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The Week in Germany: Culture

August 12, 2005

Luebeck honors Thomas Mann


Author Thomas Mann, pictured here in 1955.

The northern German city of Luebeck this week honors German literary giant Thomas Mann with festivities marking the 50th anniversary of his death. The man known for writing in an open letter from abroad that he would never return to Germany is still a bulwark in German collective consciousness and one of the country’s most important cultural figures.

The Mann family home, once inspiration for the Nobel Prize-winning author’s family saga “Buddenbrooks,” is now a museum honoring Mann’s life and work, as well as that of Klaus Mann, Heinrich Mann and the other writers the family produced. Called the “Buddenbrookshaus,” the home is the epicenter of Thomas Mann activity in the jubilee week and host to events from literary colloquiums to an exhibition on the Mann family.

The scions of Mann have become an increasingly popular topic of conversation since Heinrich Broeler’s 2002 television mini-series “The Manns.” Called a kind of literary ‘Dallas,’ the Mann film starred German-American actor Armin Mueller-Stahl. Recent biographies have also shed light on the people in Mann’s family, including his fascinating wife Katia Pringsheim.

This week also saw a biography of Mann’s mother-in-law, Hilde Pringsheim, become a Spiegel bestseller. The book’s authors, Inge and Walter Jens, have made a small industry out of probing the author’s life and the major characters that inhabited his inner circle.

And yet, even Hans Wisskirchen, director of the Buddenbrooks Foundation, is surprised by the steadily growing interest in Thomas Mann. Wisskirchen has said that although he expects very few new insights into Mann’s work, 50 new doctoral theses are written about Mann every year. One of those was honored with the Thomas Mann Young Scholar’s prize at a ceremony early this week.

Those works still being probed in depth by literary scholars include “The Magic Mountain,” “Death in Venice,” “Tonio Kroeger,” and “Faust.”

But Mann remains a writer remembered equally for his brilliance and his arrogance. Germany’s reigning “Pope of Literature,” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, once called him “the most German of Germans,” while Mann himself is known to have said: “Wherever I am, that’s where you’ll find German culture.”

Walter Kempowski receives Thomas Mann Prize

Celebrations of “Thomas Mann Week” kicked off with the Thomas Mann Prize ceremony, bestowed this year on contemporary German author Walter Kempowski. From his home and archives in a small town north of Bremen, Kempowski has composed works of literature out of one of the largest private diary collections in Europe. He recently completed the fourth volume of his diary-laced magnum opus “Das Echolot,” a work which is said to have completely exhausted him.

Kempowski was arrested as a spy in 1948 and spent eight years in an East German prison before moving to West Germany to become a teacher.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki lauded Kempowski as an author whose ironic view of the present very much placed him in the tradition of Thomas Mann. The prize, worth 10,000 Eur ($12,500), is awarded every three years.

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The Buddenbrooks Haus

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