The Devil in Palestrina: Thomas Mann’s Italian Secret

At 21, Thomas Mann had no degree, no direction, and little more to his name than a few short stories that had gone mostly unnoticed. He was, in essence, a dropout—having abandoned a dull office apprenticeship—when he followed his older brother Heinrich to Italy. What he brought back to Munich some 18 months later was astonishing: a thick and ever-growing manuscript, his first novel, sprawling across a thousand pages. BUDDENBROOKS would not only launch his career, it would earn him the Nobel.

What happened in between?

Two Souls, One Closet

This question has preoccupied me since I first became interested in the man behind the myth. Mann seemed to carry two opposing souls in his chest. On the one hand, he was exquisitely sensitive, prone to melancholia, deeply in need of emotional support. Few writers have captured psychic anguish with as much empathy or insight. On the other hand, he could be coolly detached—even toward those closest to him.

And then there was love: Mann found companionship and security with Katia, whom he married and with whom he fathered six children. But the intense yearning, the romantic ideal of emotional fusion—those he reserved for young men, often from a distance. He longed for transgression and feared it above all else.

These tensions spilled into a fraught rivalry with Heinrich, four years his senior, who lived—and wrote about—his heterosexuality openly. Thomas Mann suffered under the weight of repression, desire, and fear. And he did what great artists do: he turned it into art. But how did he learn to master that storm?

Return of the Repressed

My novel begins in 1953. The 77-year-old Mann returns to Italy one last time. What he confesses there reads like a scene from one of his own novels—yet, all signs suggest it truly happened.

He pays a visit to a Munich-born painter, Fabius von Gugel, who is living in Rome. They meet at Mann’s suite in the Hotel Excelsior. Gugel brings with him a series of drawings—bizarre, dreamlike illustrations of the Grimm brothers’ Cinderella, each accompanied by enigmatic captions. Mann studies them in silence, visibly moved. Then he speaks.

According to Gugel’s later account, which Mann’s biographer Peter de Mendelssohn would deem credible, Mann said something remarkable:

Ghosts in the Manuscript

The encounter would find its literary double decades later in DOCTOR FAUSTUS. In that novel, the composer Adrian Leverkühn is reminded by the devil of the terms of their pact: he may achieve genius, but only at the cost of his soul—and he must not love.

The infamous "Devil Chapter" is set in the very same Palestrina inn where the Mann brothers once stayed.

Did Mann truly say this? This, from the famously aloof master of self-concealment? De Mendelssohn believed so. The moment, he wrote, was “without doubt authentic,” and took place “in late summer 1897, in the stone hall of Palestrina.”

The more I read by and about Thomas Mann, the more this strange moment made sense. Mann often insisted he did not invent his stories so much as discover them. Nearly everything in his fiction draws from lived experience—not only the family drama of BUDDENBROOKS, but also the aching beauty of DEATH IN VENICE, which followed a visit to the lagoon city.

Mann had a gift for elevating the incidental to the monumental. When Katia was recovering from tuberculosis in a Davos sanatorium in 1912, he spent just three weeks at her side. The result? THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. That novel, too, features the devil—more prominently than many have realized. Literary scholar Michael Maar explored this in his dissertation, GEISTER UND KUNST (GHOSTS AND ART), and again in DAS BLAUBARTZIMMER (THE BLUEBEARD ROOM), tracing the demonic throughout Mann’s oeuvre.

Indeed, that Palestrina vision, which fills pages in DOCTOR FAUSTUS, first flickers into view decades earlier, in a single line of BUDDENBROOKS. Christian, the eccentric brother, asks the consul whether he has ever entered a twilight room and seen “a man on the sofa who nods at you—only he’s not there at all?” Mann wrote those words either while still in Italy or shortly after his return.

From that point on, his work is haunted by devilish figures—often described as disheveled men with red hair. They appear again in DEATH IN VENICE.

From Hot Mess to Nobel Prize

I am convinced: In the summer of 1897, in Palestrina, the aimless young “Tommy” was plunged into crisis by a question that would shape his life: how to reconcile his private longing with social propriety and artistic ambition. Something happened in that sweltering Italian hall that transformed him. There, he conceived the idea to turn his family’s story into a novel. There, he found his voice—his mask, his armor, his literary persona.

BUDDENBROOKS did more than make him famous. Perhaps, just perhaps, they saved his life.