Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Mann, Thomas (1875-1955)

German writer Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany, in 1875 and died in Kilchberg, near Zurich, Switzerland, in 1955. He settled in Munich with his family after the death of his father, remaining until 1936; he then went into exile in the United States. His life and work were dominated by two major questions: Germany and German identity; the status of the artist and art in society.

Concerning the question of German identity, Mann began by holding conservative, monarchist, and militarist beliefs until the rise of Nazism. He opposed a Germanic ideal that accepted values held by the rest of Europe. In this he distanced himself from the position of his brother Heinrich Mann, a republican, cosmopolitan, and critic of the Empire. During this time, Mann's literary output began with a lengthy autobiographical novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), in which he describes the decline of four generations of a rich Hanseatic family. The fate of this fictional family can be compared with his own experience of the loss of his father while he was still very young. After dabbling briefly with Nazi ideology, Mann underwent a fundamental change of opinion in the thirties. It was in his novel The Magic Mountain (1924) that he developed his new attitudes toward all the most important areas of thought and action, including psychoanalysis.

Mann contrasted the mediocrity of an average, bourgeois existence with the unconscious drives of the sensitive intellectual enamored of knowledge and beauty. He continued to articulate, throughout the course of his work, series of paired opposites: art and morality, art and civilization, culture and society, the genius of disease and the stupidity of health. He contrasted the North, cold and puritan, where his family had come from, with the South, Bavaria, where he lived. This was the carnal South of Tonio Kröger (1903), the mephitic Venice of Gustav Aschenbach (1910), the voluptuous Egypt of Joseph (1933-1934), the magic mountain of Hans Castorp—all of them fantasies of the experience of forbidden desire, places of love and death, of disease, of castration.

He contrasted liberating psychoanalysis with an alienating hypnosis. In Mario and the Magician (1929), Mann created a portrait of a disturbing illusionist who evokes Hitler. And in 1938, after the Anschluss, Mann contrasted Freud with Hitler: "How that man must hate analysis! I secretly suspect that the furor with which he marched against a certain capital was at bottom directed against the old analyst living there, his real enemy, the philosopher who unmasked neurosis, the great disillusionist, the man who knows so much about belief and genius."

Mann praised Freud directly on several occasions. From his "My Relationship with Psychoanalysis" of 1926, where he exposes his ambivalence toward Freudian theories, to the two texts written for the seventy-fifth and eightieth birthdays of Sigmund Freud, where he is compared, using an allegory from a Dürer painting, to the knight between death and the devil, Mann saw Freud as the "pioneer of a humanism of the future."

DIDIER DAVID

See also: Psychoanalytische Bewegung, Die; German romanticism and psychoanalysis.