Thomas Mann (6.6.1875 Lübeck – 12.8.1955 Zurich)

Thomas Mann came from a wealthy Lübeck merchant family. He was the second of five children of the Senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann. Three years after the death of his father, he left school early and in 1894 followed his German-Brazilian mother to Munich, where he spent nearly half his life. His literary breakthrough was the novel “Buddenbrooks” (1901), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a Munich university professor.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Thomas Mann positioned himself on the side of German-nationalist war enthusiasts and broke off his relationship with his brother Heinrich, who was four years older, due to political differences. In “Reflections of a Non-Political Man” (1918), Thomas Mann defended the Wilhelmine Empire and war. The brothers reconciled in 1922. With his speech “On the German Republic,” (1922) Thomas Mann declared his support for democracy for the first time, and he subsequently spoke out against rising National Socialism.

On November 30, 1926, Mann participated in the rally “Fight for Munich as a Cultural Center” at the Munich Tonhalle with a speech about the cultural decline of the Bavarian capital. Here, Thomas Mann reminded people about the heyday of Munich as center of the avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. On February 10, 1933, on the 50th anniversary of Richard Wagner's death, he gave the speech “The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner” at the University of Munich. The next day, he traveled with this lecture to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris. During his subsequent holiday in Arosa, Thomas Mann learned of arrests and attacks that caused him to remain in Switzerland for the moment.

As a reaction to the lectures, on April 16, 1933, the article “Protest of the Richard-Wagner-City Munich” appeared in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, initiated and written by the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch and signed by numerous Munich dignitaries, including Olaf Gulbrannsson, Hans Pfitzner, and Richard Strauss. They accused Thomas Mann of having disparaged Richard Wagner. Thomas Mann did not return to Germany.

On April 26, 1933, there was a search of his residence in the Poschinger Straße; shortly thereafter, a protective custody order was obtained. Thomas Mann’s German citizenship was revoked on December 3, 1936, shortly after he had become a citizen of Czechoslovakia. From 1934 to 1938, the family lived in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. Then the writer was invited to serve as a guest professor in Princeton, New Jersey (USA) and he lived in Pacific Palisades, California from 1940 to 1952. Thomas and Katia Mann were granted American citizenship on June 23, 1944. From 1940 to the end of the war, Thomas Mann made statements to German listeners that were critical of the regime every month via the BBC London.

Thomas Mann visited East and West Germany for the first time in 1949; in July, he was also in Munich. In summer 1952, he and his wife returned to Europe. They lived first in Erlenbach bei Zurich, then starting in 1954 in Kilchberg on Lake Zurich.