Thomas Mann

First novel "Buddenbrooks", published in 1901, was followed by novellas and stories such as Tonio Kröger, Tristan and Death in Venice. The novel The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, with which he continued the tradition of the European Bildungsroman, shows Mann's art of composition: the narrator maintains a skeptical, ironic distance from the characters, typical constellations recur as leitmotifs, and a syntactically complex, sophisticated style prevails. These characteristics also characterize the following publications, among which the novella Mario and the Magician, the novel tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers and the late work Doctor Faustus are noteworthy. His essays and statements on current political, social and cultural issues have also attracted widespread attention. While he was initially skeptical of Western democracy, he turned into a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic at the beginning of the 1920s. During the National Socialist regime, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 and to the USA in 1938, where he became a citizen in 1944. From 1952 until his death, he lived in Switzerland again.

Thomas Mann came from the respected Lübeck patrician and merchant family Mann. His older brother Heinrich and four of his six children, Erika, Klaus, Golo and Monika, were also writers.

Thomas Mann was the second son of the merchant and Lübeck senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann. He was baptized as a Protestant on 11 June 1875 in St. Mary's Church in Lübeck. His mother Julia (née da Silva-Bruhns) was of Brazilian origin on his mother's side. In addition to his brother Heinrich (1871–1950), the marriage also produced the siblings Julia (1877–1927, suicide), Carla (1881–1910, suicide) and Viktor (1890–1949). Thomas Mann later described his childhood as "cherished and happy". He grew up in wealthy circumstances in Lübeck, where his father was Senator for Economics and Finance from 1877 until his death in 1891. In 1891, Thomas Mann's father died of bladder cancer. In his will, he had ordered the sale of the company and the house in Lübeck. The proceeds were invested, and their interest was due to his wife and children for their livelihood.

After nine years of schooling, Thomas Mann passed the "one-year" (Mittlere Reife) in Lübeck in 1894, which was actually only intended for six years, with consistently mediocre to very mediocre performance. He found his school days dull. He began writing at an early age and in 1893 participated with prose sketches and essays in the school magazine Der Frühlingssturm, which he co-edited. The fourteen-year-old signed a letter to Frieda L. Hartenstein from 1889 with "Thomas Mann. Lyrical-dramatic poet". In 1894, as a senior secondary, he left the Katharineum in Lübeck prematurely and went to Munich, where his mother had moved with his siblings a year earlier.

Krafft Tesdorpf, who had been appointed guardian for the children who had not yet reached the age of majority since the death of his father, determined that Thomas Mann should take up a middle-class profession after leaving school. Thomas therefore took a job as a volunteer in a fire insurance company, although he was bored with the office work. He made his debut as a writer in 1894 with the novella Fallen. It was published in the literary magazine Die Gesellschaft, which had already published his poem Zweimaliger Abschied (Two Farewells) in 1893. He was then offered further publications in the art magazine Pan. Due to this initial success, Thomas Mann ended his insurance business in 1895 and began to attend lectures at the Technical University of Munich in order to later pursue a journalistic profession. In 1896, at the age of 21, he came of age and received 180 marks a month from the interest on his father's assets, which enabled him to live as a freelance writer. From 1895 to 1896, Thomas Mann wrote articles for the national-chauvinist monthly Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert, whose short-term editor was his brother Heinrich.

In 1896 he followed his brother Heinrich to Italy. In July 1897, they rented a room in the town of Palestrina, east of Rome. Together, they wrote the picture book for well-behaved children there. It contained parodic "art poems" and was illustrated with autograph drawings. The brothers gave it to their sister Carla for confirmation. After Carla's death, the unique specimen came into the possession of the youngest brother Viktor, who later handed it over to Thomas Mann's children. Since the family's emigration in 1933, it has been considered lost; only poems quoted by Viktor Mann in his memoirs We Were Five, and some reproductions of the drawings have survived from the only joint work of the two brothers.

Thomas Mann wrote several novellas in Palestrina, including Der kleine Herr Friedemann, and began with Buddenbrook's novel.

