Born June 6: Thomas Mann

In 1975, twenty years after his death, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s newly unsealed diaries showed the full extent of his homosexual desires. Although he married when he was thirty and fathered six children, Mann considered his love for Paul Ehrenberg, a painter and violinist twenty-one years his junior, to be the “central experience of my heart.” Similarly, a real-life infatuation with a Polish boy inspired him to write the classic novel of gay yearning, Death in Venice. To varying degrees gay themes are also evident in The Magic Mountain, Tonio Kroger, Mario and the Magician, Doctor Faustus, The Deceived, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. In nearly all cases, the gay character dies, because Mann believed open homosexuality would kill society and destroy the individual, even though he felt homoeroticism was artistically necessary and inspired much of his own work. For the full convoluted rationale, see his 1925 essay “About Marriage.” No surprise, then, that Mann's relationship with his three queer children,  Klaus, Golo, and Erika, was complicated. Colm Toibin writes about it in an LRB essay called I Could Sleep with All of Them reviewing Andrea Weiss's enthralling bio, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story. Among my all-time top ten favorite books of any kind is his novel Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family [and Kindle].