Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.^[1]

His first novel, Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, chronicled the decline of a wealthy Hanseatic family. It was a major literary success and led to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

He was also known for his political activities, supporting the German Weimar Republic and the liberal German Democratic Party and later the Social Democrats, the biggest force in German politics that both opposed communism and fascism (later National Socialism). He even broke with a lot of left-leaning tradition in the 1920s by comparing Nazism with communism as simply two sides of the same totalitarian coin. 

In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. While she later became a Lutheran, this also had an impact on Mann’s negative views toward Nazism. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann was on holiday in Switzerland with his wife, and due to his criticisms of the Nazi Party, his son Klaus advised him not to return. In 1939, he moved to the United States, returning to Switzerland in 1952. He is one of the best-known writers of Exilliteratur, the body of German literature produced by those in exile who opposed Hitler’s regime.

He struggled with his sexuality and used his attraction to young men to inform his novel, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). In his diaries, he also talked about his attractions to various young men, including a waiter named Franz Westermeier, writing upon their meeting, “Once again this, once again in love”. According to biographer Hannalore Mundt, Mann had a long-held attraction to his friend, the violinist Paul Ehrenberg, although their relationship remained platonic. Mann’s writings, both public and private, reveal that he harbored deeply felt love for several men as well as women.

He and his wife had six children —three of whom also came out later in life, interestingly enough — and they remained together as a couple for the rest of Mann’s life. There is no evidence that Mann ever acted on his same-sex attraction, but it is clear from his writings that it was there, however repressed it might have been.