Thomas Mann

For the 150th birthday in June 2025: Thomas Mann and his real life. He is the literary magician of the twentieth century: a Nobel laureate and celebrated genius, a bourgeois and family man, bound in decades-long marriage to his wife Katia, yet as unhappy as one can be. He loves and is not 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 worldwide success with Buddenbrooks and two decades later with The Magic Mountain, all doors have opened for him, even the one at the White House. No German voice fights against Hitler as audibly as his does, and no one else accumulates honors like he does. His wife Katia and their six children surround him like a fortress. Yet the abyss is always just a step away. Tilmann Lahme tells us this biography like it has never been told before: with new insights and unpublished sources, with unknown diary passages and letters to his best childhood friend, along with his memories and Susan Sontag's never-published essay On Thomas Mann. In doing so, he gives us what we have long awaited: finally, the whole Thomas Mann. Press reviews of Tilmann Lahme's book The Manns. A Family History: "All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way," says Tolstoy. Read this book to understand what this sentence can mean." Jürgen Kaube, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "A brilliantly managed wealth of source material, a book that is witty on the surface but deeply sad underneath." Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung.