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Thomas Mann served as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress for three years, and served as a Fellow in Germanic Literature for ten years after that. He delivered five addresses at the Library, and all are contained in this volume. ... Read more

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Thomas Mann (1875-1955) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. This is a collection of his shorter works. "Death in Venice", later filmed by Lucion Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde, was published in 1911. It is a poetic meditation on art and beauty, where the dying composer Aschenbach (modelled on Gustav Mahler) becomes fixated by the young boy Tadzio. The other stories are: "Tonio Kroger"; the collection entitled "Tristan"; "The Blood of the Walsungs"; "Mario the Magician"; and "The Tables of the Law". A number of essays are also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A masterpiece
Here are collected in one volume all of Thomas Mann's non-political essays that he has wished most to preserve. The essays included are: Goethe's Faust (1938), Goethe's career as a man of letters (1932), Goethe as representative of the Bourgeois Age (1932), Goethe and Tolstoy (1922), Anna Karenina (1939), Lessing (1929), Kleit's Amphitryon (1926), Chamisso (1911), Platen (1930), Theodor Storm (1930), The old Fontane (1910), Sufferings and greatness of Richard Wagner (1933), Richard Wagner and the Ring (1937), Schopenhauer (1938), Freud and the future (1936), and Voyage with Don Quixote (1934). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Don't judge THIS book by its innocent little cover!
Grandma Margaret Mann--whose photo is on the back of this book--may look like the sweetest 95-year old lady you'll ever meet, but her wit is full of pepper. This book is a one of the best collections of jokes and sayings I've ever seen--and all the more so because one doesn't expect such an incisive wit in a book called _Grandma Mann's Miscellany: Quips, Jokes, Insights and Words of Wisdom_. It should be subtitled_I Didn't Reach the Age of Ninety-Five by Putting Up with Fools!" Grandma Mann deserves her own Fan Club--and maybe her own reality show. After reading this I wished I could call her on the telephone and hear her tell these jokes.
Buy this for everyone you know--including your own grandmother! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Each story is a masterpiece
Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for "Buddenbrooks" and "The Magic Mountain"--both toweringly long novels of great complexity. These short stories, however, are as sharp and quick as a paring knife. Some of the stories are sketches for the monumental novels to come, such as "Tristan"--a satirical look at inmates in a sanatorium. Others are sweetly sick, for example "Blood of the Walsungs", which has something of the style of "Death in Venice." Some say the children in "Walsungs" are modeled after Mann's own. I don't know if this is true, but it's a shocking idea.

The stories vary from whimsical to fantastic, to tragic or even tragi-comedy. They are some of Mann's best work outside his novels, and though some are early works, they are interesting in showing the seeds of theme and promise in Mann's later great works. I consider this a "must-read" for anyone tackling Mann's bigger works. ... Read more

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Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms ... Read more

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Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice is one of the most famous and widely read texts in all of modern literature, raising such issues as beauty and decadence, eros and irony, and aesthetics and morality. The amount and variety of criticism on the work is enormous, and ranges from psychoanalytic criticism and readings inspired by Mann's own homosexuality to inquiries into the place of the novella in Mann's oeuvre, its structure and style, and its symbolism and politics. Critics have also drawn connections between the novella and works of Plato, Euripides, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Platen, Wagner, Nietzsche, Gide, and Conrad. Ellis Shookman surveys the reception of Death in Venice, analyzing several hundred books, articles, and other reactions to the novella, proceeding in a chronological manner that allows a historical perspective. Critics cited include Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, D. H. Lawrence, Karl Kraus, Kenneth Burke, Georg Lukàcs, Wolfgang Koeppen, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Thomas Mann himself. Particular attention is paid to Luchino Visconti's film, Benjamin Britten's opera, and to other more recent creative adaptations, both in Germany and throughout the world. Ellis Shookman is associate professor of German at Dartmouth College. ... Read more

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Understanding Thomas Mann offers a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction of one of the most renowned and prolific German writers. In addition to analyzing Mann’s most famous works, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Hannelore Mundt introduces readers to lesser-known works, among them Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and The Black Swan. In close readings, Mundt illustrates how Mann’s masterly prose captures both his time and the complexities of human existence with a unique blend of humor, compassion, irony, and ambiguity.

