Magic Mountains - Marking the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s birth

Independent, rebellious, queer. Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Erika and Klaus Mann were a legendary trio of friends, an 'alliance of the homeless'...

Independent, rebellious, queer. Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Erika and Klaus Mann were a legendary trio of friends, an 'alliance of the homeless' in troubled times.The lives of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the daughter of a right-wing Swiss manufacturing family, and the two eldest children of the Nobel Prize winner, Erika and Klaus Mann, were intertwined in a tragic and erotic way over the years. The relationship between the three oscillated between love, devotion, existential dependence and caring friendship on the one hand, and the urge for external and internal distance on the other.

She ran a cabaret, raced cars, appeared as an actress and served as her father Thomas Mann's 'daughter's assistant': a...

She ran a cabaret, raced cars, appeared as an actress and served as her father Thomas Mann's 'daughter's assistant': a multi-talented woman of almost inexhaustible energy. In this reader, you will get to know Erika Mann as a writer - a committed woman full of humour, linguistic power and a love of controversy.

The brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann have a long and eventful history. After being very close in their early days...

The brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann have a long and eventful history. After being very close in their early days as writers, they gradually drifted apart: different literary and political views were at the root of a dispute that became increasingly heated and turned into open hostility at the beginning of the First World War. It was not until the death of their mother in 1923 that the brothers were reunited, reconciled and met again in exile in France and America.The first edition of the correspondence between Heinrich and Thomas Mann was published in 1968. The new edition by Katrin Bedenig and Hans Wißkirchen is supplemented by newly discovered documents, including over 80 postcards from Thomas Mann to his brother, and a detailed preface that takes into account the current state of research.

This illustrated volume takes you on a tour of the Mann family's exile home in Los Angeles. The essays reflect...

This illustrated volume takes you on a tour of the Mann family's exile home in Los Angeles. The essays reflect on the past and present of this important centre of political thought in the Pacific Rim. This volume takes the reader on a tour of the Mann family's exile residence in Los Angeles, now a site of transatlantic debate in the Federal Republic of Germany. Contributions by renowned authors from the fields of literature, the humanities, and journalism recount the Manns' political life in the United States and reflect on pressing issues of our time. Inspired by specific rooms in the modernist house, the driveway, for example, becomes a symbol of the Mann family's journey to California - and of the exile community in Los Angeles today. Other rooms, such as the study, the kitchen and the garden, are the starting point for both historical observations and reflections on equality, overcoming racism, climate change and other contemporary issues. In addition to many historic photographs, the book is illustrated with exclusive contemporary photographs by renowned architectural photographer Jean Molitor. In this way, the book brings to life a place whose cultural, political and architectural heritage continues to resonate today. 

Thomas Mann's story of the writer von Aschenbach, who falls in love with the sickly boy Tadzio during a trip...

Thomas Mann's story of the writer von Aschenbach, who falls in love with the sickly boy Tadzio during a trip to Venice, is a classic of German literature. The ageing artist recognises the essence of beauty in Tadzio. He represses the possessive, ruthless side of his feelings. Tadzio's suffering under constant persecution is of no interest to him. With her watercolour, painterly style, Susanne Kuhlendahl gives the familiar story of decline and decadence a new and exciting form as a graphic novel.

Novellas and short stories have accompanied Thomas Mann's work from the very beginning. Whether in Death in Venice, a modern...

Novellas and short stories have accompanied Thomas Mann's work from the very beginning. Whether in Death in Venice, a modern variation on the eternal theme of Platonic Eros; in The Swapped Heads, a journey into the world of Indian fairy tales; in The Law, a journey into the time of the prophet Moses; in Die schwere Stunde, a succinct portrait of Schiller; in Gladius Dei, an evocation of turn-of-the-century Munich; or in Tristan, a story about the eccentric writer Detlev Spinell: He's always in the thick of it, and his passionate immersion in the process, the person, the state of mind, draws us in and doesn't let go. ' (Erich Kahler)

What is the story I have to tell? The story of an intellectual between two world wars, of a man...

What is the story I have to tell? The story of an intellectual between two world wars, of a man who had to spend the decisive years of his life in a social and intellectual vacuum: fervently - but unsuccessfully - trying to find a connection to any society, to fit into any order: always wandering, always restless, driven, always searching...'.Klaus Mann's memoirs are a mirror of an unusual life - and a brilliantly written account of contemporary and cultural history.

When the Nazis seized power, Thomas Mann left Germany and never returned. In exile in Switzerland, the German Nobel Prize...

When the Nazis seized power, Thomas Mann left Germany and never returned. In exile in Switzerland, the German Nobel Prize winner for literature lost his citizenship in 1936. He emigrated to America, from where he broadcast his anti-war speeches from 1940. In a total of 59 desperate, fervent humanist appeals, he spoke into the conscience of German listeners by November 1945. His radio speeches, adventurously transmitted to Europe by the BBC, are unique documents of an upright German.

The fascination that has surrounded the Mann family for so long can be seen in their three daughters, Erika, Monika...

The fascination that has surrounded the Mann family for so long can be seen in their three daughters, Erika, Monika and Elisabeth Mann, who have taken very different paths: Erika as an actress, writer and political activist; Monika as a musician, author and journalist; and Elisabeth as a trained concert pianist and professor of international maritime law. Erika fought passionately against the Nazis, regardless of her health, and later devoted her life to her famous father. Monika, much reviled by her family and severely traumatised by the shipwreck on her way to exile, surprisingly managed to start a new life in Capri, far from bourgeois conventions. Elisabeth also reinvented herself in middle age, becoming a peace activist and campaigner for the protection of the world's oceans. Annette Seemann looks in detail at the lives and work of Thomas and Katia Mann's three daughters, exploring the difficult relationships between the sisters and their respective positions in the amazing family system.