His sporadic contributions to the anti-Semitic monthly Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert are limited to the time of his brother Heinrich's editorship (1895/1896). Even though Thomas Mann's articles are more moderate than the rest of the magazine, they still contain the anti-Jewish stereotypes that can also be found in his literary works at the turn of the century. From 1898 he worked for a year in the editorial office of Simplicissimus. In 1900 he was drafted as a "one-year volunteer" for service in the Munich Life Regiment. His military career ended after three months due to unfitness for service, as he succeeded through his mother's connections in persuading a senior staff doctor to diagnose him with flat feet, although, as he himself wrote to his brother Heinrich, "there could be no question of a flat foot." This experience is reflected in the mustering scene in the confessions of the impostor Felix Krull.

Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published in 1901. The two-volume first edition initially met with little response. The one-volume second edition of 1903, on the other hand, brought the breakthrough and made Thomas Mann known to the public. Some of the characters in the novel have role models in the Manns' family history, many secondary characters are modelled on Lübeck citizens. Most of the portrayed were not enthusiastic about finding themselves in the book because of the ironic depiction. In his essay Bilse and I, he makes public reference to these accusations. Soon a list was circulating that identified the living role models and that a Lübeck bookstore lent to its customers. The relationship between the people of Lübeck and their prominent fellow citizen was therefore tense for a long time. In 1929, 28 years after the first publication, Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize for Literature for the Buddenbrooks.

In 1903, the first disagreements between the brothers Thomas and Heinrich became apparent. Although Thomas Mann had established himself in the public eye as a writer, he felt set back as an artist by his brother and criticized the "boring shamelessness" in his books. In particular, Heinrich Mann's recently published novel The Hunt for Love aroused his disgust. Although contact did not break off completely and there were repeated attempts at rapprochement, an artistic exchange only took place in regular correspondence, with the respective letter writer commenting on the recipient's works. In 1904, Thomas Mann met Katharina "Katia" Pringsheim (daughter of the mathematician Alfred Pringsheim and granddaughter of the women's rights activist Hedwig Dohm) and began to woo her. Until then, only homoerotic infatuations were documented in his letters and diaries. However, he did not live out his homosexuality, it remained with crushes for "youths", which were reflected in Death in Venice (Gustav von Aschenbach/Tadzio) and Felix Krull (Lord Kilmarnock/Krull), among others.

With the decision to marry Katia Pringsheim, he decided on an "orderly" life and married into one of the most prestigious families in Munich. Katia hesitated at first, so the marriage was not concluded until February 11, 1905. In his second novel Royal Highness from 1909, Thomas Mann dealt with the bridal period in literature. With Katia he had six children: Erika (1905–1969), Klaus (1906–1949, suicide), Golo (1909–1994), Monika (1910–1992), Elisabeth (1918–2002) and Michael (1919–1977, presumably suicide).

In 1912, doctors suspected Katia Mann of tuberculosis, which necessitated a longer stay in a sanatorium in Davos. When Thomas Mann visited her there, he was taken with the atmosphere of the sanatorium, the clientele and Katia's descriptions of her. These impressions inspired him to write the novel The Magic Mountain, which he began in 1913 but did not complete until 1924, after he had interrupted work on it in 1915.

In 1914, the Mann family moved to Munich, to Poschingerstraße 1 at Herzogpark. When the First World War broke out in the same year, there were many writers who did not contradict the rather euphoric mood, especially among bourgeois circles in the German Reich – on the contrary: the start of the war was welcomed and cheered. Alfred Kerr, Robert Musil, Richard Dehmel and Gerhart Hauptmann were also convinced of its justification. Thomas Mann's opinion is presented in the following quotes.

