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Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature
A ground-breaking biography of one of the twentieth-century's literary titans, Thomas Mann, author of Doctor Faustus, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. From the intimate details of his sexual emancipation to the heart-wrenching relationship with his family to his evolving political identity to the impetus of his great novels, Anthony Heilbut offers original and incisive insight into the life of Thomas Mann as he becomes estranged from his beloved Germany, showing the fine threads in the weave between his life and his art.
636 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Anthony Heilbut
11 books7 followersAnthony Heilbut received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. He has taught at New York University and Hunter College and is the author of Exiled in Paradise, The Gospel Sound, and Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. Heilbut is also a record producer specializing in gospel music and has won both a Grammy Award and a Grand Prix du Disque.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 28, 2013
Weighty and very good analysis of Mann's life and work, read in conjunction with Buddenbrooks. Not a conventional A to Z biography, Heilbut places Mann's work in the context of his family, geography, sexuality and politics. I got the impression that here was someone who had really got under Mann's skin, his contradictions, neuroses, triumphs and failures.
The analysis of each of his major works is excellent, especially "Death in Venice". Heilbut explains Mann's homosexuality and ambivalence about his nature with great sympathy and perception. Fascinating too was Mann's political journey. Mann was always conservative in thinking, but initially he was Conservative in politics and in the First World War was a strong supporter of the German government. In the early 1920s he was one of the first to see the dangers of the Nazis and in a very few years moved politically to a socialist/humanist position; championing Proust and Kafka.
This is a warts and all biography and Heilbut illustrates Mann's tempestuous relationship with his brother and his sometimes difficult relationship with his children.
The Magic Mountain is one of my favourite books and Heilbut explains Mann's dazzling contradictions and narrative ploys and the novel's central themes; love and death. There is a detailed analysis of all Mann's major works and this has given me the impetus to consider reading other works, especially the Joseph trilogy.
The analysis of each of his major works is excellent, especially "Death in Venice". Heilbut explains Mann's homosexuality and ambivalence about his nature with great sympathy and perception. Fascinating too was Mann's political journey. Mann was always conservative in thinking, but initially he was Conservative in politics and in the First World War was a strong supporter of the German government. In the early 1920s he was one of the first to see the dangers of the Nazis and in a very few years moved politically to a socialist/humanist position; championing Proust and Kafka.
This is a warts and all biography and Heilbut illustrates Mann's tempestuous relationship with his brother and his sometimes difficult relationship with his children.
The Magic Mountain is one of my favourite books and Heilbut explains Mann's dazzling contradictions and narrative ploys and the novel's central themes; love and death. There is a detailed analysis of all Mann's major works and this has given me the impetus to consider reading other works, especially the Joseph trilogy.
January 15, 2022
While reading a biography of Walt Whitman (Walt Whitman: A Gay Life), I noticed the writer repeatedly citing this book. Walt Whitman and Thomas Mann are twins separated at birth? No, but there are parallels.
In any event, I was inspired to pick up this weighty tome. I didn't get through it, because I had to return it, but I might go back to it. If you want to know everything about the life and times of Thomas Mann and the circumstances of each of his works, this book is for you.
This is the more straightforward, more pedestrian version of the 2021 novel The Magician, ideal for someone who wants all the facts, all the details, and less of an emotional storyline threading through the life of Thomas Mann.
In any event, I was inspired to pick up this weighty tome. I didn't get through it, because I had to return it, but I might go back to it. If you want to know everything about the life and times of Thomas Mann and the circumstances of each of his works, this book is for you.
This is the more straightforward, more pedestrian version of the 2021 novel The Magician, ideal for someone who wants all the facts, all the details, and less of an emotional storyline threading through the life of Thomas Mann.
June 8, 2013
Generally well done. If you prefer a straighter bio, I'd recommend Thomas Mann: A Biography; Hayman also used Mann's newly released diaries in which (more?) details about his repressed homosexuality were learned. As Heilbut's subtitle indicates, he spends more time on Mann as an erotic being, and dwells on the erotic in his works, than Hayman. Heilbut seemed to have a bee in his bonnet about Pat Robertson and Pentecostalism, which he mentioned three times, apropos of practically nothing. Oliver North and Randall Terry were mentioned in the same breath. Heilbut's authorial voice is more prominent, and intrusive, than Hayman's.
