » Es ist das Problem der Schönheit , daß der Geist das Leben, das Leben aber den Geist als ›Schönheitl‹ empfindet«. denn »der Geist, welcher liebt, ist nicht fanatisch... er wirbt, und sein Werben ist erotische Ironie...« Er wollte seine Novelle verstanden wissen als »Übersetzung eines schönsten Liebesgedichtes der Welt ins Kritisch-Prosaische, des Gedichtes, dessen Schlußstrophe beginnt: ›Wer das Tiefste gedacht , liebt das Lebendigste .‹« (Hölderlin, ›Sokrates und Alkibiades‹) Novellen und Erzählungen begleiten das Schaffen Thomas Manns von den ersten Anfängen an. Ob er nun im 'Tod in Venedig' eine moderne Variation des ewigen Themas des platonischen Eros gibt; ob er den Leser mit den 'Vertauschten Köpfen' in die indische Märchenwelt oder mit dem 'Gesetz' in die Zeit des Propheten Moses führt; ob er in 'Schwere Stunde' ein knappes Portrait Schillers zeichnet, in 'Gladius Dei' die Atmosphäre Münchens um die Jahrhundertwende beschwört oder im 'Tristan' von dem wunderlichen Schriftsteller Detlev Spinell erzählt: "Immer ist er mittendrin ganz und gar, und seine leidenschaftliche Versenkung in den Vorgang, die Person, die Seelenlage, sie zieht uns hinein und läßt uns nicht los." (Erich Kahler) Also available in English.Paperback325 pagesText in GermanFischer Verlag, 1995Originally Published in 19654.7 x 0.8 x 7.5 inchesISBN 9783596200542Fiction, Short Stories

Der Tod in Venedig und andere Erzählungen

Von Thomas MannGeplant als Novelle, als heiteres Gegenstück zum »Tod in Venedig«, entstand mit dem »Zauberberg« einer der großen Romane der klassischen Moderne. Ein kurzer Besuch in einem Davoser Sanatorium wird für Hans Castorp zu einem siebenjährigen Aufenthalt, der Kurort wird zur Bühne für die europäische Befindlichkeit vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Im Juli 1913 begonnen, während des Krieges durch essayistische Arbeiten, vor allem durch die »Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen«, unterbrochen, konnte der Roman 1924 abgeschlossen und veröffentlicht werden. Also available in English.Paperback1002 pagesText in GermanFischer Verlag, 1991Originally Published in 19247.4 x 4.8 x 1.7 inchesISBN 9783596294336Fiction

Der Zauberberg

By Thomas Mann Translated by John E. Woods "John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece."—The New Yorker "Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods."—The New Republic Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul--and the ability to love his fellow man. Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius--both national and individual--and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist. Paperback534 pagesRandom House/Vintage, 1999Originally Published in 19475.3 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780375701160Fiction

Doctor Faustus

By Thomas Mann Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter Introduction by Hayden White "There emerges from the pages of this volume such a hopeful view of man as the master of his own fate that the reader cannot fail to be lifted above himself."—A. E. Meyer, New York Times Thomas Mann, fascinated with the concept of genius and with the richness of German culture, found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the embodiment of the German culture hero. Mann's novelistic biography of Goethe was first published in English in 1940. Lotte in Weimar is a vivid dual portrait—a complex study of Goethe and of Lotte, the still-vivacious woman who in her youth was the model for Charlotte in Goethe's widely-read The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lotte's thoughts, as she anticipates meeting Goethe again after forty years, and her conversations with those in Weimar who knew the great man, allow Mann to assess Goethe's genius from many points of view. Hayden White's fresh appraisal of the novel reveals its consonances with our own concerns. Paperback 475 pagesUniversity of California Press, 1990Originally Published in 19395.6 x 1.2 x 8.4 inchesISBN 9780520070073Biographical Historical Fiction

Lotte In Weimar: The Beloved Returns

By Thomas MannIntroduction by Nina Pelikan Straus Translated by Willard R. Trask "In The Black Swan Thomas Mann returns to the compact dimensions and to the subject matter of Death in Venice (transposed into heterosexual terms)—the infatuation of an aging person for a young one. . . . A provocative addition to Mann's writings."—C. J. Rolo, Atlantic MonthlyThomas Mann's bold and disturbing novella, written in 1952, is the feminine counterpart of his masterpiece Death in Venice. Written from the point of view of a woman in what we might now call mid-life crisis, The Black Swan evinces Mann's mastery of psychological analysis and his compelling interest in the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in human behavior. It is startlingly relevant to current discussions of the politics of the body, male inscriptions of the feminine, and discourse about and of women. The new introduction places this dramatic novella in the context of contemporary feminist and literary concerns, bringing it to the attention of a new generation of readers.Paperback155 pagesCalifornia University Press, 1990Originally Published in 19535.2 x 0.4 x 7.3 inchesISBN 9780520070097Psychological Fiction

The Black Swan

Edited by E. Randol SchoenbergIntroduction by Adrian Daub "The storied triangulation of Schoenberg, Mann, and Adorno in all its contentious glory, presented in the most comprehensive assemblage of primary documents ever gathered in English translation. Adrian Daub’s introduction on California as the incubator for this controversy is essential reading."—Joy H. Calico, author of Arnold Schoenberg’s "A Survivor from Warsaw" in Postwar Europe"This is a splendid collection of letters and documents by two of the major figures in twentieth-century culture, Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. It presents their correspondence and writings by their contemporaries about Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, still one of the great literary investigations of music, creativity, and madness. An impressive achievement that should be useful to scholars across many fields."—Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Humanities and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction by German studies scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture. Paperback376 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20186 x 0.9 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520296831Literary Criticism, Music

