Thomas Mann

In the heart of Germany’s capital right along the river Spree the ‘Road of Recollection’ is taking shape. Thomas Mann is the fourth personality from Germany to be honoured with a monument, others are still to follow.
The Ernst Freiberger Foundation gives high priority to commemorate on this historic site personalities who in the first half of the 20th century have served Germany, and in some cases mankind as such, in a variety of ways through outstanding achievements. They are ‘heroes without a sword’ to whom quite literally a memorial is erected. They are personalities who verify that in the last century beside the totalitarian Nazi regime there existed also another Germany: the Germany of inventors, of writers, of those who endeavoured to reconciliate the peoples and lastly those who resisted against the regime that displayed such deep contempt for humanity.
The fourth monument is dedicated to Thomas Mann, a multi-faceted character of whom every single aspect would be worthy of praise and recognition. Thomas Mann in one of the most notable writers emerging from Germany and he ranges among the greatest novelists of the 20th century. Born in 1875 to a family of traders and senators of the free city of Lübeck, he set off as a mediocre student who even twice had to repeat a school year before he became a world-renowned writer, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Many of his deeds may have been rooted in protest against what today is called the ‘establishment’, the severe discipline of bourgeois society. Seen from that perspective Thomas Mann acted politically from an early age onwards. He objected to the budding National Socialism in the years of the Weimar Republic and later on his criticism attracted the attention of the Nazis and their almighty Gestapo.
Thomas Mann conceived his oeuvre as an endeavour in the service of a ‘higher humanity’. For him, this term designated a condition of mankind that achieves an equilibrium between contrasts and contradictions. The idea of a middle ground for Thomas Mann became the idea of life generally, in spite of all the polarities that characterised his oeuvre. On his 50th birthday he said that if he were to make a wish regarding the posthumous reputation of his work he hoped one would say that it had “embraced life even though it was acquainted with death”. According to Mann there are two ways of embracing life: “One that in unaware of death; it is rather simple-minded and sturdy; and another one that is acquainted with death, and only this way, I think, is of true spiritual value. It is the way of embracing life chosen by artists, poets and writers”.

(Preface of Ernst Freiberger, the foundation’s founder, to the book ‘Thomas Mann – The German Issue and the Germans’)

A publication of the Ernst Freiberger Foundation, published by be.bra Wissenschaftsverlag

Including contributions by:

Antje Korsmeier
The Master of Contrasts. A Biographical Portrait of Thomas Mann

Alexander Kissler
‘My Books are German in a Despairing Way”. Thomas Mann, the German Issue and the Germans

Volker Koop
Thomas Mann and the Raid of the Nazis

Helmut Engel
Thomas Mann’s Expatriation

Hardcover, 187 pages, Berlin 2007
ISBN 978-3-937233-39-0
This book can be obtained in any book store or directly from be.bra Publishing Berlin.
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