Thomas Mann's World

Joseph Gerard Brennan

Columbia University Press

1942

206 páginas

6h 52m

ISBN-10: 0846201356

Thomas Mann is more than an eminent novelist. He is one of those representatives of German culture whose writings reveal a speculative imagination of far-reaching dimensions that has the quality of synthesis. His genius reaches out into the realms of music, of morals, of politics; it raises fundametal questions as to the function of art, the nature of humanity. Mann stands at the close of the German cultural tradition which stems from Goethe on the one hand, from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, Wagner, and Freud on the other. In its quality of synthesis, Mann's artistic direction is kin to the creative drive of his predecessors. Transmuting the influence of these "kulturmenschen" within an intensely personal art and critique, Mann's achievement not only stands at the end of this cultural tradition, but is also a commentary upon it, a recapitulation, a summing up.