In his history of the First World War, Jörn Leonhard quotes the children's memory of their father's words that "a fiery sword will soon appear in the sky", and his memory of Leo Tolstoy, the "representative of radical non-violence" (Leonhard): "Strange, but if the old man was still alive, he didn't have to do anything, just be there,  on Yasnaya Polyana, – this would not have happened – it would not have dared to happen." Thomas Mann wrote to his brother Heinrich: "I personally have to prepare myself for a complete change in the material foundations of my life. If the war lasts long, I will almost certainly be what is called 'ruined'." And he later continues: "In God's name! What does that mean compared to the upheavals, especially the spiritual ones, which must result in such events on a large scale! Shouldn't we be grateful for the completely unexpected of being able to experience such great things?"

Thomas Mann considered the war to be necessary in principle, since in his view it was necessary to "smash" the "most depraved police state in the world", Tsarist Russia. In his thoughts during the war – reflections on the subject of war – the poet defended his militaristic brethren. In keeping with the imperialist spirit of the time, he also wrote: "The balance of Europe [...] was the powerlessness of Europe, had been its disgrace, more than once, ..." In the meantime, he had completely broken off contact with Heinrich, who, like Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Romain Rolland and later Hermann Hesse, wrote against the chauvinist ideas of 1914 that determined public opinion. He dealt in detail with the intellectual currents of the war and pre-war period in his extensive work Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in which he tries to work out the difference between the German pessimistic self-irony of the spirit and the simultaneous love of life on the one hand, and the Romanesque radicalism of the spirit or life on the other. The contrast to his own understanding as a German-bourgeois artist is his brother Heinrich as a Francophile "civilization writer".

Shortly after printing (end of 1918), however, Mann increasingly distanced himself from this phase of his political thought.

The murder of Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau on 24 June 1922 was one of the triggers for Mann's decision to publicly stand up for the Weimar Republic and its values. With his speech Von deutscher Republik (On the German Republic), he emerged for the first time as a political admonisher and supporter of the new form of government. Democracy and humanity, according to Mann, are one, and since man should follow the principle of humanity, he must therefore strive for democratic coexistence. He also became a member of the liberal democratic German Democratic Party. He also joined the committee of the Pan-European Union.In 1924, Mann published his novel The Magic Mountain. It was a great success right from the start. This was followed by disorder and early suffering and On Marriage. In 1925 he began work on the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. The models for Joseph's contours were the young people by whom the writer felt enchanted. The then seventeen-year-old Klaus Heuser († 1994), the son of Werner Heuser, and a friend of his children, whom Thomas Mann had met in 1927 in Kampen on Sylt and about whom he noted that he was his "last passion according to human standards", may also have flowed into the character of Joseph. As a founding member of the Poetry Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, Thomas Mann was directly involved in attempts to raise the reputation of literature. In particular, he opposed the law in force at the time for the protection of young people from trashy and dirty writings, which restricted literary freedom.

Even when he was no longer active in Lübeck, he returned there frequently. Like Fritz Behn and Hermann Abendroth, both of whom had once been sponsored by Ida Boy-Ed in Lübeck, Mann was one of the invited guests to the city's 700th anniversary celebration in 1926. The highlight of the celebration on 6 June 1926 coincided with his 51st birthday. The former patron invited them to her apartment at the Burgtor, from where they followed the procession. Afterwards, they celebrated the birthday she had organized: Thomas Mann Manns.In a speech on November 30, 1926 in the Munich Tonhalle, Thomas Mann sharply criticized Munich's cultural scene. The city reacted quickly and set up a committee to promote literature – as early as the beginning of 1927, Thomas Mann was appointed to the newly established Literature Advisory Council of the City of Munich together with Catherina Godwin, Hans Ludwig Held, Hans von Gumppenberg, Emil Preetorius, Peter Dörfler and Wilhelm Weigand. After Gumppenberg's death in 1928, Benno Rüttenauer was appointed. The advisory board supported writers by awarding subsidies for printing costs and by awarding the Poets' Prize of the City of Munich, which was founded in 1928 at the suggestion of Thomas Mann. While Thomas Mann was initially confident, from 1929 onwards the influence of the political right became increasingly noticeable, and he was less and less able to assert himself with his proposals.

