Banned and burned by Hitler, this is Mann's masterpiece about the decline of a German family at the end of the 19th century. A chronicle of middle-class life, it is the story of a family subverting its own traditions for the sake of modernity. The Nobel Prize-winning author wrote this first, and perhaps his greatest, novel when he was only 25. Mann was raised in a prosperous merchant family in Lubeck.  (GER22, $22.00)