Thomas Mann was probably Germany's most influential author of the 20th century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, his family moved to Munich in 1893, where he lived until 1933 and wrote some of his most successful novels like "Buddenbrocks" (1901), "Death in Venice" (1912) or "The Magic Mountain" (1924). After the Nazi takeover, the humanist and anti-fascist, married to Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a secular Jewish family, emigrated to Switzerland, then to Princeton and Pacific Palisades in the United States, where he finished his great tetra-logy "Joseph and His Brothers" in 1942. Two years later, he became a naturalized US citizen, but finally returned to Europe in 1952. The famous analyst and critique of the German and European soul died on 12 August 1955 in Kilberg near Zurich.