The Legacy of Thomas Mann and Social Injustice Today
The price of food in America is going up. Maybe it’s the reduction in foreign laborers to pick the lettuce in the field or maybe it’s the increased tariffs on imported seafood like shrimp and staples that include olive oil, but it’s happening.
It may take a while to notice less government support is going towards education, healthcare and scientific research, but when the cost of food and shelter goes up, I’m hoping people will take notice. And maybe just maybe, America will also begin to notice our civil liberties, one by one, are also being taken away.
It has always baffled me, the atrocities carried out in Nazi Germany. How could such evil happen? How could the citizens of Germany not see what was taking place in their own country? Books were being banned and people were losing their jobs, based on their beliefs and their religion. And now it is happening here in the United States. A member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is fired without substantiated cause or due process and the same happens to the head of the Center of Disease Control. At CDC, employees/doctors in management positions have resigned in protest. It’s scary.
Our monetary system and the oversight of medical care and medicines is now in jeopardy. But no one seems to be paying attention. Maybe when they notice it’s becoming more and more expensive to live they’ll awake from their lethargy.
I’ve been reading literature written by Germans during the late 19th and early 20th century to gain a better understanding. One writer I’ve been curious about is Thomas Mann (1875–1955), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His famous work includes, Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain.
Death in Venice was required reading when I was in high schools. Nowadays, I mention his name, and many people have never heard of him. His work includes one dozen novellas and half a dozen novels as well as short stories, essays, and plays. An excellent historical novel about Mann is The Magician by Colm Tóibín. The title of the book which makes reference to Mann’s famous novel Magic Mountain and was also a nickname bestowed on Mann’s children in response to his antics entertaining them with magic tricks, once dressing up as a wizard for a party.
Mann’s wife Katia Pringsheim Mann was from a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. Although she converted to Lutheranism, according to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany, she and their children: Erika, Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elisabeth, and Michael, were all considered members of the Jewish race and therefore not worthy of German citizenship. When the Nazi’s came into power, it was only a matter of time before they needed to “self-deport”.
Mann’s father was a prominent merchant and Senator from an aristocratic family. His mother was Brazilian, most likely of mixed heritage. Influenced by German Romanticm and 19th Century Realism, his dense and detailed prose explores with precision family structure, relationships and identity.
The novella Death in Venice is about an older man confronted with his mortality who develops a fascination with a beautiful boy vacationing with his mother. Depending on the reviewer, multiple themes can be found that include: art, beauty, passion, moral decay and intellectual aspiration. In his private journals, Mann revealed himself to be attracted to young men. He struggled with finding ways to express his complex views and thoughts on culture, philosophy, and society. Within the literary community there is debate as to whether he actually acted on his homo erotic physical desires or whether they remained solely expressed in his writing.
Because of his literary stature, the Nazi’s were not quick to denounce his fiction, but in 1933 his political writings were blacklisted and burned in response to his declaration of solidarity with his writing peers and he went into exile. Mann burned his early journals in 1896 and some of his later private journals were ultimately smuggled out of Germany. He emigrated to the USA in 1939 and gave wartime radio addresses and became a naturalized U.S. Citizen in 1944. In 1950, with the rise of McCarthyism and attacks on liberals, under the guise of rooting out communism, Mann left the United States, In 1952 he settled in Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life.
Mann continued to write until his death and the journals that survived were to be held for twenty years until being released to the public.
What is a writer to do when they witness social injustice? They write about what they see, and they write about how they feel. Humans are complicated. We make sense of the world around us through the stories we tell. But first we must pay attention and listen.
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Originally published at http://nadjamaril.com on August 29, 2025.
