Death in Venice

Born in 1875, Thomas Mann was a German writer of novels, short stories and essays who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. He began his writing career by contributing short stories to magazines, and he published his first novel Buddenbrooks in 1901. When Hitler came to power, Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland and became a key contributor to the Exilliteratur, which was composed of work written by German authors who fled the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Throughout the Second World War, he was vocal in his opposition to the Nazis, and he was later suspected of being a communist when he lived in the US during the 50s. He eventually returned to Switzerland where he died in 1955.