Reading Thomas Mann Today
After enjoying a strong presence in liberal arts curricula, by the early 1990s Thomas Mann was described as one of the “oldest dead white European males.” In this talk I argue that Mann’s life and work may speak more to pressing contemporary concerns than much of the scholarship might have allowed, particularly to issues of race, enslavement, and migration. Mann’s mother, Julia Mann, née da Silva Bruhns, was raised on a Brazilian plantation, and immigrated to Germany as a child. The Mann family constructed this history differently at different junctures, always reflecting anxieties around race, passing, and what it meant to be German. I show how central this history was for Thomas Mann’s fictions – be it in their perpetuation of the racist tropes of his time, or in their astute and empathetic analysis of marginalization through racism.
Veronika Fuechtner is Chair of Comparative Literature and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth. She also teaches in Jewish Studies, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In addition, she occasionally has held an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the Geisel School of Medicine. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (University of California Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia (with Mary Rhiel, Camden House, 2013) and A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 (with Douglas E. Haynes and Ryan Jones, University of California Press, 2017). She recently completed a monograph on Thomas and Heinrich Mann's Brazilian mother, Julia Mann, and the Mann family construction of race and "Germanness." Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis and sexology, the relationship between science and culture, discourses on race and ethnicity, German-language modernism, contemporary culture, German-language film, and global cultural and scientific histories. She has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council. She currently serves on the advisory board of PMLA and she chairs the conduct and anti-harassment committee of the GSA. She has served on the national steering committee of Women in German, and the 20th and 21st LCC forum executive committee of the MLA. In spring 2020 she was the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and for the academic year 2020/21 she was a fellow at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities. In the fall of 2022 she held a short-term residency at the Cape Modern House Trust. In the fall of 2024 she is a Jonathan Crewe Fellow at Dartmouth's Leslie Center for the Humanities to continue her work as editor of Norton's new critical edition of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain.