The sealed diaries
Thomas Mann locked his diaries away for 20 years. They tell of his love for men.
On 12 August 1955, Thomas Mann died shortly after 8 p.m. in Zurich Cantonal Hospital, aged 80. He had still asked for his glasses: to see, to observe, to read. Besides his work, he left behind a secret, locked away by his will for twenty years.
His diaries only began to be published in 1975. What they contained changed the image of the Nobel laureate. Katia's husband, father of six children, representative of the German bourgeoisie, had desired men all his life and had written it down.
It is clearest in the summer of 1950. At the Grand Hotel Dolder in Zurich, the 75-year-old notices a young waiter, Franz Westermeier. Mann writes to him, offers a letter of recommendation, waits. No reply comes. From St. Moritz he notes how impatiently he is hoping for a few lines; months later he admits that he still searches every delivery of post for them, and calls it nonsensical himself. Katia and Erika were in the know and advised him on whether a letter to a hotel employee was proper. At the same time he read Michelangelo's poems to Tommaso Cavalieri and turned them into an essay. His own longing became literature, as it had in "Tonio Kröger" and "Death in Venice".
The literary historian Tilmann Lahme goes further in his 2025 biography: Mann did not marry Katia Pringsheim in 1905 because he was in love, but in the hope of getting away from his homosexuality. A life as an openly gay man was never an option for the moral authority that was Thomas Mann. The bourgeois family image was also a façade.
He himself allowed a look behind this façade, only with a delay. A few years before his death he wrote in his diary that the world should know him not only through his literature but also "in my suffering and in my struggle".