February 1, 2017
I'm glad I persisted to reach his political involvement in Nazi days, but before then this book was greatly in danger of being unfinished. It's a highly idiosyncratic biography, and not in a way I found convincing or indeed supportable in other senses. My problem is not about his central thesis that Thomas Mann was as-gay-as; but I am irked when sexuality and nothing but sexuality is seen everywhere, in every line written and every relationship; and I found the tone anachronistic. It was also more conventional than I'd hoped for. Having just come from The Magic Mountain and having deep memories of Death in Venice, I had started to think Thomas Mann's philosophy of love is possibly a bit out there. This busily documented his gayness, but didn't explore his thought. It did not do justice to the women in his life, and I am reluctant to attribute that to the subject instead of the biographer (for one, his wife's grandmother was Germany's foremost feminist and Mann said she made the most impression on him of any person he'd met).
November 8, 2021
I have carefully read the reviews posted here and in the light of them, and the fact that the reviews from academic and other writers published at the time the book was published can also be accessed by anyone interested, I am going to try and help anyone trying to decide whether or not to read this book.
First it must be remembered that it is not a straight forward biography, it is an examination of his writings and in particular the place that 'eros', or really Mann's 'eros', played in the formation of his work and thought. Secondly the date of the works original publication, 1997, must be born in mind. I believe this was the first work to really look at the whole of his output in the light of the revelations of his diaries which were published in the 1980s. These had forced a dramatic re-evaluation of Mann's own sexuality, and this of course came at the same time that gays were fighting for an acceptance that went way beyond just tolerance or being satisfied with the lifting of legal restrictions, such as in England in 1967. Our mind set, the way that Mann's work can be examined, has moved on to such an extent that it is easy to forget the Mann was presented up until the 1980s.
I can remember in the late 1970s, as a young gay man, reading Mann's work and, although not defining it that way, using my gaydar to pick up that there was a strong queer element in many of his stories and works, not just Death in Venice, and that it was not just a 'literary' device. But this was strongly denied by critics and academic, many of them actually gay, there was huge fear to acknowledge anything, even after his diaries that his feelings were those of a real desire, so many of those same critics continued to deny what was there by saying that he might have had queer thoughts but he never acted on them, because we have no direct proof. This one of the more bizarre homophobic reactions to any discussion of the gayness of people like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Melville, even Whitman was to say you could not call them homosexual/gay/queer whatever because we have no clear proof that they ever 'lay with a man as a woman' (as the Bible so quaintly puts it). That the same lack of evidence might pertain to many heterosexual artists was of course not relevant. That you could only acknowledge someone's sexuality if it was plain by fucking in front of witnesses is of course ridiculous. A queer/gay/homosexual person is so even if they have never acted on their desires.
I apologize for this digression but several reviews have complained that there is to much on the 'gay' angle, but what they can have expected of a work subtitled 'eros and literature' is hard to understand. So this was the first substantial, academic work to bury the idea that Mann was a writer who just happened to use homoerotic imagery. I should stress that it is a academic work, although still a very readable one, it does presuppose aa awareness of not only all Mann's works, but many of his contemporaries and also the works of many literary commentators.
But this is still a book worth reading, if you are interested in Mann, have read at least some of his longer novels and are aware of the output of his brother Heinrich and children Erica, Klaus and Golo (man of whose works are available in English either again or for the first time) then you will enjoy this book. If you have just read Death in Venice and are looking to learn more about Mann and his family then this book will probably be to long, heavy and off putting. Their are excellent recent biographies which would be the place to start.
First it must be remembered that it is not a straight forward biography, it is an examination of his writings and in particular the place that 'eros', or really Mann's 'eros', played in the formation of his work and thought. Secondly the date of the works original publication, 1997, must be born in mind. I believe this was the first work to really look at the whole of his output in the light of the revelations of his diaries which were published in the 1980s. These had forced a dramatic re-evaluation of Mann's own sexuality, and this of course came at the same time that gays were fighting for an acceptance that went way beyond just tolerance or being satisfied with the lifting of legal restrictions, such as in England in 1967. Our mind set, the way that Mann's work can be examined, has moved on to such an extent that it is easy to forget the Mann was presented up until the 1980s.
