Paul Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann (1875–1955), born into a patrician merchant family in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, rocketed to international acclaim at age twenty-five with Buddenbrooks (1901), chronicling the four-generation physical and psychological decline of a merchant family. His 1912 novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), depicting writer Gustav von Aschenbach's fatal aesthetic obsession with the youth Tadzio amidst a cholera epidemic, remains a landmark of modernist psychology.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, Mann published his intellectual magnum opus, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), setting the ideological struggle between humanism and nihilism within a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos on the eve of WWI. Stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis in 1936, Mann went into exile in the United States, famously broadcasting over the BBC to the German people (*Deutsche Hörer!*) from California to resist Hitler.