writer
A very special relationship: Thomas Mann and the sea
Volker Weidermann examines Thomas Mann’s relationship to the sea. photo
© Georg Wendt/dpa
From the Baltic Sea beaches to the Pacific coast – Volker Weidermann’s new book tells how the love of the sea influenced Thomas Mann’s life and work.
Thomas Mann loved the sea. This passion runs like a red thread through his biography. “My love of the sea, whose immense simplicity I have always preferred to the demanding variety of the mountains, is as old as my love of sleep,” he once wrote. And at another point: “The sea, its rhythm, its musical transcendence is somehow present everywhere in my books, even when it is not explicitly mentioned, which is often the case.” The idea of gaining new access to Thomas Mann’s life through his relationship with the sea is only natural.
Volker Weidermann, head of the arts section of “Zeit” and author of some very successful books such as “Ostend. 1936, Summer of Friendship”, follows exactly this path in his new work “Mann vom Meer” and thus allows a sensual-emotional approach to Thomas Mann. He takes us to glistening Baltic Sea beaches, where the Mann family spent many relaxing holidays until they emigrated in 1933. We travel with him to the Venice Lido or to the island of Sylt, where the celebrated writer indulged in erotic dreams, and accompany him to the Pacific coast of California, which became a haven for him in old age.
Travemünde as paradise
Again and again, Weidermann builds bridges to the stories and novels of the author. He shows how real experiences and sensory impressions in different phases of life and on different sea shores influenced his fictional work – beginning with “Buddenbrooks”, “Death in Venice” and “Tonio Kröger” to “Confessions of Felix Krull the Conman”. .
However, Weidermann goes beyond Thomas Mann’s biography. Because it shows that the relationship between the Mann family and the sea began much earlier, namely with the mother of the writer Julia da Silva-Bruhns. She grew up on the tropical coast of Brazil and passed on the memories of her sunken youth, of her paradise under the palm trees, to her children.
For Thomas Mann himself, Travemünde became the paradise of his childhood. At the age of seven he saw the sea for the first time at the Bay of Lübeck. From 1882 he spent four weeks of summer vacation here every year as a child and still remembered it as a “celebrated man of the world”: “In this place, in Travemünde, the holiday paradise, where I spent the undoubtedly happiest days of my life, days and weeks whose deep satisfaction and lack of desire could not be surpassed or forgotten by anything later in my life, which I can no longer call poor today.”
New sensual approach
According to Weidermann, Thomas Mann gave the experience of the sea to “his early doom prince” Hanno in the Buddenbrooks. And he lets poor Tony Buddenbrook experience her only love during a “dream stay by the sea” in Travemünde, which will carry her through all future tragedies. Thomas Mann himself spent his life looking for a repeat of his childhood happiness on other beaches, such as the shifting dune of Nidden on the Curonian Spit, where he even bought a house for his family until the National Socialists drove them out of this paradise.
Like the beginning, the end of the book goes beyond Thomas Mann’s biography. Because most recently, the author devotes himself to the favorite daughter of the writer Elisabeth Mann Borgese. Her relationship to the sea, however, was far more prosaic than her father’s, for she was a well-known and respected expert on the law of the sea. That is a whole separate chapter that would have to be told separately.
Weidermann’s almost poetically written book conveys a new sensual approach to Thomas Mann. However, it is hardly suitable as an introductory book, but rather “Thomas Mann for advanced users”.
– Volker Weidermann: Man from the sea. Thomas Mann and the love of his life, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 240 pages, 23.00 euros, ISBN 978-3-462-00231-7.