I can remember in the late 1970s, as a young gay man, reading Mann's work and, although not defining it that way, using my gaydar to pick up that there was a strong queer element in many of his stories and works, not just Death in Venice, and that it was not just a 'literary' device. But this was strongly denied by critics and academic, many of them actually gay, there was huge fear to acknowledge anything, even after his diaries that his feelings were those of a real desire, so many of those same critics continued to deny what was there by saying that he might have had queer thoughts but he never acted on them, because we have no direct proof. This one of the more bizarre homophobic reactions to any discussion of the gayness of people like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Melville, even Whitman was to say you could not call them homosexual/gay/queer whatever because we have no clear proof that they ever 'lay with a man as a woman' (as the Bible so quaintly puts it). That the same lack of evidence might pertain to many heterosexual artists was of course not relevant. That you could only acknowledge someone's sexuality if it was plain by fucking in front of witnesses is of course ridiculous. A queer/gay/homosexual person is so even if they have never acted on their desires.
I apologize for this digression but several reviews have complained that there is to much on the 'gay' angle, but what they can have expected of a work subtitled 'eros and literature' is hard to understand. So this was the first substantial, academic work to bury the idea that Mann was a writer who just happened to use homoerotic imagery. I should stress that it is a academic work, although still a very readable one, it does presuppose aa awareness of not only all Mann's works, but many of his contemporaries and also the works of many literary commentators.
But this is still a book worth reading, if you are interested in Mann, have read at least some of his longer novels and are aware of the output of his brother Heinrich and children Erica, Klaus and Golo (man of whose works are available in English either again or for the first time) then you will enjoy this book. If you have just read Death in Venice and are looking to learn more about Mann and his family then this book will probably be to long, heavy and off putting. Their are excellent recent biographies which would be the place to start.
August 17, 2023
Very interesting biography bringing us back to the last century.
April 21, 2008
As you can see I read this book soon after it was published, and so my recollections fade. Because it was one of the first bios of Mann I read, I suppose, it seemed rather tedious. Now that I've read four or five others, I really should take up Heilbut's book once more, and see if my response then reflected my relative unfamiliarity with the subject - I had read many of the novels already, but not the life - or with the quality of Heilbut's biographical writing.
September 2, 2017
Not an easy biography to read. It is loosely chronological, but tends to focus on works and themes too. And there is a great deal of (generally plausible) speculation about Mann's thoughts, motives and emotions. However, since he was such a conservative, restrained, modest and apparently repressed person, this is the best way to do it.
Nearly 600 pages in which in often fascinating detail we see Mann struggling to relate to the political and historical events going on around him, and turning slowly into the left-liberal humanist sage of his final years. Roosevelt considered making him the leader of postwar Germany.
Nearly 600 pages in which in often fascinating detail we see Mann struggling to relate to the political and historical events going on around him, and turning slowly into the left-liberal humanist sage of his final years. Roosevelt considered making him the leader of postwar Germany.
June 17, 2022
Studious literary biography, but light on the last novels.
December 27, 2016
Ultimately somewhat disappointing. I would have liked more insight/analysis of TM's gay tendencies in his life and work; the book starts out that way but then becomes a very talky biography/monography that focuses too much on certain aspects, e.g. a lengthy discussion of The Magic Mountain, and then hurries through the last couple decades of TM's life.
October 11, 2024
This literary biography, which explores the author's psychology in great detail, is one of the more fascinating ones I have ever read. The writer interconnects different episodes from Mann's extensive career, showing how his shyness and fixation undergirded his insightful observations on German society, reversing course from discussions of seminal late novels such as Doctor Faustus to accounts of Mann's early years. Heilbut points out that Mann's birth happened about the same time as Germany's political unification, German Jews' legal emancipation, and the term "homosexual" became widely used. Extensive critical analyses of Mann's written works, both public and private, delve into the author's mind and show how Mann's literary consciousness provided a platform for investigating the boundaries and license of German, Jewish, and homosexual self-expression. Heilbut explains how, for instance, the famous novella Death in Venice shows a national idol dying amidst debased tourism, yet it also celebrates homoerotic longing. This interpretation of Thomas Mann's life was intriguing in light of these and other examples.
September 7, 2008
About the best biography i've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews