Autobiographical writings cover the years from 1875 to 1955, the time of Thomas Mann, a truly fateful era in German history. He had an aversion to autobiography as a closed book recounting his life. He did not need it, as he invested himself so thoroughly in all his writing that one can rightly speak of an identity between his work and his person. Furthermore, when the day and hour required it, he willingly provided information about himself, rarely as a sketch of his biography, but rather in the form of a wide-ranging lecture or essay, as a narrative of experiences or travels, in vignettes and episodes involving relatives and friends, and in response to inquiries about the conditions for his work, his relationship to religion, music, or psychoanalysis.