Of all the great European novelists of the modernist period – James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka – Thomas Mann is perhaps the least loved, and in the Anglophone world certainly the least read. Laboured, ponderous, chillingly austere: the great cathedrals of his prose are ringed with reverent distance. He is not as impish as Joyce and never as intimate as Proust. Brecht quipped that meeting him was like having 2,000 years of culture looking down at you.

Yet there is something about Mann which makes me feel unexpectedly protective, partly out of compassion for the strange man himself, and partly out of admiration for the decades of daily exertion he put in at his desk even under the most savage external pressures. Born in Lübeck in 1875, his life was marked by the eruptions and upheavals of history: the First World War, the German Revolution, the Weimar Republic, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism. And though he was not a political writer in the narrower sense that his brother Heinrich was, neither can Mann’s fiction be isolated from Germany’s political development in the first half of the century. The Magic Mountain, completed in the years immediately after the First World War, took shape in a Munich wracked by revolution and right-wing terror, events that impressed themselves, obliquely, on the manuscript. Joseph and His Brothers, Mann’s retelling of the biblical story of exile, is impossible to read without considering Mann’s own exile from Nazi Germany in 1933.

Mann proved to be a powerful and consistent foe of fascism. As early as 1922, a few months after the shocking assassination of Walther Rathenau by a ring-wing terrorist organisation, Mann made a public stand in support of the embattled Weimar Republic, hoping to turn Germany’s youth away from the reactionaries and obscurantists of the right. In October 1930, following the Reichstag elections that significantly increased the Nazi party’s seats in parliament, Mann delivered an ‘Appeal to Reason’ at the Beethovensaal in Berlin. The speech was disrupted by Sturmabteiling troops in tuxedos and the jeers of the right-wing writers Arnolt Bronnen and Ernst Jünger, the author of Storm of Steel. During his exile in the United States, he delivered antifascist radio addresses on the BBC, helped secure funds for fellow émigré writers, and worked with Eleanor Roosevelt and the Emergency Rescue Committee to pressure the State Department to increase the quota of emergency visas.

All the while he stuck to a writing schedule more typical of his merchant father than an artist. ‘How often in my life have I not observed with a smile that the personality of my deceased father was governing my acts and omissions, was serving as the secret model for them?’, he once wrote. Writing, he thought, was threatened by its essential bohemianism, and thus needed the counterbalance of bourgeois decorum. As Tonio Kröger, in Mann’s 1903 novella of the same name, at one point exclaims: ‘As an artist I’m already enough of an adventurer in my inner life. So far as outward appearances are concerned one should dress decently, damn it, and behave like a respectable citizen…’

Which is precisely what Mann did: he was the head of a large family and a writer commercially involved in all aspects of his career, expertly negotiating with publishers and deftly navigating Europe’s, and later America’s, literary and cultural networks. He kept his office hours and daily tended to his teeming correspondence. He played the part he was called to: the writer as literary statesman – part dinner guest, part diplomat. ‘You are probably scoffing at all the travelling’, he once wrote to his older brother, Heinrich. ‘But I can’t help myself; I find the self-representation fun and each time the change of air pulls me out of the intellectual stagnation to which I am inclined.’

He wasn’t kidding. His diaries record the emotional chaos and psychological distress that daily threatened to undo him. He felt he needed to give his life a distinct literary form to keep life’s formlessness from engulfing him. ‘There is no help for it’, the narrator of the early story “The Joker” says, ‘life has to be lived.’ This bourgeois sense of duty allowed him to put all of it – his repressed homosexuality, his obsession with death, his fear of losing control – at the service of his art. He was fond of what the historian Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer described as Goethe’s striving ‘to make from a dark product of nature a clear product of himself (that is, of reason) and to thus fulfill life’s vocation and duty’.

The Marxist critic Georg Lukács, one of Mann’s most perceptive and admiring readers, once noted the ‘complete absence’ of utopianism in his work, saying, ‘Thomas Mann is a realist whose respect, indeed, reverence, for reality is of rare distinction.’ It’s true that there is nothing fantastical or visionary about Mann’s writing – indeed, the Joseph novels are a kind of secular retelling of the Bible, in which the most miraculous episodes are recast in human terms. But there is also a strong sense when reading Mann – perhaps too strong, at times – of a writer who has left nothing to chance. One enters his novels as one enters an elaborately well-constructed building; slowly at first, but with increasing admiration for the care and thoughtfulness of the detail throughout. At a reading in Vienna, an admirer once said to Mann: ‘What lends your works dignity and lovableness is that when you present them you seem to be saying, This is absolutely the best I can do.’

I first read Mann when I was 18, probably at the encouragement of my father and grandfather, on whose shelves Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus loomed with encyclopedic promise. I remember going to the secondhand bookshop in Copenhagen where I liked to spend my afternoons and buying a copy of Death in Venice. When I put the book down on the counter, the owner jerked his head back and exclaimed: ‘Why, that’s Thomas Mann!’ He sounded like someone recognising a long-forgotten actor assumed to be dead.

If the novella made any impression on me at the time, it’s since been eclipsed by the rather more vivid memory of the bookseller’s dramatic reaction. Still, whatever impression it did make was strong enough to make me want to climb The Magic Mountain when my grandfather gifted me a two-volume edition a few years later. On first reading it, I felt like Susan Sontag did when she picked up her copy at Pickwick Bookstore in Hollywood: ‘All of Europe fell into my head.’ Something about that particular novel, and about Mann more generally, seems distinctly ‘European’. Ironically, Mann very much feared the opposite. On its publication he warned André Gide that The Magic Mountain was ‘a highly problematical’ and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe’. And yet how could Europe resist a novel that ends with the outbreak of a world war during which, to quote The Magic Mountain’s narrator, ‘so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased’.

As the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote, ‘We’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain.’ And, let’s add, Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus Zeitblom, the ‘heroes’ of Doctor Faustus. But Thomas Mann did more than simply write about the cultural and spiritual transformations of German society in the early 20th century. He lived them. The reason that he became such a forceful foe of Nazism is because he shared the same intellectual and cultural roots. As he provocatively put it in a 1938 essay, Adolf Hitler was ‘a brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother’. This was echt Mann: at once self-aggrandising and self-incriminating. As Lukács said of him, he was always his own most ruthless judge. The distant, Olympian figure of Mann is misleading; in his pursuit of literary form, no writer revealed more of himself.