The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podgolomorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello, in 1929 a professor speaking at a banquet said,

Thomas Mann has described the phenomena which are accessible to us

without the help of models of electrons and atoms.

His investigations concern human nature, as we have learned to know it in the light of conscience.

Thus his field is many centuries old, but Thomas Mann has shown that it offers no fewer new problems of great interest today."

End quote.

That banquet was, of course, the Nobel Prize ceremony for literature,

and the committee was awarding its celebrated honor ceremony for

the literature and the committee was awarding its celebrated honor to a German writer for the fourth time.

At the time of the ceremony, Germany and Europe were in a state of uneasy calm as intellectuals and artists sought to grapple

with the political and philosophical ideas that had launched one world war and would soon

ignite another.

Mann was 54 years old and he'd been famous for wrestling with those ideas for the majority of his adult life.

He was generally viewed as one of Germany's most serious

and capable thinkers and he would live in worldwide fame as Germany's pre-eminent

20th century novelist for two and a half more decades,

even as the rise of Naziism forced him into exile.

Known for his cerebral novels, laced with ideas and often delivered

with a gently ironic tone,

Mann had a tumultuous personal life,

with diaries filled with inner life musings that could threaten his reputation

...