Biography

Thomas Mann was born into a family of grain merchants in the Baltic seaport of Lübeck in 1875, four years after the proclamation of the German Empire. His childhood coincided with the ‘Gründerjahre’ of the new united Germany, marked by rapid industrial and commercial expansion. His father died suddenly when Thomas was sixteen, leaving a will which wound up the family firm, whereupon his mother took the family to Munich, at that time the artistic and cultural centre of the new Reich.

Thomas, who had never shown any academic prowess or interest in a conventional profession, worked for a while in an insurance firm and enrolled for various university courses; most of his time, though, was spent in what would later figure in Doctor Faustus as the ‘house-trained Bohemian’ circles of the Bavarian capital. His first story, ‘Gefallen’ (Fallen: 1894) appeared when he was nineteen, but the real foundation of his career was the publication in 1897 of Little Herr Friedemann. On the strength of this novella, Samuel Fischer, a leading progressive publisher, suggested he should try his hand at a larger-scale narrative. The result was Buddenbrooks (begun 1897, finished 1900), a novel drawing extensively on his family history, through which Thomas Mann taught himself the craft of fiction in the grand manner. It was partly written during a stay in Italy in the company of his elder brother and fellow aspiring novelist Heinrich, including a summer in Palestrina in the house that was later to provide the setting for Adrian Leverkühn's encounter with the devil.