It is paradoxical that a body of work which begins by being so narrowly preoccupied with problems of the writer's self, and which to the end centres on characters expressing his intimate and unchanged concerns, should also contain so much history. Partly it is a matter of natural growth, the widening range of experience in increasingly turbulent times, which a novelist of all people could hardly ignore; but it also sprang from a remarkable congruence between Thomas Mann's themes and the patterns of twentieth-century German history. His work, with all the traditions, ambitions and temptations that lay behind it, was representative of fundamental German situations and responses before he set out consciously to represent them in fiction. When awareness dawned and representation became deliberate analysis, he was able to represent those phenomena with such depth of insight because he had been so deeply part of them and they of him. We can read him for pleasure, but also for understanding. Crede experto: believe the man who has gone through it himself. He can offer, in a word that is central to both Mann's art and his ethics, Erkenntnis (a complex concept which embraces knowledge, insight, analysis, understanding). Two of Mann's novels in particular are impressive reports - they are a great deal more than that, but they are that too - on crises of modern history: The Magic Mountain of 1924 on pre-1914 Europe and on the conflicts, especially acute in Germany, which were left unresolved by the First World War; and Doctor Faustus of 1947 on the long roots of Nazism in German culture and society.