Mundt takes readers chronologically from Mann’s literary beginnings in 1894 to his last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. She considers the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the emergence of Mann’s literary voice, his conflicted feelings about his bourgeois background, and his life as Germany’s representative writer in the Weimar Republic and in exile. Mundt places Mann’s works in the realistic and modern traditions and discusses his recurring thematic concerns—the individual’s rebellion against oppressive bourgeois conventions and antihumanistic principles, the need for an unremitting questioning of authority and ostensibly absolute truths, and the antagonism between individualistic freedom and social responsibility. In light of the recent publication of Mann’s diaries, disclosing his homosexual inclinations, Mundt also identifies the textual strategies he adopted for revealing and simultaneously masking his secret sexuality.

Mann emerges from Mundt’s analysis as a writer who plays with opposing perspectives in his fictional renderings of both the alienated individual and Germany’s cultural and political history. Mundt suggests that the openness of his works, paired with his deep insights into human existence, explains his stature as a literary figure whose importance extends worldwide. ... Read more

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The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim.

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity." ... Read more

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Author of such classics as Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Doctor Faustus, and The Magic Mountain, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for literature not half-way through his career, Thomas Mann was without doubt the leading German novelist of his era and one of the three or four great writers of our century.

Now, in Thomas Mann: A Life, celebrated biographer Donald Prater illuminates the life and work of this gifted writer, from his upbringing in Lubeck, through his years in Munich, his exile in the United States, and his last years in Switzerland. Prater discusses Mann's tumultuous relationship with his novelist brother Heinrich, which Mann called, "the hardest of my existence," his homosexuality, his career as a prolific essayist, the vast achievement of his novels, and his love of music. Prater writes that as Mann's passion for the gramophone grew almost to a vice, the music became an important motif for his text and a stimulus in its composition. Indeed, Mann conceived of such books as The Magic Mountain as symphonic constructions, interweaving its themes in strict counterpoint. Prater also reveals the personal side of Mann, from his marriage to Katia and his relationships with their six children, all of whom remained marginal to his firmly dedicated life as a writer, to his obsession with the minor ups and downs of his health. Mann's seventy-fifth birthday, for example, found him in typical form: pursuing the usual daily routine of morning work, afternoon correspondence, evening relaxation with the gramophone, and considering the year's lecture tour; but depressed over ailments, which were more or less minor, of ear and throat. But, the particular strength of the biography is the attention Prater devotes to Mann's political thinking and his role in the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. In Mann's development from a nationalistic conservative to a vigorous, anti-Nazi humanist, Prater recognizes a fascinating and crucially important illustration of the "German problem" still so relevant to the Europe of today. Mann could hardly bear even to mention the name of Adolf Hitler, still less to write about the horrors of the concentration camps. And later in his life while still in exile, he admitted it was no easy matter to be a German writer, with conflicting feelings towards one's country "of rage, revulsion, the desire for its destruction, yet an attachment that is inalienable."

Elegantly written and always entertaining, Thomas Mann depicts a man whose life and writing continue to impact our lives today. It will take its place as the major biography of Mann, and as a compelling portrait of 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and the political metamorphosis that country saw during Mann's lifetime. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Perhaps a great find?
Found this today at the annual library sale for $1 and now that I have read the reviews on Amazon I am anxious to read it.

A highly detailed but uninspiring account of Mann's life.
Donald Prater has produced a highly detailed account of Thomas Mann's life.He remains an objective observer and paints a picture of the development of an often cold literary statesman who finds it difficult toform personal relationships.Prater does not dwell on the genesis ofMann's literary production despite his insistence thatMann was notprincipally a political writer but an artist.Instead he gives along-winded account of Mann's travels throughout Europe and America, hisdeparture from Nazi Germany and naturalisation in the USA.The lattersection of the text is larded with references to meetings with his childrenand other literary figures in the USA which do little to aid the reading ofMann's major works of fiction.The author is at pains to justify Mann'sbehaviour after the Second World War and emphasise his disgust for Nazismand anti-Semitic thought. Despite being a detailed and carefully researchedmanuscript, he text is not an inspiring exploration of Mann's life and workand often verges on the tedious.It will be an invaluable companion to theresearch student who wishes to verify precise details in the history ofThomas Mann, but as a companion to the study of Mann's oeuvre it is notsuccessful.A superior guide must always be TJ Reed's 'The Uses of Tradition' which, after 25 years, continues to be the best English Languagecompanion to the life and works of Thomas Mann, providing intelligentinterpretation and valuable insight into the biography of the writer. ... Read more