The sea is the silent hero of all his books
She knew how much he loved the sea. How often he told her about the sea, about its boundless blue, sea spaces, about vacations in Travemünde, how small and happy he was then. And now the moment has finally come when he can show it to her. Show the sea. Its own Baltic Sea.
For Thomas Mann throughout his life, the sea was a source of longing and immersion in the depths. The German romantic considered it a place of liberation from the political, literary and erotic restrictions of bourgeois life — the sea was his place of freedom and true self.
It all began where Julia, the mother of Thomas Mann, knew the happiness of her childhood - in a large, brightly lit house on the seashore in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. At the age of seven, she lost her mother and ended up in the gloomy and cold German Lübeck, where she was left to fend for herself by her own father and where, years later, her son Thomas was born. But the longing for the warm and sunny shore of her childhood did not leave her until the end.
Throughout his life, the sea was a balm for the wounded soul of the writer, which he inherited from his mother, and gave him freedom. The boy traveled to the south, Italy and the Mediterranean and fell in love with young men, but, following the conventions of the time, he married Katya. But years later, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in California, Mann again has to release his deep and longing inner life, turning it into prose that will become a weapon against Hitler, for democracy, for freedom.
Thomas passed on his love for the sea to his daughter, who became an oceanographer and continued the fame of the melancholic man of the sea — a tireless explorer of the ocean of the human soul.
