Looking back ... today, at a span of one hundred and fifty years. It is almost impossible for us to truly grasp what Thomas Mann’s era means for him and what historical changes he experienced over the course of his long life. In 1950, exactly halfway between his birth and now, recalling the memories of his early years, he is himself astonished that he saw Kaiser Wilhelm I with his own eyes, that he witnessed the first telephones arrive in merchants’ offices, the first electric light, the bicycle and even the crease in men’s trousers, something novel and unheard-of at the time.

A long-gone era – and a form of artistic existence that is now very difficult to imagine. Thomas Mann was every inch the artist, the writer, dedicated to his work like almost no other. Virtually day in, day out, he wrote, studied sources, lexicons, conversed with experts in a vast range of fields to gain background knowledge for his books. His daily creative efforts, his almost incessant output, astonished even his contemporaries, beginning with his family, who called him "the Magician" partly for this reason.

But he was not practising magic. Writing and artistic output were, even for him, a practical craft and an internal battle – waiting to be kissed by the muse was not his style. He always knew what foundations were needed for his work. His own life and experiences were crucial in this respect – as well as his origins, here in the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, and the surrounding countryside. On the one hand, he says: "I am a burgher, a citizen, a child and great-grandchild of German bourgeois culture," and yet he also speaks in the same reminiscences of his gratitude "to the sea of my childhood, the Bay of Lübeck". He continues: "And if some found my colours to be dull [...] it may well be the fault of certain glimpses, caught between silvered beech trunks, of a pastel pallor of sea and sky upon which my eye rested when I was a child and happy."

Sea and sky, the northern light, the broad horizon – Thomas Mann found all of this in the dunes of the Curonian Spit as well. I am already looking forward to revisiting Mann’s summer house in Nida with the Lithuanian President, who hails from the area, in a few weeks’ time. Mann enjoyed no more than three summers there before he felt forced to flee Germany.

There, too, he wrote.

Mann’s daily work would have been inconceivable without his innermost circle, his family. Firstly, his wife Katia, who stood by him, selfless and irreplaceable, in the face of his often difficult manner, his artistic challenges, his political activities. In the upper-middle-class home of their early years together as in their various places of exile.

Marking her seventieth birthday, Thomas Mann declares quite publicly: "As long as people remember me, she will be remembered [...] for her vitality, her active loyalty, unceasing patience and courage." How thoroughly independent and admirable a character she was, and yet how impossible his work would have been without her, is portrayed in the bestselling German-language biography by Inge and Walter Jens: Frau Thomas Mann. Das Leben der Katharina Pringsheim.

Complicated characters, all of them, in the Mann family – a multigenerational German saga that has taken more varied shape in books and films than that of any other family from the last century. And if we today believe that the father, the Magician, was the most complicated of all, then only because he left to us those of his extensive diaries that were not destroyed. A saga of its very own, perhaps the most astonishing and touching of his works.

Here we find someone for whom even the most trivial everyday occurrences – and above all the most trivial everyday inconveniences! – took on seemingly disproportional significance. Nothing is too unimportant, certainly, to be faithfully recorded. A literally boundless attention to himself. Even events of historical import are accompanied on the same day by comments on, for example, digestive issues, cold weather preventing a walk outdoors, or his freshly bathed poodle.

But, strangely, these diaries, of all things, have found so many readers, almost a congregation, as the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki once wrote, that they have even been published as paperbacks.

Their appeal is likely not in the descriptions of his physical ailments, so easily parodied and so quick to induce mockery of his excessively hypochondriac nature. It is instead likely this vast richness of daily readings, encounters, observations, correspondence, thoughts, images, magazines, cinema releases, theatre visits, of radio features and records listened to, of political news and aesthetic ponderings, and indeed of the subtlest sensations and sentiments, including, as nobody any longer conceals, his homosexual tendencies. It is this whole daily kaleidoscope that astonishes us readers and leaves us in constant curiosity about the following day. How much of life did this man let in, did he take in, in all of its great richness and indeed in all of its banal richness?

Perhaps it is here, in this excessive sensitivity, that we find a key – a key, not the key! – to understanding the incomparable richness of his actual literary work. And perhaps also of his active political engagement, especially from the early days of his exile in America.

Human life in all its richness – tried out, experienced, suffered by him and within him, in the depths and superficialities of his own life.

And human life in all its richness – portrayed, made plausible to an astonished public, in a body of work that is peerless in its wealth of themes, in the styles it deploys and the way it plays with language; and that ultimately also reveals a political commitment, a commitment to humanity and individuality, particularly in times of inhumanity and fascism, as the almost self-evident other side of his work. Is it this that explains Thomas Mann’s enduring significance?

Experts have presented interpretations and analyses of his work – not least in the major annotated Frankfurt edition, a masterful example of how publishers can approach the great author’s legacy. Much would remain out of our reach today without the extensive explanations designed specially for us modern readers.

