Thomas Mann was born into an upper-middle class family in Lübeck in 1875, son of a German father and Brazilian mother.
After his father's death the family moved to Munich where he and his brother, Heinrich, established themselves as writers. Thomas Mann married into the wealthy Jewish Pringsheim but despite a seemingly happy marriage and sixe children, he had strong homosexual urgings.
A nationalist in World War 1, he drifted leftward between the wars and moved to Switzerland then the USA in the wake of the Nazi takeover in Germany. Among his great works are the novella Death in Venice and his novels Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain and Dr. Faustus. Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 and died in Switzerland in 1955.
Professor Tobias Boes is an expert on German cultural history in general and Thomas Mann in particular; he teaches at Notre Dame University.
***
The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature.
It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna.
An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen.
This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon.
The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience.
Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack.
Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books.
In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon:
E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon
E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini
E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam
E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett
E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill
E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes
E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford