Dynamite Prizes

No U. S. citizen has ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature.* Last week's award did not break the 28-year-old rule. The Swedish Academy of Letters picked Germany's great Thomas Mann.

The award was a relief. For at least a decade even the Swedish press has been asking. "Why not Mann?" In 1925, after his name had been most prominently mentioned, the Swedish Academy, with the old-maidish perversity for which it is famed, withheld the prize for a year, finally awarded it to George Bernard Shaw. Last week's amends were handsome. This year the prizes bequeathed by the late Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swede who invented dynamite, are larger than ever before. Thomas Mann will get $46,299./-

Mann of Buddenbrooks. In the early 18th Century the House of Mann was great in the woolen draping trade at Nuremberg, ancient, free and most glamorous of German cities. Novelist Mann has told in his Buddenbrooks, aptly dubbed "The German Forsyte Saga," of the rise and decline of a great merchant family almost precisely like his own. His father was a Senator and twice Mayor of Luebeck, the Hanseatic Capital where Thomas was born 54 years ago, when Hanseatic troops still dipped their colors at a Mann's approach.

Through the saga of the Buddenbrooks clatters the Manns' ancient family coach. Their medievally faithful servant, Ida Jungmann, tended Thomas. He published Buddenbrooks in 1901, the year of the first Nobel Prize, which he did not win. For almost three decades Buddenbrooks has been constantly in press, still sells in Germany at the rate of 4,000 copies yearly, was brought out in the U. S. by Knopf in 1924.

Mann, Spengler and Stresemann. The son of the House of Mann stubbed his toe against life when his father died. The family business had to be sold at a loss in 1890. He moved with his mother to Munich, where she insisted that he must work at something. He sold fire insurance, writing novels by stealth until fame came. Like his great contemporary in philosophy, Oswald Spengler, his genius was fired most completely by contact with Mediterranean culture, and he repaid Italy with Der Tod in Vene dig (Death in Venice, 1913).

The War found both Thomas Mann and Gustav Stresemann (then an unfamed Reichstag Deputy) ranged hot on the side of Kaiserdom and Conquest. Mann's War-time essays, Reflections of a Non-political Man, show that he shared the general will to spread kultur by the bayonet. Like Stresemann he changed his whole political philosophy after defeat. Both men have been flayed as opportunists. Last week in strongly Royalist Munich, where Republican Mann still lives, news of the Nobel Prize was frigidly received by the newspapers, given scant space, small praise.

Reporters from Berlin who sought out tall, handsome Municher Mann found him quietly working at his latest novel, Joseph and His Brothers, a first venture into Biblical fiction. He would not talk of it, was lured to speak of his newest book, Mario and the Magician, which he wrote last summer in a wicker bath chair on the brim of the Baltic. "I find it quite possible," he gossiped, "to write a novelette while surrounded by noisy folks on a beach." Solemnly: "I am sincerely delighted with this great honor. I welcome it the more because I have always been profoundly stirred by Scandinavian literature."

Other Nobel Prizes awarded last week (by the Swedish Academy of Science) were three: 1) The 1928 Physics Prize (delayed) to Professor Owen Willans Richardson of King's College, London, for research into the movements of electrons emanating from hot bodies. His discovery of "Richardson's Law" gave other scientists important clues which led to the invention of the electron-actuated radio tube; 2) the Prize in Chemistry for 1929, to be divided between Dr. Arthur Harden of London University and Professor Hans von Euler-Chelpin of Upsala University, Sweden, for their joint research on the enzyme action in the fermentation of sugar; 3) the Physics Prize for 1929, to perhaps the most elite of living scientists, Louis Cesar Victor Maurice, Due de Broglie.

The 1929 Nobel Medicine Prizes, voted last month by the Caroline Institute of the University of Stockholm (TIME, Nov. 11), was awarded jointly to Professor Frederick Gowland Hopkins of Cambridge University and Professor Christian Eijkman of the University of Utrecht, for pioneer work in proving the existence, usefulness, necessity of vitamins in nutrition.

Three of the Due's ancestors were Marshals of France. Victor Claude. Prince de Broglie, his great-great-grandfather, served with Lafayette and Rochambeau in the American Revolution, was a Jacobin in the French Revolution. Opposing Robespierre, the "sea-green incorruptible," he died under the guillotine during The Terror.

The present Duc was graduated by the French Naval Academy. He retired to specialize in physics, returned to the navy at the outbreak of the War, in which he won the tiny but coveted rosette of the Legion of Honor for his invention of a wireless receiver for submerged submarines. Last week's prize of $46,299 was awarded for his theory of wave mechanics in the problem of atomic constituion. Roughly and as elaborated by other researches, the Due de Broglie's theory is that matter consists of a series of waves as well as of corpuscles.

*U. S. Peace Prize winners: Roosevelt, 1906; Root, 1912: Wilson, 1919; Dawes, 1925.

/-Swede Nobel's bequest was $9,000,000. Every year 68% of the income is available for prizes; 22% for "expenses." The remaining 10% is added to the slowly increasing fund. Original Nobel Prizes in 1901 were $40,511. After the War they declined to a low of $30,802 in 1923, due to high taxes and depreciation of the Swedish kronor. This year for the first time Sweden has taken most of the taxes off the Nobel Fund, a deed of grace long stormily debated.

*In Brooklyn his father subscribed to and omnivorously read Editor Greeley's Tribune. Herr Schacht and his wife moved back to Germany before their son, now President of the Reichbank, was born.