The Nobel Prize for Literature came as no surprise to Mann. Years earlier, there had been speculation that he could get it, and he himself had hoped for it as early as 1927. On the afternoon of November 12, 1929, he received news from Stockholm. He was dismayed that the committee practically only referred to his first novel. Responsible for this was primarily the influential Stockholm "kingmaker", the Swede Fredrik Böök, who was unable to show any appreciation for the novel The Magic Mountain and had torn it apart several times. The prize money was 200,000 Reichsmark. Mann used part of it to pay off the debts of his children Klaus and Erika after their trip around the world. In addition, the construction of the summer house in Nida on the part of the Curonian Spit belonging to Lithuania, which has been maintained since 1996 as the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre, was used to finance two cars, and the rest was built. Already in Stockholm, a journalist had suggested to the Manns to "leave the money outside", but they did not understand why. When they emigrated from Germany in 1933, they lost a large part of their assets, namely their real estate and other property.

The Reichstag election of 1930 had given the NSDAP a huge increase in votes (from 2.6 percent on May 20, 1928 to 18.3 percent on September 14, 1930). Thomas Mann, who, like many other skeptics, had observed the growing political influence of the NSDAP with suspicion, decided to make an appeal to reason, a speech he gave on October 17, 1930 in Berlin's Beethoven Hall and which went down in history as the "German Address". Arnolt Bronnen, the brothers Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger and about a dozen National Socialists had mingled with the predominantly Republican and Social Democratic audience, who tried in vain to disturb by heckling. Thomas Mann called National Socialism in sober frankness "a huge wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive-mass-democratic fairground brutality" with "mass cramps, stall bells, hallelujah and dervish-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone foams at the mouth". He asked whether this was German and whether "the ideal of a primitive, blood-pure, simple of heart and intellect, heel-beating, blue-eyed obedient and strict honesty, this perfect national simplicity could be realized at all in a mature, experienced cultural people like the German." The applause in the hall was great, but did not penetrate outside. Thomas Mann was one of the most important prominent opponents of National Socialism.

February 13, 1933 marked the 50th anniversary of Richard Wagner's death. Mann accepted several invitations to give a lecture on this occasion. He gave this lecture (The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner) on February 10 in the Auditorium maximum of the University of Munich, went on a trip abroad with his wife the following day and gave lectures in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. Then the Manns travelled to Switzerland for a winter holiday; they were regular guests in Arosa and stayed at the Waldhotel Arosa. In 1914 and 1926, Katia had been to the forest sanatorium, which later became the Waldhotel, for a cure. The holidays in March 1933 in Arosa were the Manns' first days in exile, and they did not return to Munich from there, partly at the insistence of Erika and Klaus Mann. When all members of the Poetry Section at the Prussian Academy of Arts were asked to make a declaration of loyalty to the National Socialist government, Mann announced his resignation in a letter to the Academy President Max von Schillings dated March 17, 1933.

The Bavarian Political Police (BPP) searched Mann's house in Munich and confiscated the house along with its inventory and bank account.Reinhard Heydrich, who de facto headed the BPP, wrote to Reich Governor von Epp on April 12, 1933: On the day of the book burning, May 10, 1933, Thomas Mann was expelled from the Munich Literary Advisory Board. His works were spared from the book burning, but not those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus.The decision to turn their backs on Germany was not easy for the Manns. Among other things, they had to leave their assets behind. Only some of them could later be brought to Switzerland in a roundabout way. There were no financial bottlenecks because the family had transferred a significant part of the Nobel Prize money and cash from Germany to Switzerland in good time. Thomas Mann's publisher had implored him not to leave the Germans alone in this difficult time and had agreed to continue publishing his new publications.