To complete my train of thought, I would like to briefly recall the wealth of characters in his work. First, there are the Buddenbrooks. Never again does Thomas Mann’s literature touch so closely on his own origins, his family, his father’s city – and yet, all authenticity aside, everything here is art, including every one of his characters. This art makes the novel, to this day, likely his most-read.

Then we have The Magic Mountain, a farewell to the old Europe, its characters gathered symbolically in a sanatorium. It is a novel of debate and of intellectual confusion and exploration. Thomas Mann begins this roman à clef of what became a major self-revision even before 1914. His speeches and writings on war, his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, are here subjected to profound examination in the arguments, indeed also in the emotionally torn characters themselves. As readers, we become witnesses to a passionate debate: enlightenment and humanism versus totalitarian temptations and even theocracy – everything is probed. In the end, this long consideration leads the author, Thomas Mann, to the conclusion that a prosperous, a free coexistence of diverse individuals can succeed only in a republic, a democracy; only then can the general irritation ever-present in The Magic Mountain as a foreshadowing of a major war be resolved politically and socially. In his 1922 speech On German Republic, in which Mann resolutely defends the Weimar democracy and presents it as being in the hands of each and every one of us, he voices this political conclusion in public.

Let’s return to the novel. The main character in The Magic Mountain is Hans Castorp, a "problem child of life" – like all of us who have to find our way in this turbulent world. He – and we – meet a gallery of individuals. As much as they may have been inspired by real people, they are all creations of the author’s mind, from their distinguishing features to their idiosyncrasies of speech to the very smallest of tics; thoroughly invented and yet thoroughly alive, immediately and eternally visible in the imagination of every reader.

Thomas Mann’s greatest novel, Joseph and His Brothers, is set in Biblical times. Mann expands the short Old Testament story of Joseph into an entire narrative universe. It is certainly a fine art to bring to life believable characters from this ancient world, and a fine art to do so in a style and language all of one’s own. Above all, however, it is a very fine art to write a novel about religion and at the same time one of the cleverest books about the condition humaine, the nature of human existence in all its many facets.

Thomas Mann’s emphatic humanity, so present in the writing in Joseph and His Brothers, does not preclude betrayal, treachery, crime, indeed every kind of sin. But what prevails here is a gaze of deep understanding, a gaze of gracious forgiveness, a hint of almost divine mercy. And the style, amid its Biblical resonance, is replete with a pained and knowing yet sometimes also casual and friendly irony. Sentence after sentence reveals his knowledge of every conceivable human virtue, as well as of all conceivable human flaws. It is this above all that determines the humanity of this great work.

This view is rooted in the central theme of the tetralogy: humanising religion. How Abraham Discovered God, runs the title of a chapter in Part Two – and one might also say, How Abraham Invented God. How ancient tribal traditions, mixed with traditions from Egypt, gave rise to a religion that allows the Eternal One to communicate with mere mortals – misunderstandings and conflicts included. Portraying a humanisation of religion. That is Thomas Mann’s audacious undertaking. And it does not just unite religion and humanity. Ultimately it is also – very briefly put – an attempt to portray good, humane politics, and a demand for such politics.

For in Egypt, a tremendous act of mercy allows Joseph to go from an outcast, rejected by his brothers, to the Pharaoh’s vizier. His actions reflect the realisation of a socially just, humane form of politics, such as Thomas Mann had personally seen and admired in Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal in America during those years.

When Thomas Mann began writing Joseph and His Brothers with its Biblical and Jewish themes in 1926, it was, one might say, as an antifascist novelistic undertaking, indeed as a conscious testament to the ties between German and Jewish culture. His friend Ida Herz writes to him in December 1933: "What [...] so especially moves us German Jews in your work: it is for us the incarnation of the loving fusion of the German spirit with the Jewish." At the same time, Mann also understood his work as a testament to the deep intertwining of Christianity with its inalienable Jewish origins. And then, 17 years after the beginning of Part One, the final volume appears in 1943 quite symbolically with words of praise for humane, socially just politics that value the individual.

Thomas Mann is by this time politically active like never before. As literature professor Kai Sina recently put it, he has become a political activist.

Although in 1926, just as he was beginning to write Joseph and His Brothers, he dedicated an emphatic message of greeting to the newly resuscitated Komitee Pro Palästina, although he made his declaration of support for the Republic in 1922 and finally broke with the Germany of racist fanaticism and violence in an open letter to the University of Bonn in early 1937 – it is only now that he becomes what can, as said, rightly be called an activist.

At almost seventy years old, he travels tirelessly across the United States on arduous speaking tours that take in large and small towns, promoting the fight against fascism, promoting democracy. Borne by the conviction that it is only in democracy that the individuality of each and every human being, their dignity and the flourishing of true humanity, as reflected in his own literature, can be guaranteed.

