Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Synopsis

Thomas Mann, author of "Death in Venice", "The Magic Mountain", and "Buddenbrooks" was a man with secrets. This biography offers a portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, drawing on Mann's unexpurgated diaries. It uncovers a brilliant writer's mask to reveal the private man:

• his bisexuality, his obsession with preserving appearances and the deep guilt which plagued him for nearly fifty years
• The sanitized self-image Mann strove to maintain is revealed as a fragile veneer. Drawing on the diaries that he stipulated should remain under seal for twenty years after his death, and on interviews with Mann's children, the author depicts a man subject to nervous trembling, convulsive sobbing and moments of sexual embarrassment
• When his novels are reread from this perspective, new meanings emerge and interconnections between the problems of the author and his characters become apparent. As Mann wrote to a friend, he devised "novelistic forms and masks which can be displayed in public as a means of relaying my love, my hatred, my sympathy, my contempt, my pride, my scorn and the accusations I want to make"
• Ronald Hayman is the biographer of Proust, Sartre, Kafka, Nietzche, Brecht and Sylvia Plath