阅读托马斯·曼 Thomas Mann在小说之家的作品!!! | |||||
托马斯·曼托马斯.曼1875年6月6日出生于德国北部港市吕贝克。他的父亲 是经营谷物的巨商，母亲出生于巴西，有葡萄牙血统。托马斯.曼是 五个孩子中的老二，长他四岁的亨利希.曼后来也是一位著名作家。 作为成功的商人，托马斯.曼的父亲作风实际，在吕贝克很有影响； 而他从母亲那里则得到音乐、文学和艺术的熏陶。父亲的实用主义与 母亲的艺术气质所代表的二元性，成为托马斯.曼后来文学创作的重 要主题。
托马斯.曼的父亲于1891年在41岁的年龄上早逝。长子亨利希. 曼和次子托马斯.曼这时都还年轻，且都对文学更感兴趣，而不想成 为商人。于是家族产业变卖出去，曼氏家族商业上的衰败也随之而来， 而他们在文化上的地位却开始蒸蒸日上。
1892年，曼的母亲迁往慕尼黑。托马斯.曼则留在吕贝克完成大 学预科学校的学业。他把大部分精力转向了文学，他的学习成绩并不 理想，毕业时只得到了一个“中等”文凭。1893年，托马斯.曼离开 吕贝克前往慕尼黑。1894-1896年间，他参加了慕尼黑技术大学的历史、 艺术和文学课程。1897年，托马斯.曼开始他第一部长篇小说《布等 勃洛克一家》的创作。1901年这本小说发表并立即获得巨大成功，从 此奠定了托马斯.曼在德国的文学地位。
1905年，托马斯.曼同卡蒂娅普林斯.海姆结婚。尽管曼对自己 的同性恋倾向不是一无所知，但他选择了压抑克制。他们生了六个孩 子，三儿三女。除了长子克劳斯.曼，长女艾丽卡.曼也是一位作家、 演员和社会活动家。克劳斯.曼和艾莉卡.曼都是公开的同性恋者。
1929年，托马斯.曼荣获诺贝尔文学奖。但这也没有阻止纳粹主 义对他一家的威胁。除了托马斯.曼自己的作品不合纳粹的胃口之外， 他哥哥亨利希.曼的进步言论，他妻子的犹太血统以及他子女公开的 同性恋身份都足以令纳粹咬牙切齿。1933年，托马斯.曼一家开始流 亡生活，先是瑞士，然后是美国。在美国，托马斯.曼在加利福尼亚 州的帕利塞兹丘陵的家成了许多者和名流们参拜的地方，阿诺德 .勋伯格，勃托尔特.布莱希特，以及他哥哥亨利希.曼都是这里的 座上客。
五十年代，迈卡锡主义开始在美国肆虐。而二战后的德国分裂为 东西两个。托马斯.曼最终选择于1952年返回瑞士定居。1955年8月 12日，托马斯.曼在苏黎世病逝。
托马斯.曼与长子克劳斯.曼在对待同性恋的问题上有著不同的 看法。克劳斯曼选择公开的同性恋生活方式，并且在作品中再现两次 大战之间德国富于反叛精神的年轻艺术家们的波西米亚式生活。在托 马斯.曼那里，同性恋虽然常与艺术的唯美相关，但它更是一种具有 毁灭性的力量，它破坏社会建构，并最终带来同性恋者个人的死亡。 1949年，克劳斯曼的自杀似乎更是印证了托马斯.曼对同性恋的悲观 态度。由于父子关系早已僵化，或者也是为了不让自己的名誉受到玷 污，托马斯.曼这位可敬的大文豪没有出席他儿子的葬礼，而是仅仅 发了一封吊唁电报。
在德语世界中，托马斯.曼算得上是一位“受过教育的市民”的 典范。他舒适的中上阶层经济地位不仅使他不愁吃穿，还允许他获得 良好的文化教育，使他变得儒雅且有品位。他的作品中反映出的就是 这样一种状况。比如，《布等勃洛克一家》就是以他自己的家族为蓝 本，描绘出一幅中上阶层的风情画。
不过，托马斯.曼一生都在努力与中产阶级社会划清界线。他认 为艺术灵感来源于一个与中产阶级相对立的王国，即一个情爱的、性 欲的，或更具体说，一个同性爱的王国。他的许多重要作品都记录下 为了保持一种平衡而付出的斗争，即那种介于艺术家与日常生活中普 通人之间的平衡。而处于这场斗争核心的往往就是那种男同性爱的欲 望，这种欲望在表达与压抑之间犹豫不定。
在一封写给朋友海尔曼.吉塞林伯爵的信件中（发表时题为《关 于婚姻》，1925），托马斯.曼试图将婚姻与同性爱进行区分，前者 具有创造性和持久性，建立了家庭，并成为国家的基石，而后者虽具 有艺术必要性，但终究是一种毁灭性的力量。关于同性爱，他写道： “除了美和死亡，对它没有别的祝福。”这封信可以看作是作者对自 己同性爱情感的辩护。托马斯.曼是他那一代中坚公民的一分子，是 一个享有盛誉的作家，也是一家之父。他承认，如果细心阅读，读者 可以发现启发他艺术灵感的同性爱欲望，但是同性恋身份，他是坚决 拒绝的，因为这不只是威胁到“社会”，更威胁到他显赫的社会地位。
同性恋破坏社会建制并导致同性恋者个人死亡的主题出现在托马 斯.曼的好几部作品中，其中一些也是他最杰出的作品。
◇ 《魂断威尼斯》
