German novelist who wrote The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus, and Death in Venice — the greatest German prose novelist of the 20th century — and who engaged with the tension between art and life, decadence and vitality, Nietzsche and music, throughout his work.
Created the most sustained literary engagement with the disease of the German soul — Doctor Faustus traces German culture's self-destruction through the composer Adrian Leverkühn's Faustian bargain — making Mann the artist who most completely understood how German high culture and German barbarism were connected.
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