Author Thomas Mann has long been celebrated as the quintessential German modernist. But what if his story has been incomplete all along?
As scholars around the world mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth, Dartmouth’s Veronika Fuechtner has emerged as a leading voice in reinterpreting the literary icon’s legacy.
The chair of the Comparative Literature Program and associate professor of German studies has been in demand at major commemorative events all year—from the International Thomas Mann Conference in Lübeck, Germany, where the German president spoke, to the Thomas Mann Festival in Lithuania, and a recent panel at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. Across these gatherings, Fuechtner has been recognized for her groundbreaking research on Mann’s Brazilian heritage and its power to reframe one of modern literature’s most influential voices.
Her argument is as bold as it is transformative: Mann was not only a German icon but also a writer with a migration background. His mother, Júlia da Silva Bruhns, was born in Brazil and immigrated to Germany as a child—a story that, as Fuechtner puts it, “changes everything about how we read him.”
“Thomas Mann shaped 20th-century ideas of Germanness,” Fuechtner says, “yet his mother’s life was one of migration, trauma, and cultural crossing. Once you really reckon with that history, the idea of a homogeneous German literature begins to unravel.”
Mann’s Brazilian heritage was not widely known even in German scholarship until recently. “Often it doesn’t appear at all, even in biographies of Thomas Mann,” Fuechtner says. “They might say his grandfather had immigrated to Brazil, but the mother mostly grew up in Germany. So it’s kind of a footnote.”
Fuechtner brings unique qualifications to illuminating Mann’s Brazilian and German heritage. Born in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother and a German father, she grew up between two languages and cultures. “I always knew about Mann’s Brazilian mother—it’s common knowledge in Brazil, but not in Germany,“ she says. “Seeing that gap made me want to explore it.”
Reframing a literary giant
Fuechtner’s research on Mann will be expanded in her forthcoming book, The Magician’s Mother: A Story of Coffee, Race, and German Culture. The book examines how Júlia Mann’s transnational background—including her family’s involvement in the coffee trade—had a profound and often overlooked influence on Thomas Mann’s writing and his place in the German literary canon.
Fuechtner describes how the author’s relationship to this heritage evolved throughout his career. In his early fiction, for example, the split between north and south often appears as “something tragic, a tragic rift, something that’s not reconcilable.” Some early works feature racist figures and link “southernness“ to degeneracy, Fuechtner says. But in his later writing and personal reflections, this duality “also creates the conditions for being an artist, and for having a sense of empathy and artistic understanding.”
Mann himself was attacked on racial grounds by the Nazis, who “zeroed in on his Brazilian origin and the idea of racial mixture,” Fuechtner says.
In exile from fascism in the United States, Mann came to embrace his Brazilian heritage as essential to his work. He wrote that it made him “not just a German, but a European author,” connecting it to “a certain sense of worldliness, cosmopolitanism,” Fuechtner says. He even likened his mixed background to “a kind of Jewishness in him,” understanding it as something that deepened his artistic sensibility and aligned him with others forced into exile.
Fuechtner’s work has gained wide attention in Germany, including a feature in the popular Berlin newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and an essay in a special issue of ZEIT Geschichte commemorating the author’s 150th birthday.
When Fuechtner describes Mann as “a German author with a migration background”—a term typically applied to contemporary writers—she has found that German audiences occasionally laugh. The response exposes lingering assumptions about who truly counts as German.
“The idea, even though it’s not spoken, is connected to race and to a certain image that people have of a non-white person,” Fuechtner explains. “They see this author who’s so über-German, and to them, it just doesn’t fit.”
Bringing Mann to a new generation
At Dartmouth, Fuechtner has made Mann’s legacy come alive for students as well. Last winter, she organized a translation workshop on The Magic Mountain, bringing together a dozen scholars from around the world for two days of close reading with acclaimed translator Susan Bernofsky. Undergraduate students joined the discussions, and filmmaker Shakeb Arsalan ’26 produced a short documentary film about the event.
Arsalan first connected with Fuechtner when he traveled to Berlin on a Dickey Center grant during his freshman summer. Their collaboration deepened when he participated in Fuechtner’s FSP Plus program, a fall immersion in Berlin run jointly by the Department of German Studies and the Jewish Studies Program.
For the documentary, Arsalan captured 14 hours of footage over the two-day conference, which he edited down to a 35-40 minute film. “I was trying to poke into people’s own lives and marry their lives and their context with what they’re talking about academically,” he explains. The film explores how the book’s themes resonate with contemporary challenges.
“Throughout the book we are looking for this answer: What will save us if we are in this situation of polarization, economic inequality, and suffering in the world?” Arsalan reflects. “The answer we ultimately end up getting is that we need a more pragmatic approach. We might also need love, but we also need something more pragmatic.”
The film is intended for multiple audiences—from museum spaces like the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles to pedagogical settings. Fuechtner has already used clips at conferences to illustrate her work on translation and Mann’s legacy.
Fuechtner serves as editor of a forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of The Magic Mountain, featuring Bernofsky’s new translation. “It’s a century-old novel, but we’re thinking about how it can speak to readers now—about illness, isolation, and the search for meaning,” Fuechtner says. “This new edition will make it accessible to a new generation of students and readers.”
Fuechtner’s work on Mann has been supported by prestigious fellowships, including her time as the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2020 and, most recently, as a Jonathan Crewe Fellow at Dartmouth’s Leslie Center for the Humanities in 2024, where she focused her work on the Norton edition.
Fuechtner also helped bring Mann’s grandson, writer and psychologist Frido Mann, to campus as a Montgomery Fellow in 2018. “Frido remembers walking with his grandfather in California, hearing stories about Brazil,“ she says. “Connecting those family histories with literary and political history has been deeply meaningful.”
A champion for democracy
In November, Fuechtner joined a panel on “Why Read Thomas Mann in the 21st Century?” at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles as a featured speaker in a discussion of how Mann’s literature and political activism continue to resonate in an era of democratic crisis.
Asked which text she would recommend as an introduction to Mann, Fuechtner doesn’t hesitate: Mario and the Magician, his 1930 novella about the seductions of fascism. “It’s short, gripping, and unsettling,” she says. “It captures the allure of authoritarianism—ideas that remain all too familiar.”
“While we are not in the same political moment as Mann was when he wrote this… we are in a moment where the figures of charlatans, of manipulators, of people that play with the psychological susceptibility of the crowd have returned,” Fuechtner said in a conversation about the novella with political scientist Claus Leggewie in 2021 at the Thomas Mann House. “And that is, I think, what really makes this novella so timely.”
Mann’s concern with democracy, Fuechtner says, was central to his evolution. “He started as a conservative monarchist but became one of the most passionate defenders of democracy in exile,“ she says. “His lectures across the U.S. drew thousands. He truly believed democracy would win.”
For Fuechtner, Mann’s story—of transformation, exile, and belonging—continues to resonate across time and borders. Mann “reinvented himself in exile,” she says, turning personal displacement into a broader vision of humanism and empathy. His capacity to hold contradictions—to be both German and cosmopolitan, conservative and democratic—makes him, Fuechtner argues, “a profoundly modern figure.”