MANN, THOMAS. (1875-1955). German novelist and essayist; winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for literature whose works include the autobiographical Buddenbrooks, as well as Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. TLS. (“Thomas Mann”). 1p. 4to. Pacific Palisades, October 26, 1949. Written on his personal stationery to Frankfurt politician DR. HELLMUT REINERT (1891-1962). In German with translation.

“Thank you very much for your charming letter, which my wife and I enjoyed very much. It must have given me a certain amusing satisfaction that, after all the clamor that followed my trip to Weimar, the city of Frankfurt itself sent a delegation there celebrating Goethe and apparently did not do so badly. My open letter to the Swedish journalist was not entirely felicitous in every phrase, but it did say some of the right things. Better is a short travel report that I wrote for the New York Sunday Times, in which I also placed special emphasis on my visit to the Eastern Zone (if we can speak of the East in the case of Weimar). This article is now to be ‘syndicated’ by a New York press office in Europe, and so you may get to read it somewhere in some language.

Thank you again for your kind letter and allow me to tell you that both my wife and I took an especial liking to you in Frankfurt and that we both hope to meet you again in our future lives...”

Mann’s Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, was the first of his symbolic, ironic and psychologically insightful novels. His stay, with his wife Katia née Pringsheim (1883-1980), at a Swiss Sanatorium inspired his most famous novel, The Magic Mountain. As early as 1930, Mann had expressed his views on the growing threat of Nazism, and he continued to speak out against Hitler and his atrocities after emigrating from Germany in 1933 and settling in California.

German poet, novelist, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 1832) was the greatest figure in German Romanticism. He considerably influenced Mann’s writings, and during his lifetime he gave numerous lectures about Goethe’s life and art. Mann’s 1940 novella The Beloved Returns explicitly invokes Goethe’s unrequited love affair with Charlotte Buff, the woman who inspired Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Though elected president of the literary section of the Bavarian Academy of Arts in February 1948 and awarded the 1948 Goethe Prize in March, Germany’s most prestigious literary honor, it was not until 1949 that Mann returned to his former homeland, after an absence of more than sixteen years, when he spoke at a celebration in honor of the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth, the subject of our letter, on July 25, 1949. Mann ironically refers to Goethe’s culturally rich city of Weimar and its location under Soviet dominated East Germany.

Reinert participated in Frankfurt’s government beginning in the 1920s and, at the time of our letter, was a city councilor actively engaged in civic matters until his retirement in 1960.

Folded with normal wear and in very good condition. With the program for the Frankfurt Goethe Celebration of Goethe’s 200th birthday, at which Mann gave a talk entitled, “Ansprache in Goethejahr.”