Man is known as a great german writer, but there must have been at least ambiguous feelings about this guy who'd satd in sunny california. D because he presented himself as a sort of titanic figure above the politics. So there was an ambiguity. I mean, one of the things that hasn't come up yet at all, really, in our discussion is irony. There's a ruthless irony in his work, also about himself. And it goes back to that idea of the buttons. It can be funny looking at the buttons if you do it ironically. And i think that that is for man. But, but, yes, i think translations often were caught up in
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