The first stop of exile was Sanary-sur-Mer in France. After initial considerations about settling in either Paris, Basel or Zurich, the Manns finally moved to Switzerland and lived in Küsnacht near Zurich. The writer's freedom of movement decreased when his German passport expired. The Nazi regime made its extension dependent on Mann's personal appearance in Munich. A "protective custody order" was already waiting for him there. The expatriation procedure, which affected all celebrities who had emigrated since August 1933, was initially suspended in his case. However, the tax authorities took the opportunity to confiscate his house in Munich, including its inventory. They claimed that publishing contracts showed that Mann still had to pay considerable taxes for the years 1929 and 1930.

In 1934 and 1935, the Manns traveled to the United States for the first two times. There was great interest in the prominent writer; the authorities granted him entry without a valid passport. Thomas Mann celebrated his sixtieth birthday in Küsnacht; it was overwhelmingly celebrated by the Swiss. On 19 November 1936, at his request, he was granted Czechoslovak citizenship for the village of Proseč; he swore the oath in the presence of his family members and the Czechoslovak consul Laška in Zurich; the state office in Prague had sent all the papers by messenger. In his diary, he wrote briefly: "Strange event." A few weeks later, he was stripped of his German citizenship – at the same time as his wife Katia and their children Golo, Elisabeth and Michael. According to the findings of an independent commission of historians, the expatriation procedure was facilitated by the opinion of the then envoy Ernst von Weizsäcker, who had spoken out in favour of it in a letter from Bern in May 1936 because Thomas Mann had engaged in "hostile propaganda against the Reich abroad in addition to scornful remarks". On December 19, 1936, the University of Bonn revoked Mann's honorary doctorate, which had been awarded to him in 1919. In the 1930s, Mann visited Hungary six times, where he stayed with the writer and literary critic Lajos Hatvany near Budapest. Here he published several texts in the German-language newspaper Pester Lloyd, founded in 1854, such as the essay Achtung, Europa!

In September 1937, the German exile magazine Mass und Wert was published for the first time. Bimonthly magazine for free German culture, which was published by Emil Oprechts Verlag in Zurich and was published in 17 issues until October 1940. The editors were Thomas Mann and Konrad Falke. The editor-in-chief was initially the journalist Ferdinand Lion, then from November 1939 his son Golo Mann. In 1938, Thomas Mann and his family moved to the USA for good. Upon arrival in New York on February 21, 1938, reporters asked him for a statement on the Berchtesgaden Agreement, which the National Socialist regime had reached shortly before, and asked him whether he felt exile was a heavy burden. His answer was printed in the New York Times the next day: The first stop of exile in the USA was Princeton. Thomas Mann received a visiting professorship at the university there, mediated by his patron Agnes E. Meyer. Four lectures were on his curriculum with the self-chosen topics of Goethe, Faust, Wagner, Freud and an introduction to the Magic Mountain.

The first year in the United States was successful. He was financially secure, his works sold well, he undertook several reading tours, met important personalities and received five honorary doctorates (Columbia, Hobart, Princeton, Rutgers and Yale). On June 6, 1939, he set off on his last journey to Europe for the time being. At the same time, he was working on his novel about Goethe, which he finished in October 1939 and which was published in the same year under the title Lotte in Weimar. On September 1, 1939, Hitler began the Second World War with the invasion of Poland. This caused consternation at home and abroad and prompted Thomas Mann, who was in Sweden at the time, to take numerous actions. He was a member of several committees that supported emigrants, including the Unitarian Service Committee and the Committee for Jewish and Christian Refugees. In October 1940, he began writing the lyrics for his radio show Deutsche Hörer!. Broadcast at monthly intervals, his warning and pointed speeches were recorded on disc in California from March 1941 and brought to New York by airmail. They were transmitted by cable from there to London, where the BBC also broadcast the five- to eight-minute recordings via longwave to the territory of the German Reich. The Western Allies incorporated these attempts to break through the monopoly of the German broadcasting corporation from the outside into their general information policy and propaganda towards the Third Reich and its population. Mann donated the proceeds from the show to the British War Relief Fund. One of his best-known speeches is the broadcast of January 14, 1945: It is no coincidence that Mann chose such an apocalyptic way of expressing himself. However, he also made joke figures out of Hitler and his helpers, who later became known as "paladins", in biting parts of the radio speeches in order to avoid too much demonization: "Well, war is terrible, but the advantage it has is that it prevents Hitlers from giving cultural speeches." In the speeches, moral and civic-social distancing often alternated. Thomas Mann was one of only a few publicly active opponents of National Socialism to whom Hitler addressed by name in his diatribes. Mann retaliated with allusions to the rhetorical weaknesses of the "Führer" and emphasized the correctness of his own predictions:

