Almost no one who reads Thomas Mann knows this detail: the greatest German writer of the 20th century had Brazil at home. His mother, Júlia da Silva Bruhns, was born in 1851 on a farm in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro.
A childhood between coffee and the forest
Júlia was the daughter of a German merchant living in Brazil and a Brazilian mother. She spent her early childhood on a farm in the Paraty region, at a time when that coast of Rio de Janeiro still lived off the coffee economy that came down from the mountains to be shipped. As a girl, she was taken to Germany, to her father's hometown, and there she grew up, got married and started a family, but without ceasing to carry with her what she had experienced before.
Brazil in your lap, in bedtime stories
This is the detail that changes how you read Thomas Mann. He himself recognized, throughout his life, a sensitivity that he attributed to his mother: a warmer, more affectionate temperament, more open to emotion and irony than the commercial rigidity of the Hanseatic Lübeck in which he was born and which he would describe, years later, in the novel The Buddenbrooks. Brazil does not appear in Mann's books as a setting, but as a disposition, an internal counterpoint to the Germanic discipline that he also inherited from his father.
What Paraty still has from that time
Paraty today preserves the layout and colonial architecture of a port that, in the 19th century, experienced a transition between the gold cycle and the coffee cycle, before commerce moved to the port of Rio de Janeiro and the city entered decades of isolation that, paradoxically, helped to preserve its historic center until today. It is this landscape, between mountains and sea, that saw the birth of the woman who, on the other side of the Atlantic, would create one of the greatest novelists in the German language.
Knowing this origin does not change the plot of any of Mann's books, but it changes the lens: behind the Germanic erudition of The Holy Sinner there is also, silently, a farm in Paraty.
Readings from Nous
Read the classics in depth
Our list of more than 130 recommended books, commented and organized by theme, so you don't read in the dark.
See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
Is it true that Thomas Mann's mother was Brazilian?
Yes. Júlia da Silva Bruhns was born in 1851 on a farm in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, daughter of a German father and a Brazilian mother. While still young, she moved to Germany, where she married the merchant Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and had, among other children, the future novelist Thomas Mann.
What does Paraty have to do with the work of Thomas Mann?
Nothing directly narrated in his novels, but everything in the author's emotional formation: Mann grew up hearing stories from his own mother and a temperament that he described as coming from another world, warmer and freer than the bourgeois rigidity of Lübeck, the German city where he was born.
Why was Paraty a farm region in the 19th century?
Because, still in the colonial period and at the beginning of the Empire, Paraty functioned as a shipping port, first for gold coming from Minas Gerais, then for coffee produced on farms in the region, before the commercial route migrated to the port of Rio de Janeiro.
Continue: Who was Thomas Mann? · Lübeck, the city of Thomas Mann · The Holy Sinner, by Thomas Mann: summary and analysis · Who was Saint Anselm of Canterbury?
Source class: O Eleito, de Thomas Mann