"Both Mann and Hesse were charged with ... energy. Mann, the resident of cities (particularly his beloved Munich) poured his uncertainty and his corrosive insights into his great first novel, Buddenbrooks, which was published in 1901 and sold an astonishing one million copies. The bourgeois writer had exposed most of the fault lines in bourgeois society, not only in Germany, but in most of Europe. At twenty-six, he was famous, proclaimed by many as a coming master of the literary twentieth century...., Hesse had solidified his literary reputation with Siddharta and...