In around 1890, the teenage Thomas Mann, at the time a student at Lübeck Grammar School, fell in love with his classmate Armin Martens. Yet when Mann handed Martens a poem confessing his love, Martens laughed at him and told him not only that he did not return his affection, but that he considered it wrong and perverse. Thomas Mann would carry that rejection with him his whole life. Time and again, he crafted the hazards of love into literature.

Mann’s first major humiliation proved to be an initiatory experience for the budding writer. He learned the lesson that love must remain secret. Later on, when he fell in love with Williram Timpe, another classmate, he took a different approach. Their contact consisted solely of the polite loan of a pencil for art class – but Mann kept the shavings of the sharpened pencil for a long time as a memento of his love for the other boy. Thus he learnt a second lesson: love is safer from a distance. Years later, Mann would include the story of the pencil and his secret love in his novel The Magic Mountain, in which he attributes it to the main character, Hans Castorp. A pencil also became the central symbolic motif of the novel. A request to borrow a pencil marks the first personal encounter between Castorp and his beloved, the Russian Clawdia Chauchat, who reminds him of his former classmate. This pencil also serves as a hint to the reader that the two will end up in bed together by the end of the night. The quiet episode of the pencil in young Thomas Mann’s life thus became world literature.

Mann did not harbour romantic feelings for Otto Grautoff, his closest friend from his youth. Instead, they were aware of a common sense of difference. Both lacklustre students, they kept to themselves, shared an interest in literature, writing plays, poems and prose essays, and enjoyed discussing them with each other. And they were both homosexual. They had read Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the standard scientific work of the time on sexuality and its ‘pathological forms’, as they were labelled at the time. They also pored over Albert Moll’s Die konträre Sexualempfindung [Contrary sexual feeling], another work on homosexuality. In doing so, they were eagerly searching for answers to the question of what their feelings for people of their own sex could mean. Both books had a profound and lasting impact on the two youths.

They learnt that scientists at the turn of the 19th century believed that male homosexuality was a hereditary degenerative brain disease, promoted by intense early masturbation and preoccupation and excessive contact with men. Moreover, it was thought to be difficult to cure. According to Krafft-Ebing and Moll, homosexuality could be cured in men who still had a ‘residual attraction to women’ by encouraging this attraction and treating them out of their gravitation towards the same sex. This was to be achieved through conversion therapy, involving hypnosis and a strict renunciation of same- ‑sex love, as well as through sexual intercourse with women; regular sexual intercourse was believed to promote the ‘cure’. In numerous case studies, Krafft-‑Ebing and Moll describe the fates of homosexual men who had suffered from their love for men yet overcame it with the help of the aforementioned therapy, and were considered ‘healed’.

Later, having gone their separate ways after school, Mann and Grautoff, both aspiring writers, began to exchange letters. They wrote about their lives, their writing and, albeit cautiously, about their desire for other men and their struggle to overcome it. Mann entreated his friend to always destroy their letters. He himself burned his diaries from these years, along with all literary endeavours that had not been published and all letters from his childhood friend dating from this period. For his part, Grautoff did not follow his friend’s wishes. He censored his letters, cut parts out of some, and threw others away. But many of the letters survived. In them, Mann comments, among other things, on the conversion therapy his friend underwent in Berlin at the practice of Albert Moll, whose book they had read.

"This is precisely where Mann’s literary mastery lies: he shows without confessing; he describes without revealing himself. In Tonio Kröger, Thomas Mann speaks more openly than usual about the origin of his literary drive – a feeling of alienation that is a source of both pain and creativity."

These letters reveal Mann’s tortured attempts to tame his love and desire, and restrain his ‘dogs in the basement’, as he calls his tendencies, with reference to Nietzsche. Unlike his friend, he believed that he could keep his ‘aberration’ in check through literary means. To that end, he embarked on a convoluted process of experiencing and defending his own homosexuality as something special, living through it as a feeling and portraying it in literature, while rejecting all physical sexual acts, his motto being ‘Let us separate the lower abdomen from love.’ This attitude would cast him into crises and conflicts throughout the course of his life, but it also formed the foundation of his literary work. In their lives and loves, the two friends essentially accepted what the medicine of their time prescribed: self-denial, discipline and heterosexual marriage.

Mann’s earliest literary endeavours oscillate between convention and a hesitant attempt to take possession of his own identity. His first printed story, Gefallen (The Fallen, 1894), is about a heterosexual love affair – but the female protagonist remains pale, the plot formulaic. For Mann himself, it was an early test run. He soon realised that all the pats on the back and admiration he had received for his literary maturity as a 19-year-old could not disguise the fact that he had not yet found his literary voice. Little Herr Friedemann, (1897) was different: in this story, Mann found a literary form that allowed him to frame his own otherness. The protagonist, a physically deformed outsider, distances himself from love and thus protects himself from disappointment. When love finally reaches out to him, it leads him into the abyss: to severe humiliation, rejection and suicide. Mann, as he writes, had found the ‘discreet forms and masks’ by which to express himself through literature.

Mann achieved his literary breakthrough in 1901 with Buddenbrooks, a novel based on his own family history. It is an epic account of the decline of a merchant family. One particularly striking character is Hanno Buddenbrook, the last male heir, who is passionate about music, appears weak, refuses to engage with the family’s legacy – and perishes. Hanno is an alter ego who cannot succeed because he rejects social norms. In this character, an aesthetic principle is clearly evident in Mann’s work for the first time: the sensitive, artistically gifted boy who suffers under the conventions of the age.

Around 1900, shortly before the completion of Buddenbrooks, the painter Paul Ehrenberg entered Mann’s life, changing it profoundly. A charismatic artist, Ehrenberg became a figure onto whom Mann could project his repressed feelings. Numerous entries in Mann’s notebooks reveal the extent of his fascination. His love for Ehrenberg plunged him into a crisis: what he had previously perceived as a controllable emotion now threatened to overwhelm him. He also struggled to capture Ehrenberg in his writing. The rough drafts in which his beloved friend provided the model for a character remained fragmentary or were somewhat unconvincing from a literary perspective.

[...]