在《魂断威尼斯》（又译作《威尼斯之死》，1912）中，成熟的 名作家古斯塔夫冯阿申巴赫让想象中道德上的疑点服从于防古典艺术 的严格的伦理和美学的要求，他的生活处于理智的严格掌控之中。然 而，在他前往威尼斯度假的过程中，他的理智堡垒受到了猛烈冲击而 最终崩溃。而引发这场冲击的则是一个美丽绝伦的14岁波兰男孩塔齐 奥。塔齐奥也在威尼斯与家人一起度假。阿申巴赫窥视著塔齐奥的一 举一动，男孩那如同古希腊雕塑般美丽的容貌一开始似乎只是印证了 作家关于美的理想。然而，阿申巴赫发现自己越来越难以自拔。原本 保守克制的作家完全迷失于自己对男孩的迷恋之中，他每天坐在海滩 边就是为了看到塔齐奥在那里戏耍，他在城里散步也是为了能碰到塔 齐奥，他甚至涂脂抹粉，穿上色彩鲜艳的衣服，以使自己看上去年轻 一些。阿申巴赫同塔齐奥之间从来没有说过一句话。当阿申巴赫从熟 人那里得知威尼斯开始流行霍乱时，他却选择了留下来，只为了每天 能看到塔齐奥。终于，阿申巴赫也病倒了，直到他临死的那一刻，他 仍然望着他心中的美少年在海滩上玩耍，而塔齐奥也似乎在远处召唤 他“进入那无限浩瀚的富饶前景之中。”
托马斯.曼自己的兴趣和经历无疑是这部中篇小说的灵感之源。 1911年，他在威尼斯度假时被一个14岁波兰男孩所吸引。和阿申巴赫 一样，曼也从未结识那个男孩。
托马斯.曼的日记和信件以及一些散文提供了作家本人受到同性 ──尤其是英俊的年轻同性──吸引的证据。文学史家具有特殊兴趣 的两个关系，一个是曼与保罗.尤伦伯格之间的（大约在1899-1903年 间），另一个是曼与克劳斯.郝赛尔之间的（开始于1927年，郝赛尔 当时16岁，保持了好几年）。曼的同性恋情结曾经一直是许多文学评 论家拒绝承认的事实。而过去几十年间曼日记的出版则使得类似这样 的否认不再可能了。
◇ 《托尼奥.克勒格尔》
在中篇小说《托尼奥.克勒格尔》（1903）中，主人公托尼奥在 孩童时就对他的好朋友汉斯汉森产生了同性爱的情感。托马斯.曼用 这种情感来暗示与普通的中产阶级生活的疏离。同性爱成为一种异见 者和局外人的隐喻。托尼奥渴望融入那些“金发碧眼的、明朗快活的、 值得被爱的普通人们。”但是加入他们就得放弃他作为艺术家的身份。 对于艺术家身份尤为关键的便是深处日常生活存在之外的王国，从那 里进行创造。
◇ 奥古斯特.冯.普拉腾
托马斯.曼在19世纪诗人奥古斯特.冯.普拉腾身上找到了将艺 术与中产阶级生活相分离的先驱。普拉腾的诗歌和日记揭示出他本人 的同性恋趣味，而这又成为一场著名的文学纷争的由来：后来名气远 远超过普拉腾的海因里希.海涅曾用普拉腾的性取向来贬低普拉腾和 他的作品。托马斯.曼在他的散文《论普拉腾》（1926）中试图将诗 人的生活与作品区分开来。曼认为，普拉腾将他的性欲疏导进入了他 的艺术创作。虽然曼承认，普拉腾可能施与一些“微不足道的男孩们” 以感性之爱，但诗人在中产阶级社会中所体验的压抑为他的诗歌创作 提供了必要的灵感。
◇ 《魔山》
在托马斯.曼另一部非常著名的宏篇巨制《魔山》（1922）中， 同性恋题材被融入了一个更大的有关世界观的题材中。在这部被称之 为“教育小说”的著作中，主人公汉斯.卡斯托普去瑞士阿尔卑斯山 区的一所肺病疗养院探访他的表哥。原计划只要几周的探访，没想到 卡斯托普一去就呆了七年。阿尔卑斯山上的时间流动的速度似乎与平 原上的有所不同。而山下的世界里，欧洲文明正在堕入即将成为第一 次世界大战的混乱之中。年轻的工程师汉斯.卡斯托普成了疗养院里 新来的病人，而他身边的几个病友则竞相向这个年轻人灌输各自不同 的世界观和相互对立的哲学信仰。对卡斯托普身心康复起关键作用的 则是者科劳迪娅.舒夏特夫人，她给卡斯托普带来了难以抗 拒的性爱。但在小说末尾，历史以第一次世界大战的形式打断了 卡斯托普没有时间的梦并猛然地把他抛到了佛兰德的战场上，成为战 争的牺牲品。不同于一般的教育小说，小说到这里嘎然而止，似乎没 有得出任何确定性的结论，只有从主人公的最后一句话“爱将在这个 世界性的大中诞生”中，或许能窥探到作者思想中的一斑。
在这部对欧洲战前思想进行反思的作品中，神秘性也是小说的一 个重要元素。比如，舒夏特夫人的长相与卡斯托普的一个中学男同学 普里比斯拉夫.希普出奇地相似。汉斯与普里比斯拉夫是同校但不是 同班同学，普里比斯拉夫还比汉斯长一级。普里比斯拉夫长著中亚人 一样的细长眼睛。然而就是这蒙古人一样的细长眼睛牢牢俘获了汉斯 的心。汉斯每天上学最快活的时刻就是碰见普里比斯拉夫的时刻，如 果哪天，普里比斯拉夫没来，那一天对于汉斯来说都是灰暗的。汉斯 后来鼓足勇气向普里比斯拉夫开口借铅笔，并且还将削下来的铅笔沫 保存了很久。如果按照弗洛伊德的理论进行分析的话，那么这支铅笔 就象征著普里比斯拉夫的。汉斯想要对普里比斯拉夫做出性爱表 达，但是他所能做的也只能是拿走普里比斯拉夫的一个拥有物──铅 笔──来作为对他的象征。多年以后，当舒夏特夫人借给汉斯一支铅 笔时，所有的回忆都涌上汉斯心头，而他的同性恋过去也就此得以解 决。此时，铅笔的象征意味也更加明显了。
有关普斯比斯拉夫的情节在一本厚厚的《魔山》中只不过几页篇 幅，但是他却通过与舒夏特夫人的联系而取得了中心的地位。托马斯 .曼受弗洛伊德的影响很深，他希望与其压抑或消灭同性恋欲望，不 如去转换或集成它。不过不管怎样，在托马斯.曼那里，同性恋都是 一种需要克服的病态。
◇ 《马利奥和魔术师》
在中篇小说《马利奥和魔术师》（1929）中，场景又一次选在文 化气息与陈腐乏味相交错，艺术蜕变为情色的意大利。驼背魔术师齐 卜拉靠表演催眠术为生，他把各式各样的人拉入自己的表演中，泄露 他们内心的隐秘。一次，他诱使年轻迷人的侍者马里奥加入他的舞台， 并称他为甘尼梅德（宙斯身边侍酒的美少年），显然齐卜拉扮演的就 是宙斯。魔术师施展魔法让马里奥在无意识中讲述自己与女友的烦心 事。而魔术师把自己作为一个更善解人意、更值得爱的对象给马里奥 奉上。在魔术师“相信我，爱我”的魔咒下，马里奥吻了他。这是艺 术胜利的一刻──“极其重要的时刻，荒诞古怪而又令人毛骨悚然， 马里奥赐福的一刻”──这也是标志齐卜拉毁灭的一刻，因为他僭越 了曼在《魂断威尼斯》中所描绘出的艺术灵感与公开的同性恋之间的 界线。等待他的只有死亡。果然，清醒后的马里奥因为不堪魔术师的 当众羞辱，立即拔枪杀死了他。
与托马斯.曼的其他小说不同的是，即将于1933年离开德国的曼 在《马里奥和魔术师》中已经开始描绘法西斯主义、同性爱，以及同 性恋恐惧之间的相互联系。
◇ 《浮士德博士》
《浮士德博士》（1947）是一部关于德国向法西斯主义蜕变的寓 言，书中的艺术家也是一个同性恋者。作曲家阿德里安莱弗昆为了延 长自己的艺术生命将灵魂出卖给了魔鬼。莱弗昆与他交际圈中的卢迪 史维特菲格有过一段同性恋关系。在这里又一次，托马斯.曼将同性 恋欲望视作一种与保持社会制度和促进社会进步相对立的元素。
Life
Mann was born Paul Thomas Mann in Lübeck, Germany and was the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant), and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns (a Brazilian with partially German ancestry who emigrated to Germany when seven years old). His mother was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. Mann's father died in 1891, and his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent time at the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich and Technical University of Munich where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. He lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year in Palestrina, Italy, with his novelist elder brother Heinrich. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story, "Little Herr Friedemann" (Der Kleine Herr Friedemann), was published in 1898.
In 1905, he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secular Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children:
Children
Name Birth Death
Erika November 9, 1905 August 27, 1969
Klaus November 18, 1906 May 21, 1949
Angelus Gottfried Thomas "Golo" March 29, 1909 April 7, 1994
Monika June 7, 1910 March 17, 1992
Elisabeth April 24, 1918 February 8, 2002
Michael April 21, 1919 January 1, 1977
The summerhouse of Thomas Mann in Nida (German: Nidden)
In 1929, Mann had a cottage built in the fishing village of Nidden (Nida, Lithuania) on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony, and where he spent the summers of 1930-32 working on Joseph and his Brothers. The cottage now is a cultural center dedicated to him, with a small memorial exhibition. In 1933, after Hitler assumed power, Mann emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, but received Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936. He then emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he taught at Princeton University. In 1942, the Mann family moved to Pacific Palisades, in west Los Angeles California, where they lived until after the end of World War II. On 23 June 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalized as a citizen of the United States. In 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland.
He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, as a statement that German culture extends beyond the new political borders.
In 1955, he died of atherosclerosis in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. Many institutions are named in his honour, most famously the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.
Thomas Mann is buried at Kilchberg, Zurich
Thomas Mann's works were first translated into English by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Her translations have become classics in their own right and have contributed enormously to Mann's popularity in the English-speaking world.
Political views
During World War I Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism and attacked liberalism. Yet in Von Deutscher Republik (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. He also gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, which appeared in Die neue Rundschau in November 1922, in which he developed his eccentric defence of the Republic, based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. Hereafter his political views gradually shifted toward liberal left and democratic principles.
In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason", in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929 (see below). Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. A few months later he moved to California.
However, already in 1933, in a personal letter dated 26 October 1933 but published only recently (in the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dated Oct. 30, 2007), Thomas Mann expressed views on Nazism, which corresponded to the much later novel Doktor Faustus. In the novel, the author refers in several places to the historical debt of the German population, leading to World War II with all its cruelty.
During the war, Mann made a series of anti-Nazi radio-speeches, Deutsche Hörer! ("German listeners!"). They were taped in the USA and then sent to Great Britain, where the BBC transmitted them, hoping to reach German listeners.
"Images of Disorder", by social critic Michael Harrington in his collection The Accidental Century, is an account of Mann's political progression from the right to the left.[citation needed]
Work
"Modern Book Printing" from the Walk of Ideas in Berlin, Germany - built in 2006 to commemorate Johannes Gutenberg's invention, c. 1445, of movable printing type
Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), and his numerous short stories. (Precisely, due to the personal taste of an influential committee member, only Buddenbrooks was explicitly cited.) Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of three generations. The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) follows an engineering student who, planning to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for only three weeks, finds his departure from the sanatorium delayed. During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization. Later, other novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doktor Faustus (1947), the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II; and Confessions of Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, 1954), which was still unfinished at Mann's death.
In Buddenbrooks, at several places he uses the Low German of the northern part of the country.
To his greatest works belongs the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933–42), a richly imagined retelling of the story of Joseph related in chapters 27-50 of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The first volume relates the establishment of the family of Jacob, the father of Joseph. In the second volume the young Joseph, not yet master of considerable gifts, arouses the enmity of his ten older brothers, who then sell him into slavery in Egypt. In the third volume, Joseph becomes the steward of a high court official, Potiphar, but finds himself thrown into prison after rejecting the advances of Potiphar's wife. In the last volume, the mature Joseph rises to become administrator of Egypt's granaries. Famine drives the sons of Jacob to Egypt, where the unrecognized Joseph adroitly orchestrates a scene that discloses his identity, resulting in the brothers' reconciliation and the reunion of the family.
Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy.
A classic about an intellectual succumbing to passion, Death in Venice has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex desire to the common culture. Mann was friends with violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg for whom he had feelings as a young man. Despite certain homosexual overtones in his writing, Mann fell in love with Katia Mann—whom he married—in 1905. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut) and The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte).
Throughout his Dostoyevsky essay he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Frederich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche he says: "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor, Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime." Nietzsche's influence on Mann runs deep in his work, especially in Nietzsche's views on decay and the proposed fundamental connection between sickness and creativity. Mann held that disease is not to be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoyevsky we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased., who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity... in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit."
Balancing his humanism and appreciation of Western culture was his belief in the power of sickness and decay to destroy the ossifying effects of tradition and civilization. Hence the "heightening" of which Mann speaks in his introduction to The Magic Mountain and the opening of new spiritual possibilities that Hans Castorp experiences in the midst of his sickness. In Death in Venice he makes the identification between beauty and the resistance to natural decay, embodied by Aschenbach as the metaphor for the Nazi vision of purity (akin to Nietzsche's version of the ascetic ideal that denies life and its becoming). He also valued the insight of other cultures, notably adapting a traditional Indian fable in The Transposed Heads. His work is the record of a consciousness of a life of manifold possibilities, and of the tensions inherent in the (more or less enduringly fruitful) responses to those possibilities. In his own summation (upon receiving the Nobel Prize), "The value and significance of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously."
Regarded as a whole, Mann's career is a striking example of the "repeated puberty" which Goethe thought characteristic of the genius. In technique as well as in thought, he experienced far more daringly than is generally realized. In Buddenbrooks he wrote one of the last of the great "old-fashioned" novels, a patient, thorough tracing of the fortunes of a family.
—Henry Hatfield in Thomas Mann, 1962.
Cultural references
Martin Mauthner's German Writers in French Exile 1933-1940 (London, 2007) devotes several chapters to Thomas Mann and his family.
