[2] Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933,[clarification needed] with the exception of a year spent in Palestrina, Italy, with his elder brother, the novelist Heinrich.

[3] Due to the Pringsheim family's high financial circumstances, Katia Mann was able to purchase a summer property in Bad Tölz in 1908, on which they built a country house the following year, which they kept until 1917.

In 1912, Katia was treated for tuberculosis for a few months in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where Thomas Mann visited her for a few weeks, which inspired him to write his novel The Magic Mountain, published in 1924.

He used the prize money to build a cottage in the fishing village of Nida, Lithuania on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony and where he spent the summers of 1930–1932 working on Joseph and His Brothers.

He was doubtful at first, because, with a certain naïveté, he could not imagine the violence of the overthrow and the persecution of opponents of the regime, but the children insisted, and their advice later turned out to be accurate when it emerged that even their driver-caretaker had become an informant and that Mann's immediate arrest would have been very likely.

[7] In 1939, following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Mann emigrated to the United States, while his in-laws only managed thanks to high-ranking connections to leave Germany for Zurich in October 1939.

As a "suspected communist", he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company".

Being in his own words a non-communist, rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: "As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends.

[19] Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress,[20] and in 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland.

[27] Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, after he had been nominated by Anders Österling, member of the Swedish Academy, principally in recognition of his popular achievements with Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), and his numerous short stories.

During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters, who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization.

Later novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doctor Faustus (1947), the story of the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II; and Confessions of Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, 1954), which was unfinished at Mann's death.

Speaking of Nietzsche, he says, "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal ... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same.

In his essay on Dostoevsky, we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky.

In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conducive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity.... [I]n other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit.

In his 600-page-long work Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), Mann presented his conservative, anti-modernist philosophy: spiritual tradition over material progress, German patriotism over egalitarian internationalism, and rooted culture over rootless civilisation.

Also in 1921, he wrote an essay Mind and Money in which he made a very open assessment of his family background: "In any case, I am personally indebted to the capitalist world order from the past, which is why it will never be appropriate for me to spit on it as it is à la mode these days."

In contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, Mann's books were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929.

[44][45] Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his homosexuality, which found frequent reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).

In 1902, George had met the fourteen-year-old boy Maximilian Kronberger; He made an idol of him and after his early death in 1904 transfigured him into a kind of Antinous-style "god".

[47] A similar "decomposing skepticism" had already estranged the barely concealed gay novel characters Tonio Kröger and Hanno Buddenbrook (1901) from their traditional upper class family environments and hometown (which in both cases is Lübeck).

The Confessions of Felix Krull, written from 1910 onwards, describes a self-absorbed young dandyish imposter who, if not explicitly, fits into the gay typology.

In The Magic Mountain, the enamored Hans Castorp, with his heart pounding, asks Pribislav Hippe if he could lend him his pencil, of which he keeps a few scraps like a relic.

In the background conversations about man-to-man eroticism take place; a long letter is written to Carl Maria Weber on this topic, while the diary reveals: "In love with Klaus during these days" (5 June).

The attraction that he felt for Ehrenberg, which is corroborated by notebook entries, caused Mann difficulty and discomfort and may have been an obstacle to his marrying an English woman, Mary Smith, whom he met in 1901.

Mann understands Jupiter as the "lonely artistic spirit" who courts life, is rejected and, "a triumphant renouncer", learns to be content with his divinity.

"[57] Although Mann had always denied his novels had autobiographical components, the unsealing of his diaries revealing how consumed his life had been with unrequited and sublimated passion resulted in a reappraisal of his work.

Thomas Mann reacted cautiously to Klaus's first novel The Pious Dance, Adventure Book of a Youth (1926), which is openly set in Berlin's homosexual milieu.

"[60] When the physician and pioneer of gay liberation Magnus Hirschfeld sent another petition to the Reichstag in 1922 to abolish Section 175 of the German Criminal Code, under which many homosexuals were imprisoned simply because of their inclinations, Thomas Mann also signed.

[61] However, criminal liability among adults was only abolished through a change in the law on June 25, 1969 − fourteen years after Mann's death and just three days before the Stonewall riots.