"All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, Tolstoy said. Read this book to understand what this sentence can mean." Jürgen Kaube, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"A book that brilliantly exploits a wealth of source material, is witty on the surface, but deeply sad underneath." Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Thomas Mann
He is the literary magician of the 20th century: Nobel Prize winner and celebrated genius, upper-class citizen and family man, married to his wife Katia for decades, yet as unhappy as one can be. He loves and isn’t allowed to love; the ideas of his time stand in his way. What a drive for great literature—and what a painful life.
Since his early global success with Buddenbrooks and two decades later with The Magic Mountain, all doors have opened for him, including the White House. No German voice fights against Hitler as loudly as his, no other heaps honors upon himself as he does. His wife Katia and his six children surround him like a fortress. But the abyss is always only a step away.
Tilmann Lahme tells us this biography as it has never been told before: with new insights and unpublished sources, with unknown diary passages and letters to his best childhood friend, with his memoirs, and with Susan Sontag’s never-published essay «At Thomas Mann’s.» He thus gives us what we have long been waiting for: finally, the whole Thomas Mann.