Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1975 - 10 Pfennig

Important Personalities, Edition 1975 The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic publishes five special postage stamps with portraits of important personalities. No special first-day cover envelope 10-pfennig value: Thomas Mann Thomas Mann, born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, died on August 12, 1955 in Zurich, thanks to the humanistic ethos and the artistic perfection of his work and through his passionate commitment in the world anti-fascist struggle to become the most important progressive writers of the 20th century. He was a critic of the bourgeois end time and knew of the need for social reorganization. His familiarity with the literatures of other peoples and the presentation of general epochal problems contributed decisively to the high international rank of his work. In the novel "Buddenbrooks" (1901) Thomas Mann designed the decline of a humanist-minded bourgeoisie during the development of imperialism; in the Novellist early work ("Tonio Kroger", 1903, "Death in Venice", 1912) culminates for him the crisis of the bourgeois personality in the problem of the artist. Shaken by the experiences of World War I, Thomas Mann became more and more committed to democratic positions (especially in the speech "Von deutscher Republik", 1922, and in the novel "Der Zauberberg", 1924). He urgently warned against the rise of fascism: journalistic in the "German speech", poetic in the novel "Mario and the magician" (1930). After the establishment of the fascist dictatorship (1933) Thomas Mann went into exile. He published the magazine "Maß und Wert" (1937-1940), wrote antifascist speeches and essays ("On the Future Victory of Democracy", 1938), held radio speeches since 1940 to the people of fascist Germany and confessed that the Future "difficult to imagine without communist traits". Thomas Mann's novels of the 30s and 40s are also under the spotlight of the confrontation with fascism: the four-part novel Joseph and his brothers "(1933 to 1943), the Goethe novel" Lotte in Weimar "(1939) and the" Doctor Faustus " (1947) .- His last poetic work, "Confessions of the Impostor Felix Krull" (1954), builds on the popular tradition of rogue literature and is a cheery-unmasking swan song on the bourgeois era.Following the positions won at the time of fascism logically Thomas Mann showed keen interest in developments in the GDR, and his speeches in Weimar in Goethe Year 1949 and Schiller Year 1955 once again clearly show his productive relationship to the humanistic traditions of the past and their fertilization for the tasks of the present an integral part of spiritual and cultural life in our developed socialist society.