The company, which is known under the name Deutsche Hörer! radio broadcasts that became well-known offered a lot of material for discussion in Germany after the war. While some claimed that Thomas Mann had suggested a collective guilt of all Germans in his speeches, others were of the opinion that he had only been very harsh on the mentality of the Weimar Republic and the social climate in the first years of National Socialism.

In 1941, the Manns moved to Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. From April 8, they lived there in a rented house on Amalfi Drive, before they were able to move into a purpose-built house on San Remo Drive on February 5, 1942. In mid-2016, it was threatened with demolition as a property for sale, which led to an online petition for its preservation on behalf of the Society for Exile Research, in which Herta Müller, among others, participated: The house should become "a place of remembrance of the history of exile, a place of intellectual, social and cultural exchange". The Federal Republic of Germany acquired the property for this purpose. It was opened as the Thomas Mann House in June 2018 as a cultural center.

There was also a connection to Aldous Huxley, which had existed for over a decade at the time and lasted, but is now becoming increasingly intensive, when Mann moved into his immediate neighborhood. Thomas Mann did not obtain citizenship of the United States until 1944. In the years 1943 to 1947 – interrupted in 1946 by lung cancer, which was surgically treated in Chicago – Mann worked on Doctor Faustus. For this project, he had previously studied musicological textbooks as well as biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Hugo Wolf and Alban Berg. He contacted contemporary composers such as Stravinsky, Hanns Eisler and Arnold Schoenberg to receive instruction in musical composition. He learned a lot from Adorno, who lived in the neighborhood at the time. The latter was happy to advise him in detail, which Thomas Mann himself gives an account of in his autobiographical report The Origin of Doctor Faustus – Novel of a Novel and which Katia Mann also reports on in her Unwritten Memoirs. Documentary and historiographical material from Luther's time and the Thirty Years' War was just as much a part of the preparation of the novel as Grimmelshausen, collections of proverbs from the Middle Ages and specialist literature on Nietzsche. He called the book his "life confession" and wrote to Paul Amann on October 21, 1948: "Zeitblom is a parody of myself. There is more of my own in Adrian's mood than one should believe – and should believe." In California, Mann also gained access to the North American Unitarians, of which he became a member. Thomas Mann – previously a Lutheran – valued the Unitarians above all as a religious community without dogmatic foundations, although he was closer to Christian-oriented Unitarianism than to newer humanistic approaches. Mann also appeared as a guest speaker in the pulpit and arranged for his grandchildren Frido and Angelica to be baptized in the spring of 1942 at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles, with himself acting as godfather.

Mann had driven a wedge between himself and influential literary-journalistic circles of Western post-war Germany: In his open letter to Walter von Molo Why I am not returning to Germany, he advocated the thesis of the collective guilt of the Germans. Threatening letters and scathing reviews from his doctor Faustus were the result. He commented on the bombing of German cities during the Second World War with the words: "Everything must be paid for." A few years had to pass before a more conciliatory attitude towards Thomas Mann emerged among the West German public.