Mann's 1896 short story "Disillusionment" is the basis for the Leiber and Stoller song "Is That All There Is?", famously recorded in 1969 by Peggy Lee.
"Magic Mountain" by the band Blonde Redhead, is based on Mann's novel of the same title.
"Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann)" is a painting made by Christiaan Tonnis in 1987. "The Magic Mountain" is a chapter in his 2006 book "Illness as a Symbol" as well.
The 2006 movie "A Good Year" directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe and Albert Finney, features a paperback version of Death in Venice. It is the book the character named Christie Roberts is reading while she visits her deceased father's vineyard.
In the Philip Roth novel The Human Stain, several references are made to Mann's Death in Venice.
A staged musical version of The Transposed Heads, adapted by Julie Taymor and Sidney Goldfarb, with music by Elliot Goldenthal, was produced at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and The Lincoln Center in New York in 1988.
Joseph Heller's 1994 novel, Closing Time, makes several references to Thomas Mann and Death in Venice.
The Andrew Crumey novel Mobius Dick (2004) makes extensive references to Mann, and imagines an alternative universe where an author named Behring has written novels resembling Mann's. These include a version of The Magic Mountain with Erwin Schrodinger in place of Castorp.
Works
* 1896 Disillusionment (Enttäuschung)
* 1897 Little Herr Friedemann ("Der kleine Herr Friedemann"), collection of short stories
* 1897 "The Clown" ("Der Bajazzo"), short story
* 1897 The Dilettante
* 1897 Tobias Mindernickel
* 1897 Little Lizzy
* 1899 The Wardrobe (Der Kleiderschrank)
* 1900 The Road to the Churchyard (Der Weg zum Friedhof)
* 1901 Buddenbrooks (Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie), novel
* 1902 Gladius Dei
* 1902 The Hungry
* 1903 Tristan, novella
* 1903 Tonio Kröger, novella
* 1903 The Child Prodigy ("Das Wunderkind")
* 1904 Fiorenza, play
* 1904 A Gleam
* 1904 At the Prophet's
* 1905 A Weary Hour
* 1905 The Blood of the Walsungs ("Wälsungenblut"), novella
* 1907 Railway Accident
* 1908 Anekdote
* 1909 Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit), novel
* 1911 The Fight between Jappe and the Do Escobar
* 1911 Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull), short story, published in 1922
* 1912 Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig), novella
* 1915 Frederick and the Great Coalition (Friedrich und die große Koalition)
* 1918 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), essay
* 1918 A Man and His Dog (Herr und Hund; Gesang vom Kindchen: Zwei Idyllen), novella
* 1921 The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut), novella
* 1922 The German Republic (Von deutscher Republik)
* 1924 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), novel
* 1925 Disorder and Early Sorrow ("Unordnung und frühes Leid")
* 1929 "Mario and the Magician" (Mario und der Zauberer), novella
* 1930 A Sketch of My Life (Lebensabriß)
* 1933–43 Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder), tetralogy
o 1933 The Tales of Jacob (Die Geschichten Jaakobs)
o 1934 The Young Joseph (Der junge Joseph)
o 1936 Joseph in Egypt (Joseph in Ägypten)
o 1943 Joseph the Provider (Joseph, der Ernährer)
* 1938 This Peace (Dieser Friede)
* 1937 The Problem of Freedom (Das Problem der Freiheit)
* 1938 The Coming Victory of Democracy
* 1939 Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns, novel
* 1940 The Transposed Heads (Die vertauschten Köpfe - Eine indische Legende), novella
* 1943 Listen, Germany! (Deutsche Hörer!)
* 1944 Mose, a commissioned novella (Das Gesetz, Erzählung, Auftragswerk)
* 1947 Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus), novel
* 1947 Essays of Three Decades, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. [1st American ed.], New York, A. A. Knopf, 1947. Reprinted as Vintage book, K55, New York, Vintage Books, 1957.
* 1951 The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte), novel
* 1954 The Black Swan (Die Betrogene: Erzählung)
* 1954 Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil), novel expanding upon the 1911 short story, unfinished