🕰 In a time of extremes, the German writer Thomas Mann was a voice of reason. He was one of the towering figures of 20th-century literature. His works wrestled with illness, art, politics, and what it means to be civilized in the face of collapse. 📍 Born into a patrician merchant family in Lübeck in 1875, Mann saw the world change after his father’s death and the family business collapsed. He channelled this early loss into a literary mission: to dissect the soul of the bourgeoisie with irony