It happened at breakneck speed. February 1933 was the month in which everything was decided for writers in Germany. Uwe...

It happened at breakneck speed. February 1933 was the month in which everything was decided for writers in Germany. Uwe Wittstock gives a day-by-day account of how, in the space of a few weeks, the glittering literary life of the Weimar period gave way to a long winter, and how the net tightened for Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, for Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin and many others.

Who was Mrs Thomas Mann? Who was Katharina Pringsheim? The answer seems simple: Katia, who else? Katia, as well known...

Who was Mrs Thomas Mann? Who was Katharina Pringsheim? The answer seems simple: Katia, who else? Katia, as well known as Heinrich or Golo, Erika or Klaus. A figure in the magician's realm, his closest confidante. K.', who appears in Thomas Mann's diaries as the mother of his children, his companion and advisor, but also as the manager of a business that is as successful as it is threatened.

Hannah Arendt and Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schönberg - they all contributed, each...

Hannah Arendt and Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schönberg - they all contributed, each in their own way, to the creation of a masterpiece of philosophy: the 'Dialectic of Enlightenment'. Martin Mittelmeier tells the story of this fascinating chapter in the history of ideas, and shows how relevant the themes described in the book are today. How an apparently enlightened humanity can relapse into populism, even barbarism, and how an epochal break can give rise to racism and anti-Semitism - Adorno and Horkheimer had already addressed all this in their work. Martin Mittelmeier's atmospheric and entertaining account of the creation and aftermath of this book of the century brings this unique intellectual colony under the Californian palm trees back to life.

Nidden in the summer of 1930, an East Prussian fishing village and artists' colony on the Curonian Spit, an archaic...

Nidden in the summer of 1930, an East Prussian fishing village and artists' colony on the Curonian Spit, an archaic stretch of land between the wild Baltic Sea and the tranquil lagoon. In July 1930, Thomas Mann and his family landed on this white coast, 'so beautifully curving that you might think you were in North Africa', to move into their new summer house. Back in Germany, the dissolution of the Reichstag threatened to bring the Weimar Republic to an end, and the deeply troubled poet was secretly working on a major speech in his bathrobe, in the shade of his beach chair, to warn the German people of the growing strength of National Socialism. Then, under extraordinary circumstances, the paths of the world-famous poet and the young Lithuanian translator Žydrūnas Miuleris, whom Mann persistently and insistently calls Müller, cross. And it is Müller who gets the poet into serious trouble when he loses the manuscript of the explosive speech. The search for it seems to set other mysterious events in motion. Thomas Mann felt that he was being followed and watched, and a member of his household disappeared without a trace. The poet and his translator are confronted with a case that is as strange as it is exciting. Between shifting sand dunes and forests, surrounded by eccentric artists, stoic fishermen and curious spa guests, Mann and Müller must do everything in their power to recover the copies before they fall into the wrong hands.

Like no other, Klaus Mann epitomised the turbulent first half of the 20th century - as a flamboyant bohemian, as...

Like no other, Klaus Mann epitomised the turbulent first half of the 20th century - as a flamboyant bohemian, as a great writer. Thomas Medicus accompanies Klaus Mann (1906-1949) on the stages of his very modern life - from his sheltered childhood in Munich, through his career as a dandy in the Weimar Republic, which favoured homosexual emancipation, to his political exile in Europe and the USA. Klaus Mann was always on the move, wandering between continents, publishing in an unrestrained flow of writing. An extreme life, always overshadowed by drugs and debauchery, a death wish from an early age. Finally, his return to Germany in 1945 as an American GI, the dark final years before his suicide in Cannes.In his major biography, Thomas Medicus recounts this improbable life and explores his obsessions and driving forces. The friction with his father, the political battles and amours, the close relationship with his sister Erika. A brilliant reassessment of this brilliant writer and interpreter of his time, resurrected here as an impressive panorama of contemporary history.

Throughout his life, the sea was for Thomas Mann a place of longing and the promising pull of the deep....

Throughout his life, the sea was for Thomas Mann a place of longing and the promising pull of the deep. German romanticism and a yearning for death - and a place of liberation from the conventions, political, literary and erotic constraints of bourgeois life. A place of freedom and true self.Perhaps it all began where his mother experienced the happiness of childhood: in the Brazilian jungle, in a big, bright house by the sea. At the age of seven, she came to Travemünde, in the dark German cold, with a longing that remained. Her son Thomas grew up by the Baltic Sea, in Lübeck, but as soon as he could he went south, travelled to Italy and the Mediterranean, fell in love with young men, but followed the conventions of the time and married Katia. Years later he went into exile. In California, on the other side of the Pacific, he becomes someone else again: he fights against Hitler, for democracy, for freedom, and takes American citizenship. After his death, his favourite daughter Elisabeth continues his legacy as a world-renowned oceanographer with her utopian ocean politics.

Thomas Mann is regarded as a model of discipline, a diligent, unwavering worker in his daily home office. His diaries,...

Thomas Mann is regarded as a model of discipline, a diligent, unwavering worker in his daily home office. His diaries, however, paint a different picture: between morning tiredness and a stomach ache, the self-imposed writing workload has to be wrested from his body every day - sometimes successfully, but much more often unsuccessfully. Felix Lindner, known for his Twitter account 'Thomas Mann Daily', has compiled 365 short quotations from the diaries in this humorous book, which shows the everyday life of the Nobel Prize winner with all its crises and obstacles. Yes, Thomas Mann had people and women around him who did his housework and protected him from the restlessness of the outside world. Nevertheless, Thomas Mann was not a calm 'magician' whose sentences just flowed from his pen. Like all of us, he was tired and angry, plagued by doubts and constantly distracted by life outside the books.