The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. Woods “All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version . . . Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor.” —New York Times Book Review“[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose.” —Washington Post Book WorldWith this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps—a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.Acclaimed translator John E. Woods has given us the definitive English version of Mann’s masterpiece. A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic. Also available in German.Hardcover854 pagesEveryman's Library, 1996Originally Published in 1924ISBN 9781400044214Novel, Fiction

The Magic Mountain

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. Woods "In Mann's work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world." —The New York Review of Books"The Magic Mountain taught me that big ideas have vitality, that intellectual life could make for great storytelling, and that the map of an age could be found in the personalities of the people who lived it, lessons that I carried into the writing of history. But the truth is, I have returned again and again to The Magic Mountain because the characters who inhabit it are such delightful company."—The American Scholar"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing."—A. S. Byatt In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelist, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In The Magic Mountain, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps—a community devoted exclusively to sickness—as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.To this hermetic yet intrigue-ridden world comes Hans Castorp, a "perfectly ordinary" young man who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying seven years. For on the Magic Mountain, Hans will succumb to both the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death. Also available in German. Paperback706 pagesVintage International, 1996Originally published in 19245.2 x 1.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679772873Existentialism, Satire, Historical Fiction

By Colm TóibínA New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction“Compelling… This is an enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced…Tóibín has fashioned an epic.”—The Guardian“An intimate portrait of Thomas Mann… In The Magician, Tóibín presents a rare view into the making of serious art and, in the process, shows he is a powerful magician himself.” —Chicago Review of Books The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.Paperback512 pagesScribner, 20226 x 1.4 x 9 inchesISBN 9781476785097Thomas Mann, Historical Fiction

The Magician [Paperback]

By Morten Høi Jensen “A nuanced portrait . . . thoughtful [and] perceptive.” —Kirkus Reviews “The Master of Contradictions is many things: a biography of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a history of the Weimar Republic, and a story about one reader’s relationship to the most beguiling novel of the twentieth century. Morten Høi Jensen writes from a place of profound feeling and deep erudition. He is the perfect guide to the novel’s intricate, enchanted world; I did not want to stop exploring it with him.” —Merve Emre, contributing writer, New Yorker The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) welcomed the outbreak of the First World War. He viewed it as a spiritual necessity, a chance to reassert German cultural dominance over Western ideas of democracy and enlightenment. Then, in 1924, he published The Magic Mountain, a massive novel that culminates in the slaughter of war and foreshadows the Nazi terror to come. One of the central achievements of modernism, The Magic Mountain bears testimony to its author’s dramatic political reorientation as a defender of democracy. This poignant book is a biography of Mann’s great novel—its evolution from a short story into a two-volume masterpiece and one of the bestselling novels of the Weimar era. Deftly weaving together elements of biography, history, and literary criticism, Morten Høi Jensen reveals how writing The Magic Mountain against a backdrop of world war, revolution, hyperinflation, and rising right-wing terror moved Mann to embrace the democratic and humanistic ideas he once scorned. One hundred years after The Magic Mountain was first published, at a time when democratic ideas are again under threat, Jensen reveals the universality and timeliness of Mann’s great novel—its still-resonant debates over democracy and tyranny, time and place, illness and death. Hardcover248 Pages Yale University Press, 2025 5.50 x 8.50 inches ISBN 9780300233742History

The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain"

By Thomas MannTranslated by Damion Searls "In this vigorous new version . . . Searls takes pains to bring Mann’s decades-old prose to life without anachronism or false breeziness . . . A well-chosen, confidently translated gathering of stories that casts new light on its author."―Kirkus Reviews, starred review"Searls infuses the prose of Nobel laureate Mann (1875–1955) with momentum and energy in this excellent collection. English-language readers will find the humor and digressive appeal of Mann’s prose enhanced... A well-chosen excerpt from the novel Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull exhibits a connection between the title character, a peripatetic young man, and Mann’s other protagonists: “What a royal gift the imagination is, and what pleasure it affords us!” Felix narrates. Throughout, the characters are linked by their unspeakable desires, and their inner worlds are just as significant as, and often more so than, their actions. Scholars as well as those new to Mann will find much to appreciate in Searls’s stimulating approach."―Publishers WeeklySparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Mann’s best stories―including his masterpiece, in its first English translation in nearly a century. A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer―“the starched collar,” as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann’s genius.The headliner of this volume, “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” (in its first new translation since 1936)―a subtle masterpiece that reveals the profound emotional significance of everyday life―is Mann’s tender but sharp-eyed portrait of the “Bigs” and “Littles” of the bourgeois Cornelius family as they adjust to straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is a free-standing excerpt from Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks―a sensation when it was first published. “Death in Venice” (also included in this volume) is Mann’s most famous story, but less well known is that he intended it to be a diptych with another, comic story―included here as “Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull.” “Louisey”―a tale of sexual humiliation that gives a first glimpse of Mann’s lifelong ambivalence about the power of art―rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection. black-and-white frontispiece. Hardcover272 pagesLiveright, 20236.3 x 1 x 9.4 inchesISBN 9781631498480 Short Stories, Literature

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Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks

Death in Venice and Other Tales

Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories

Der Tod in Venedig und andere Erzählungen

Der Zauberberg

Doctor Faustus

Lotte In Weimar: The Beloved Returns

The Black Swan

The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951

The Magic Mountain

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Thomas Mann