Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice
The great German novelist of bourgeois decline. Buddenbrooks chronicled four generations of a merchant family's dissolution; Death in Venice compressed an entire civilization's crisis into one man's fatal obsession. His later works — The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus — are intellectual novels of extraordinary ambition.
Key works
- Buddenbrooks1901— Family saga as cultural diagnosis
- Death in Venice1912— Beauty, plague, and self-destruction
- The Magic Mountain1924— Europe's pre-war fever dream