(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann)
". . .Thomas Mann's works were first translated into English by H. T. Lowe-Porter beginning in 1924. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) and his numerous short stories. (Due to the personal taste of an influential committee member, only Buddenbrooks was cited at any great length.) Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of three generations. The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) follows an engineering student who, planning to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for only three weeks, finds his departure from the sanatorium delayed. During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters, who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization. The tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers is an epic novel written over a period of sixteen years, which is one of the largest and most significant works in Mann's oeuvre. Later, other novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doktor Faustus (1947), the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II and Confessions of Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, 1954), which was unfinished at Mann's death. . . In 1930, Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason", in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his strident denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. . ."
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(from Wolfgang Mieder)
". . . This proverb certainly belongs to one of the most commonly used proverbs
in the English language. This should not be surprising since it
expresses the only too human idea of discontent, envy, and jealousy in a
metaphor which is easily understood. Interestingly enough, the proverb
is also literally true as has been demonstrated by James Pomerantz in a
scientific article on "'The Grass is always Greener': An Ecological
Analysis of an Old Aphorism" (1983).3 This scholar proves that optical
and perceptual laws alone will make the grass at a distance look greener
to the human eye than the blades of grass perpendicular to the ground.
The "truth" of this metaphorical proverb can, of course, also be
observed often enough in the countryside when a cow or a horse is trying
to get at that juicy green grass just on the other side of the fence.
And since people are equally dissatisfied with their lot in life, it
should not surprise anyone that a modern psychologist has spoken of "the
'greener grass' phenomenon"4 by which modern individuals continually
evaluate supposedly better alternatives for themselves.
The proverb thus expresses a basic behavioral truth in a rather
universal metaphor - after all, grass and fences aren't exactly anything
new. This should imply that the proverb belongs to those ancient bits
of wisdom that everybody knows, but when one consults the standard
paremiographical works, it comes as quite a surprise to see that the
earliest recorded reference stems from 1957! This appears absurd, and
there are bound to be native American speakers who will instantly claim
that they have heard or even used this proverb long before the 1950's.
But that claim needs to be proven in light of what Archer Taylor has
called the apparent "incompleteness of collections of proverbs". The
following remarks will present a few precursors to this proverb as well
as some synchronic variants, and it will be established that the "grass
is always greener" proverb is at least a bit older than proverb
collections would have us believe. In addition to tracing the
lexicographical history of the proverb it will also be studied in its
traditional and innovative use as the title of novels, plays, and
magazine or newspaper articles. Its iconographic depiction in cartoons,
caricatures, comic strips, postcards, and photographs will also be
analyzed with a special emphasis on modern parodies. . ."
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