Thomas Mann - His Work and the Answers to His Time

Thomas Mann – Sein Werk und die Antworten auf seine Zeit was the titel of Prof. Helmut Koopmann‘s talk. It served as a starter for a lecture series in the framework of the Studium generale to mark the 150th anniversary of the poet's birth.

The lecture hall was filled to capacity when the 91-year-old doyen of Thomas Mann research started his talk with the wisdom, "A good lecture has three parts: It is one third known, one third new, and one third incomprehensible.

Red Baron has a very special interest in the lecture series. As a young student, he read Die Buddenbrooks and, now, during his advanced years, has taken on Mann's 1100-page novel Der Zauberberg.

Whereas in The Buddenbrooks I lived through the story of a decaying bourgeois family, I now face in The Magic Mountain a multi-layered, dazzling plot with many people who surround the protagonist Hans Castorp. Thanks to Mann's genius, the novel is a unique experience of the power of the German language.

In the sixties and seventies of the last century, Thomas Mann was described by authors writing realistically as having fallen out of time, and not just because of his style. This view changed when Mann's diaries from 1918 to 1955 were published in 1977, 20 years after his death.

Now, the poet's epigones wrote doctoral theses and habilitation treatises on Mann's life, thoughts, political views, and writings.

Prof. Koopmann gave some general insight into Mann's authorship.

Mann was a precision writer who had and consulted a rich collection of notes on subjects such as medicine, natural sciences, etc. In his detailed descriptions of people, it is striking that every one of his characters seems to be blessed with an abnormality by nature.

The central theme of almost all novelists is sexuality. This is also the case with Thomas Mann, but one gets the impression that he suppresses it. This may have something to do with Mann's homosexual inclination. It is also fitting that he frequently draws on Greek mythology in his descriptions. In Der Tod in Venedig (The Death of Venice), the adored young man is an image of Adonis.

So it is no wonder that after his diaries were published, researchers pounced on them to find out more about Mann's sexual concealments.

Thomas Mann's political transformation from a nationalist to a democrat is astonishing, something that many found difficult to believe. In his 1918 book Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an apolitical man), he plays the reactionary war-monger who writes about the arch-enemy France and places civilization, which he hates, against culture.

In 1922, two years before the publication of Der Zauberberg, he declared his support for parliamentary democracy in his speech on the German Republic. He accepted the unpopular peace agreement, and in The Magic Mountain, the protagonists Settembrini and Naphta discuss the political ideas of the time. The novel is filled with bizarre characters from a torn society that is unable to come to terms with itself against the backdrop of crises and, not least as a result, slips into the First World War.

In his novels, Mann describes a world in which nothing is fixed. Everything seems interchangeable, can be viewed differently, and, yes, can be called into question.

The auditorium was overwhelmed with Thomas Mann and gave the speaker a never-ending round of applause.

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