Seventy years ago today, on August 12, 1955 (June 25, 1955 in the lunar calendar), the outstanding novelist Thomas Mann passed away. Shortly before his death, Mann lived in Lübeck with his wife Kayati. Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in the city of Lübeck, northern Germany. His father was a giant businessman who served as a councilor for tax affairs in the city of Lubeck; his mother was born in Brazil and of Portugal descent. After his father died, the family business went bankrupt. After graduating from high school, Thomas Mann worked as an intern at an insurance company. During this period, he wrote his first novella,"The Fall". He had a brother named Henrich-Mann, who was also a famous German critical realist writer. When Thomas Mann was 20 years old, he attended courses on history, literary history and economics at the Munich Higher Industrial School, and wrote and reviewed "Pages of German Art and Welfare in the Twentieth Century" edited by his brother. In 1901, 26-year-old Thomas Mann wrote his famous work "The Buddenbrock Family-The Fall of a Family". This work is set in a large family that has been doing business for three generations, outlining a picture of the ups and downs of "Lao Tzu started a business, his son kept it, and his grandson failed." It profoundly reflects the process of germination, growth and decline of the bourgeoisie. It has become a microcosm of the development history of German society from the 1830s to the 1890s, and is "a soul history" of the German bourgeoisie. Some commentary articles also claimed that it "made the whole of Europe feel related to it." After its publication, the novel was translated into multiple languages and moved on the screen. According to records, two years after the author's death in 1957, the sales volume of "The Buddenbrock Family: The Fall of a Family" had exceeded one million copies. In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany. In the same year, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the famous German composer Wagner, Thomas Mann delivered a speech entitled "The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner" at the University of Munich. Based on the humanitarian tradition of German culture, he condemned fascism's distortion of Wagner and German culture, which was criticized by pro-Nazi literati and artists. In 1936, the Nazi government stripped him of his citizenship, and the University of Bonn also revoked his honorary doctorate. To this end, he wrote a famous open letter to the dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn, condemning the Nazi government's destruction of German culture. This letter played a great inspiration to the people in the subsequent anti-fascist struggle. During his exile abroad, Thomas Mann wrote the first three parts of the tetralogy of "Joseph and His Brothers":"The Story of Jacob","Joseph's Youth" and "Joseph in Egypt". In 1938, Thomas Mann moved to the United States and was hired as a professor at Princeton University. In 1944, he obtained American citizenship. In 1952, he moved to Switzerland again because of his dissatisfaction with the increasingly rampant McCarthyism. Thomas Mann wrote a lot in his life. Other influential novels include "Tristan","Tonio-Kroeger","Death in Venice","Loti in Weimar","Dr. Faust, The Life of the German composer Adrian Levkin Telling by a Friend","The Deceived Woman", etc. In addition, Thomas Mann also wrote a large number of articles in various styles such as reviews, essays, book reviews, etc. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, he led his family to Stockholm to receive the award. Thomas Mann died on August 12, 1955 in Zurich, Switzerland. Thomas and his father Henrishiulia and their children (Thomas Mann, second from right) Kaja before their marriage to Thomas Mann. Thomas and their children Kaja (center) is with the children. From left to right are Elizabeth, Goro, Furnika, Klaus, Michael and Erica