Practical Christianity plays an ever-greater role for Thomas Mann in this context. This is partially due to President Roosevelt, who, as Mann says, understood "religion as societal progress characterised by piety", as "respect for the individual and what is here called ‘mercy’". Mann’s work for the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, where he has his grandchildren baptised and occasionally gives sermons, is also a factor. Christianity, he writes in 1949, is "democracy as religion – just as one can say that democracy is the political expression of Christianity". Perhaps also – as an aside – in opposition to all those, at all times and in all places, who exploit religion for authoritarian ends.

Thomas Mann’s most significant efforts against the National Socialist tyranny are the radio addresses that he records for the BBC’s German-language service under the title Listen, Germany! during the war. With every device of powerful rhetoric, without flourishes, quite unlike his usual manner, without fear of provocative turns of phrase, but rather sarcastically, polemically, with undisguised contempt for dictatorship and its willing executors. With, time and again, grim predictions of the just fate that awaits the German perpetrators and all those who willingly follow them.

And he sheds light on what many do not want to know – and, later, claim not to have known. He talks about the concentration camps, the fate of the Jews. He tells of how the Scholl siblings resisted and were sentenced to death. Of the incessant propaganda lies. Above all, he refuses to allow those culpable for unceasing crimes against humanity, of all people, to lay claim to German culture and its defence for themselves. And although it must have cost him a great deal of internal struggle, he who understands and loves Germany and the great flowerings of its culture like almost no other, he justifies the Allied bombing campaign.

All of these polemics, as well as the countless lectures, essays and letters with which Thomas Mann sought to exert political influence, were written in the writing-room in his house in Pacific Palisades. Just a few years ago, we were able to save this house, the "White House of exile", from demolition. For many years, it was not only Thomas Mann’s family home and workplace, but also a meeting place for artists, authors and intellectuals driven out of Nazi Germany, including Bruno Walter, Bruno Frank, Lion Feuchtwanger and, of course, Mann’s brother Heinrich. Today, it is a forum for exchange in what has become a difficult transatlantic dialogue.

And it is here that, even alongside these wearying efforts, the Magician continues writing new works. Two particularly notable publications appear shortly after the war: Doctor Faustus and The Chosen One. Many of the reactions in the German press are shattering. Reading criticism from the time in annotated editions is still a jarring experience today. Some who had until so recently been members of the Nazi party or SS, or loyal accomplices, tried their utmost in the guise of literary criticism to accuse exiles and emigrants like Thomas Mann of disloyalty and treachery. In the first years after the war, self-criticism was not widespread, far less remorse. The cultural climate reflected here was often far removed from democratic, humanitarian convictions. I will spare us names and quotations – in the interest of justice, the information is freely available in the public sphere.

It is more important to note this: Thomas Mann himself continues to write. And the longer he does, the more important humour becomes for him. Looking back on his Joseph novel in 1945, he writes that he had believed and hoped that he had brought "some sublime touch of lightness [...] to a darkened world". And in 1947 he declares: "Comedy, laughter, humour increasingly appear to me as balm for the soul [...] Someone who wrote ‘Joseph’ at the time of Hitler’s victories will certainly not be defeated by what is to come."

Thomas Mann only ever returned to Germany for visits, never to stay. Nor did he settle again in America, which had transformed, where he was deeply disillusioned by the growing intolerance and even had to fear persecution. But would he have been able to conceive of today’s America, where art and science, where universities, which were the pride of that free country which granted him refuge, are fundamentally endangered as never before? Certainly he knew, and said in a clear-sighted speech in 1938, that "democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem". His message is that democracy, once attained, will endure only if the people engage in it and for it and defend it.

Thomas Mann died and was buried in his final exile in Switzerland – an outsider to the end, with his deliberately bourgeois deportment as a form of lifelong protection.

He has since become what he likely dreamed of: a part of the German canon. Thanks to the major editions, thanks to commemorative events and anniversaries such as this one, and not least thanks to each and every reading.

Anyone who falls for Thomas Mann’s charm today will find themselves on a journey full of surprises – for three weeks or for seven years; discovering great human experiences, that "sublime touch of lightness", as well as humanity and freedom, whose foundations are democracy and the committed effort to uphold it.

One closing remark. In his final speech, when he was awarded the Freedom of the City here in Lübeck in May 1955, three months before his death, Thomas Mann recalled his secondary-school German teacher – or ordinarius, the term used back then. This teacher once told the class, while they were reading Schiller: "This is not the first best thing you are reading, it is the best thing you can read!"

On this 150th anniversary, I believe we may be so bold as to say the same of him himself, the schoolboy from Lübeck who became one of the German greats, Thomas Mann: "This is the best thing you can read."

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