Viandante nel Novecento. Thomas Mann e la storia

The book addresses Thomas Mann’s relation with history in its manifold meanings and diverse stratifications. This is explored in both biographical terms, considering Mann’s life in Germany, Europe and America and its symbolic significance, and in terms of historic concepts such as myth, primitivism and nocturnal humanism. What emerges is the figure of Mann as an interpreter of the crisis of the twentieth century, an era split between technical and scientific advances and atavistic political regressions.
Thomas Mann is the great “seeker” of the human in a by-now dehumanised world, the wayfarer forced to travel the harsh and rugged paths of the twentieth-century spiritual landscape.