Childhood and early influences

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck on the morning of June 6, 1875. At that time Lübeck was a moderately sized city of approximately 35,000 inhabitants, but it had known greater days in the past. During the late Middle Ages, Lübeck had been the capital of the Hanseatic League, a far-flung trade network extending across northern Europe from St. Petersburg to the Netherlands. Wealth from the trade in grain, furs, timber, amber, and wool flowed into the coffers of the Lübeck merchants and financed the construction of the imposing city gates, the striking town hall, and the great brick Gothic cathedral of St. Mary, where Thomas Mann was baptized. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, the Hanseatic League began to unravel; the subsequent depredations of the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic occupation accelerated the decline of what had once been one of Germany’s wealthiest cities. Modest growth resumed in the course of the nineteenth century, but industrialization and the expansion of transatlantic trade directed shipping away from Lübeck and toward the booming harbor of Hamburg. Perhaps because of its relative insignificance, Lübeck was spared total devastation in the Allied bombing campaigns of the Second World War, and by the time of Mann’s death in 1955, it had completed its transformation from the “Queen of the Hansa” to the picturesque town that continues to attract tourists today.

Mann’s early horizons were both narrow and broad. As an adult, Mann went on extensive lecture tours in Europe and North America, sailed back and forth across the Atlantic long before flights made international travel routine, and spent more than thirty years in exile. By the time of his eighteenth birthday, in contrast, Mann had seen little more than his hometown. To be from Lübeck meant to be surrounded by the local dialect of Low German (Plattdeutsch), which Mann could understand and imitate in his works, even if he spoke standard German (Hochdeutsch) at home and in school. Being from Lübeck also meant living in the crowded streets of a harbor town, breathing the cool, damp air of northern Europe with endless summer days and correspondingly long winter nights, and taking the occasional family vacation to nearby Travemünde, a resort on the shore of the Baltic Sea. Yet because of its commercial ties to Russia, Scandinavia, and Great Britain, Lübeck had a cosmopolitan openness that belied its provinciality.