The necessity of empathy in understanding absolutely so we're talking about writing for the voiceless, and also describing things that couldn't be said before. Which leads me back to colm and thomas man's diaries. Ha ha, the other dey am,. he had them in a safe in munich when he went out of the country in ninetee 33, and he couldn't come back in to get them. And if they had looked carefully, they would have real they could have ruined him. There. It was his discussion of how much he admired andesired young boys. Orsare not young boys, but young men. I mean, teen aged boys sometimes.
The prize-winning author Colm Tóibín recreates the life and work of one of Germany’s most famous and acclaimed writers Thomas Mann. The Magician is a deeply intimate portrait of a private man, revealing both his suppressed homosexuality and complex family ties, and of a public writer who sought to explicate the soul of Germany in the 20th century.
When Hitler came to power Thomas Mann fled his homeland and went into exile in America, and in Switzerland, never to return to live in the country that inspired his creativity. Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature at Oxford, considers how German writers have become embroiled in the major events of history, and the impact on their writing. She has translated the lectures of the poet Durs Grünbein, For the Dying Calves, to be published in November.
Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the story of the decline of a wealthy bourgeois merchant family. As a family saga it’s been likened to Jesse Armstrong’s 21st century creation, Succession. As the television drama reaches its third series Armstrong explains why the back-stabbing, power-grabbing antics of a superrich, dysfunctional family has so caught the public imagination.
Producer: Katy Hickman