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Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Writer
1875 (Lübeck)–1955 (Zurich, Switzerland)

No other person portrayed bourgeois Germany in the 20th as he did, and no one more precisely described the abysses of the bourgeoisie as the Nobel laureate from Lübeck. Thomas Mann was awarded the prize in 1929 explicitly for the "Buddenbrooks" (Buddenbrooks – Verfall einer Familie), the swan song for 19th century bourgeois society. At the end of the 1920s, Thomas Mann pointedly advocated rescue of the bourgeois republic in Germany – which was well-known in Scandinavia, a stronghold of democracy among an increasingly authoritative-governed Europe.
Forced into emigration in 1933, he said about the core of Nazi racial hatred: "It is directed against the Christian and classical foundations of Western morality. It is the attempt to shake off the ties of civilization and threatens to bring about a terrible alienation between the land of Goethe and the rest of the world."
While Thomas Mann continued his literary work with incredible discipline, he never grew tired of reminding the world from his exile in Switzerland and America that there was another, better Germany.
After the war he returned to Zurich, as close as possible to his beloved – and feared Germany. And in 1949 while attending the Goethe anniversary in Weimar, he emphasized that the German cultural nation was indivisible.

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