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“... fiction-writers: for Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes, for Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth, for Thomas Mann in ‘Tonio Kröger’. Szerb’s group centres on a charismatic brother and sister, Tamás and Eva Ulpius, who live in unstructured bohemian chaos with their father, a grumpy archaeologist. The others – Ervin, a brilliant, sensitive, gentle ...”

“... the little town was all but overwhelmed by distinguished German refugees, Brecht, Alma Mahler, Thomas Mann and his family among them. This now famous episode, which turned a French fishing village briefly into the ‘capital of German literature’, is recorded by a thick smattering of blue plaques. At the time, feelings were more mixed. Bedford ...”

“... kind proper to an artist. In The Golden Notebook and elsewhere, she mentions her admiration for Thomas Mann and for the idea of the philosophical novel, now, she believes, an impossibility; but even so she thinks one can still claim to be serious. Her right to make that claim is supported by her permanent interest in the world’s wickedness and ...”

“... in other words, badly wants to be the kind of novelist – Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann are among those he quotes, according to the postscript – who could make Literature out of the thin delusions of a reprobate like Haffner. Unless, of course, it is Thirlwell who wants to be that novelist, in which case The Escape is a different ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... that refer to these claims. Among the novels about which she has most to say is Death in Venice. Thomas Mann was 35 when he met the original of the boy Tadzio, whose beauty prevents Aschenbach from achieving ‘Platonic sublimation’. Consequently, Mann, with his aesthetic imperative, cannot offer ‘a primarily ...”

“... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow ...”

“... that doubled as a water-hearse and plonked in the middle of it a coffin. It was like a moment that Thomas Mann might have conjured up and it made me plan to go to the Lido and take a look at the Grand Hotel des Bains, now a shell, where he set Death in Venice. More than sixty years after the story was written, Katia ...”

“... and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he had been such a prominent ...”

“... esteem until he is demoted after a show of petulance at a tactless mention of his archrival Thomas Mann. Herman Broch was Canetti’s great friend at the beginning of the period but fades out of the narrative as it continues. As for poor Karl Kraus, the mentor who had urged and inspired Canetti to write Auto da Fé, his is the most summary ...”

“... modern society.’ Germany after its defeat in 1918 was a very political place. But Scheler, like Thomas Mann, whose Considerations of an Unpolitical Man caught the mood of many intellectuals in the Weimar years, hated the fact. He despised the interest-mongering in the new parties, disliked the interests themselves, and was contemptuous of the ...”

“... to the first generation of German writers to whom writing seemed to offer a prosperous future. Thomas Mann, a friend of Wassermann’s, was teased for being a hartnäckiger Villenbesitzer, or ‘serial villa buyer’; Stefan Zweig owned Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen; Hofmannsthal summed up his aspirations with a list of trophy comforts: ‘I ...”

“... wasn’t until the 20th century that the novel’s more violent aspects were addressed, notably by Thomas Mann, who in 1944 called it ‘colourful, wild, crude, amusing, amorous … boiling over with life and death … and immortal in the splendour of its sins’. Following Mann’s assessment, Günter Grass used ...”

“... again, when Congdon ends with a reference to the supposed ‘portrait’ of Lukacs as Naphta in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. That characterisation has been generally influential in Western perceptions of Lukacs, and it is interesting now to be able to read his own reflections on it: ‘If Thomas Mann had ...”

“... would later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted ...”