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iewed on a map, old Lübeck, which some have called "the Venice of the North," is eye-shaped, or buttonhole-shaped, oval. Thomas Mann, the great writer, was born in this city in northern Germany. Today declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a city that, since the Middle Ages, excelled in maritime trade between the ports of the Baltic and North Seas and the neighboring Scandinavian lands.
"I am a citizen, a bourgeois, a son and descendant of German bourgeois culture" -Thomas Mann wrote, with a pride that today would even seem politically incorrect, in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Entrelíneas), his great profession of faith, published precisely the year the First World War ended.
"Were my ancestors not Nuremberg artisans, of the temper of those whom Germany sent all over the world, and even to the Far East, to show that it was the country of cities? They were attached to the burgomaster of Mecklenburg, came to settle in Lübeck, were merchants of the Holy Roman Empire."
The history of the Mann family in Lübeck dates back to the 16th century. In 1790, the writer's great-grandfather founded the firm Johann Siegmund Mann, commissions and transports. When he was two years old, in 1877, his father was elected senator, that is, deputy to the burgomaster, of Lübeck (which retained its status as a free city-state until 1937).
The family home, the grandmother's house, at Mengstrasse number 4, opposite the church, was destroyed during the Second World War and recovered a few years ago as the Buddenbrook House, where today you can visit a Heinrich and Thomas Mann Center with an archive and a permanent exhibition of panels and screens on the life and work of the two writer brothers.
Thomas Mann believed that nothing characterizes our way of life better than our relationship with nature, and specifically with extra-human nature. His childhood and youth were spent in Lübeck, in a landscape marked by houses with steeply pitched roofs and the greenish spires of its large churches. And eight kilometers from the city, at the mouth of the Trave River, in Travemünde, right on the coast where the large commercial port is today, he discovered, as a child, associated with summer games, the mystery of the sea: "It is the sea, the Baltic Sea, which as a very young child I saw for the first time in Travemünde (...) with its old Louis-Philippe style bathhouse, the Swiss chalets and the music pavilion where Hess, the little conductor with long gypsy hair, gave concerts with his orchestra (...) in this place, in Travemünde, the holiday paradise, I spent the happiest days of my life - he declared forty years later. Days and weeks whose profound stillness, whose absence of all desire, have never been surpassed in the course of an existence that I cannot call helpless either; and nothing could make me forget them."
Thomas Mann, who only lived in Lübeck until he was nineteen, recalled much later (in 1926, when he was invited to give a lecture on the occasion of the 7th centenary of Lübeck's elevation to a free city) that what distinguished the people of Lübeck was the "civic-patrician" element, as he called it. That is: the entrepreneurial spirit of the old bourgeois patriciate, perhaps the most specifically Hanseatic element of the people of Lübeck, always so committed to the continuity of their success story.