Thomas Mann: Life as a work of art by Hermann Kurzke, trans. by Leslie Willson

An incredible shrunken Mann for our times

The reasons for reading Thomas Mann (1875-1955) 30 years ago were clear. He was Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse. Mann was about the German journey into inwardness, the hubris of German intellectuals not facing up to political responsibility; about the lure of belief in national superiority, and the perpetual lure of the disinterested pleasures of art and intellect.

A sexually wayward streak runs through many of the stories, and the superb, difficult novels. The Magic Mountain concerns charm, enticement, intoxication and surrender sublimated into politics and medical routines before the First World War. What Mann understands and laughs at, though it grips him, is the quasi-sexual attraction of beauty and philosophy.

Death in Venice, vulgarised by Visconti's film, was in the original an erotic vision which imagined the collapse of European civilisation in a diseased back-street, with a scholar famed for self-control reduced to begging attention from an unknown boy. Visconti had to be wrong because the whole dignity of Mann's work rested on the decent distinction between the word, or metaphor, and reality. Dangerous ideas can be explored and enjoyed in art, Mann believed. That is their place: something the Greek tragedians well understood.

But here comes a German scholar, the latest of a stream of Mann biographers in the last decade. Hermann Kurzke draws on recently published, homosexually-explicit diaries, and long-available letters, as well as on the published work, to give us a new Mann. The idea is to give the life priority; to put back all the bits the artist cut out or transmogrified.

The insult is a Thomas Mann rediscovered for a frankly unsubtle age. His approach honours those who wouldn't otherwise see the appeal of a peculiar intellectual. It presents the artist as a man with something to hide, and a suitable candidate for a newspaper exposé. The complexity of Death in Venice becomes accessible to all if paedophilia lies behind it. Mann's equivocal patriotism in the First World War, his inability to condemn the bloodshed, follows subliminally from his love of young men.

Why, then, did Mann bother to struggle with art? Kurzke is right to highlight the split between the optimistic essayist and the anti-political, pessimistic writer. The answer, however, is that Mann believed in a civilisation that didn't hide from extremes, but cultivated the strength to reject them. This is why he both hates Hitler and explores how he might be his "brother". Look at what Mann writes, quoted here but never explained, in favour of art: "Which is move revolting, death or life? ... I find that these questions should be raised – and without obligation – in artistic freedom and made vital without their being settled."

This book has enjoyed great success in Germany. But it offends this humanist reviewer to see a great, flawed figure reduced to a man with a problem.