Thomas Mann was increasingly disappointed with US policy after the death of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 and especially since the beginning of the Cold War in 1947. He first recorded his decision to return to Europe in his diary in December 1949. He solidified himself when he was described in June 1951 before the House of Representatives in Congress as "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company" (german: "one of the world's most important defenders of Stalin and comrades"). Like the German émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht before him, he had to account for his activities before the Committee for Un-American Activities. Exactly one year later, in June 1952, the Manns returned to Switzerland with their daughter Erika. In his diary, he spoke of a "repeated emigration". There they first moved into a rented house in Erlenbach near Zurich and then lived from 1954 in the purchased villa in Kilchberg, Alte Landstrasse 39, above Lake Zurich. Thomas Mann had already paid a visit to Germany in 1949 on the occasion of the celebrations for Goethe's 200th birthday. He visited Frankfurt am Main (Trizone) and Weimar (SBZ), which was eyed with suspicion by the West German public, but was commented on by Mann with the sentence: "I don't know any zones. My visit is for Germany itself, Germany as a whole, and not for an occupied territory." In Frankfurt he received the West German Goethe Prize. In Weimar he met Johannes R. Becher, President of the Cultural Association and later Minister of Culture of the GDR, as well as Colonel Tyulpanov, head of the information department of the SMAD, and was awarded the East German Goethe National Prize. The entire trip, which also took him to Stuttgart and destroyed Munich, was under police protection, as there had been some threatening letters in advance. In the end, however, he was enthusiastically received, and his Frankfurt speech Goethe and Democracy was transmitted via loudspeaker from St. Paul's Church to the forecourt, where other listeners were standing. The prize money of the Frankfurt award was donated by Thomas Mann to penniless writers, the sum of the Weimar Prize for the reconstruction of the Herder Church there. In 1953, Thomas Mann accepted the honorary presidency of the German Schiller Foundation in Weimar (GDR). In June of that year, following an invitation from Hamburg, he traveled to the north of Germany for the first time again. From Hamburg, he and his wife made a detour to the Baltic Sea on June 10, visiting Travemünde, his "childhood paradise". There he had spent his summer holidays as a boy, just as he lets his young hero Hanno experience it in Buddenbrook's novel. There are also reminiscences of this time in other works, both in Tonio Kröger and in Felix Krull. He paid only a short visit to his hometown of Lübeck and had his picture taken in front of the ruins of the Buddenbrook House in Mengstraße. The following year, he continued the work he had begun in 1909 on the novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, which ultimately remained a fragment due to his imminent death.

On the 150th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller's death in 1955, Mann published the essay Versuch über Schiller and gave the ceremonial speeches at the festivities; first in Stuttgart and on 14 May 1955 in Weimar. On this day, he was presented with the certificate of honorary member of the German Academy of Arts.

In the early summer of 1955, he visited Travemünde and his hometown for the last time, which had invited him this time: In Lübeck, he was awarded honorary citizenship on May 20. In his acceptance speech, he referred to his father, the former senator of the city: "I can say that his image has always stood in the background of all my actions, and I have always regretted that I could give him so little hope during his lifetime that I would still become something respectable in the world. All the deeper is the satisfaction with which it fills me that I was granted the privilege of doing some honor to my origin and this city, albeit in an unusual way."

In July 1955, the couple stayed in the Dutch seaside resort of Noordwijk in South Holland. On July 18, Thomas Mann mentioned to his wife for the first time a pulling pain in his left leg, which had "recently flown to him" and was now beginning to annoy him. The doctors consulted diagnosed leg vein thrombosis and prescribed bed rest. On 23 July, he returned to Zurich early for further treatment. In the cantonal hospital, his condition improved for a short time. Full of anticipation of his return to Kilchberg, he wrote to Theodor W. Adorno: "Pazienza! It's Magic Mountain time that I've entered." However, a steady deterioration followed within days: He lost weight and increasingly suffered from circulatory insufficiency. On August 12, 1955, Thomas Mann died at the age of eighty in the Zurich Cantonal Hospital from a rupture of the lower abdominal aorta (aorta abdominalis) as a result of arteriosclerosis.

The funeral at the Kilchberg cemetery on 16 August was attended by numerous mourners from Germany and abroad. As one of the deceased's long-time companions, Carl Zuckmayer wrote in his words of farewell: "At this coffin, the opinion of the day falls silent. A life has been fulfilled that was dedicated to only one content: the work of the German language, the continued existence of the European spirit."