Thomas Mann. Ein Leben

Reading and talk
with Tilmann Lahme
Moderation: Anna Kinder

He was born 150 years ago: Nobel Prize winner, upper-class citizen and family man, bound to his wife Katia in decades of marriage and at the same time as unhappy as one can be. Thomas Mann loved and was not allowed to love, the ideas of his time stood in his way. Since his early worldwide success with "Buddenbrooks" and two decades later with "The Magic Mountain", many doors opened for him, right up to the White House. After living in exile in France and Switzerland, the Mann family came to the USA and lived in Los Angeles from 1941. Geographically far away, Thomas Mann turned to the "German listeners" and against Hitler via the radio. In his biography "Thomas Mann. A Life", literary historian Tilmann Lahme provides new insights into unpublished sources and unknown diary passages, supplemented by Susan Sontag's never-printed essay "Bei Thomas Mann". Tilmann Lahme worked as an editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and is the author of numerous publications on the Mann family.

In cooperation with the German Literature Archive Marbach