Mann’s last years

The final decade of Mann’s life was in some ways a vindication and celebration. Mann had been right about Hitler and the National Socialists, unlike so many of his contemporary Germans, and his efforts against the war and on behalf of world peace were now recognized and rewarded. The University of Bonn returned the honorary doctorate that it had revoked in 1936, the city of Lübeck declared him an honorary citizen, and many more awards and honorary degrees from major European and North American universities followed. Mann was received by heads of state, royalty, and the pope; overflow audiences gave him standing ovations when he spoke, and he was often hailed as the greatest living man of letters. Even death was gentle when it came on August 12, 1955: the writer who had specialized in gruesome depictions of death and dying, from the clinical details of Hanno Buddenbrook’s typhoid fever to the excruciating account of Nepomuk Schneidewein’s cerebral meningitis, passed away quietly in his hospital bed from complications of arterial sclerosis.

Although Mann took pride in his accomplishments and basked in the recognition he received, his final years were nevertheless neither easy nor happy. “Very tired, nervous, and suffering,” Mann noted in his diary on August 14, 1949. “My life is truly la vie difficile.” Although Mann recovered from his major lung operation in the spring of 1946, there were signs of aging. He fell and fractured a shoulder leaving a dinner party at the home of Max Horkheimer. His teeth and partial dentures caused discomfort and made it difficult for him to eat; in his final years Mann lived on little more than soup and caviar, noting frequently that he was losing weight. Sleep was impossible without a cocktail of sedatives – and this from a man who had once written an essay about how much he enjoyed his rest (“Süßer Schlaf!” [Sweet Sleep!], 1909). Friends and family members began to die, increasing Mann’s sense of isolation; within less than a year he lost his younger brother, Viktor, his older brother, Heinrich, and his son, Klaus, who committed suicide in May 1949. Even writing became difficult. Mann looked back with a sigh at the time when he was able to complete one major project after the next. Now, after having completed his magnum opus in Doctor Faustus, he felt that his life’s work was done, and yet, life without work was inconceivable. So Mann wrote on, but he wrote unhappily, worrying that his work had become dull or frivolous or simply pointless.