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Introduction
War, hate speech, the rise of populist politics,
a deadly pandemic,
a society totally divided
and possibly on the brink of collapse –
Sounds like we’re talking about today, right?
Actually, it’s all in a novel published 100 years ago.
“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann.
'This novel addresses issues that still concern us today,
issues we still discuss with great enthusiasm -
or great hostility.'
'This novel can better explain to us problems
we’re currently experiencing,
things, that worry us.'
Today people are also taking a closer look at the book’s
queer elements, which have always been there.
'I think it's a fascinating read and a novel
that has many interpretations.
It has many layers, many themes.'
It’s also 1000 pages long, it’s a literal
literary heavyweight.
So what makes it worth the read?
Or even a second read?
Title: Why You Need to Read 'The Magic Mountain'
The Magic Mountain’s 100-year anniversary
is being marked with an exhibition in Thomas Mann’s
hometown of Lübeck, stage productions,
even a sequel - not written
by Thomas Mann himself obviously.
But first – What's it about?
What is 'The Magic Mountain' About?
Ok, let's set the scene: it's the Swiss Alps -
at a sanatorium – that's a kind of health resort or clinic -
where people think the fresh air will cure them of lung disease.
And there was plenty of lung disease at the time.
Thomas Mann sets his novel in 1907
when tuberculosis is still a leading cause of death in Europe.
And the best treatment people can get – if they can afford it –
is breathing good air
and just waiting around to get better.
And they can wait a long time.
Enter: the story’s young hero,
Thomas Mann’s main character,
who goes to visit his sick cousin.
Kai Sina: 'We meet this character, Hans Castorp,
who travels into this world where he ends up
staying for seven years
and where he’s confronted with all the ideological,
political and philosophical debates of the time.'
What’s funny about the book is: even though
Hans Castorp is actually healthy,
he really gets into the sanatorium,
the people, their philosophical debates
and just the culture of being a patient there.
The strict health routines, luxurious meals,
and obsessive temperature taking.
He ends up living like one of them.
Hans Wißkirchen: 'And then, in an isolated, hermetically
sealed place, the questions of humanity
are played out that are still interesting today, on all possible levels.
Illness, progress, science.
Love plays a major role. Death is very present.'
So all the big topics.
And Thomas Mann creates two characters –
patients at the clinic - who really are
polar opposites in their philosophies.
Settembrini on the one hand – he stands for
progress and individual freedom,
for Enlightenment.
Then there’s Naphta.
He wants to see society dominated
by a totalitarian regime
Totalitarian regimes were starting to take power
in Europe at that time with the rise of communism and fascism.
Kai Sina: 'Hans Castorp is caught between these two.
The whole novel revolves around his decision:
which side to take?'
Both these characters become Hans Castorp’s mentors.
And he’s really torn between their two philosophies.
Eventually their explosive debates turn violent.
The two rivals face off in a duel.
And that’s just the beginning of the violence.
The book ends in 1914,
with the start of World War I and
Hans Castorp disappearing into the chaos of battle.
When The Magic Mountain came out, it quickly became an
international bestseller, translated
into many different languages.
And over the decades, influential people have claimed it
as their favorite book.
Like American critic Susan Sontag
who said she’d read it 7 or 8 times.
In Spain, big fan clubs cropped up at schools and universities.
Isabel Garcia Adabel: 'You don't have to have three doctorates in Nietzsche
to understand Thomas Mann.
Because there’s a lot of irony and humor in his work.
It's about very serious things,
but the book itself is an enjoyable experience,
and there are some really hilarious scenes.'
One group of people who didn't think 'The Magic Mountain'
was funny was the tourism board
in Davos, Switzerland.
They thought the book made the town look bad.
They actually asked another big German writer
of the time, Erich Kästner,
to write a novel that painted the town in a better light.
Who Was Thomas Mann?
Thomas Mann led quite a life.
Born in 1875, at the beginning of the German Empire,
his diaries reveal that he was bisexual
at a time when that was not accepted.
In 1929 he won the Nobel Prize
for his novel Buddenbrooks.
Later he fled Nazi Germany with his wife,
Katia - a Jewish convert to
Christianity - and their six kids.
But let’s take a step back.
In 1912, Katia Mann had been diagnosed with
tuberculosis and Thomas Mann
went to visit her – at a sanatorium in
Davos, Switzerland, that became his inspiration.
Hans Wißkirchen: 'With Thomas Mann, it's all coincidences.
We imagine he must have sat there for years
thinking about, how to do it?
But it’s all coincidence.'
He originally wanted to write “The Magic Mountain” as a
short story, a humorous counterpart to his tragic novella “Death in Venice”.
'And it turned into a thousand-page novel.'
And it took him 12 years to write it.
He was interrupted by World War I.
But also, he was going through a shift
in his own mindset.
When he started writing the book he was very pro-war.
Kai Sina: 'In 1914 Thomas Mann allowed himself
to be carried away by the enthusiasm
for war that was driving many intellectuals,
authors, writers and artists at the time.
So he was in the front line of advocating for it.
And in 1918, when Germany was defeated,
it was a lost cause and he wound up very isolated.'
Caren Heuer: 'Thomas Mann switched sides.
In the 1920s he became one of the most eloquent
defenders of the republic and by the
1930s during his exile in the United States
a true believer in democracy.'
When the Nazis came to power in 1933,
Thomas Mann left Germany with his family.
He moved to Switzerland,
then to the United States,
and later back to Switzerland.
Thomas Mann advocated for tolerance
and human dignity until he died in 1955.
When Thomas Mann wrote “The Magic Mountain” he was thinking
about his own process of political transformation.
He puts a lot of the old him, the pro-war him
that he distanced himself from
into the character of Naphta.
Kai Sina: 'What impresses me most about Thomas Mann
is his honest and sincere willingness -
and courage - to change his mind -
to put his views to the test again and again,
and arrive at new views and to stand up for those
new views until he revises them again.
The Magic Mountain reflects exactly that.'
Time of Tension
When "The Magic Mountain” came out in 1924,
European society was really on edge.
There’s this feeling, like today actually,
of restlessness, of heightened tensions,
existential dread and the feeling
that society could go off the rails.
Hans Wißkirchen: 'What was in the air?” he writes in the novel.
You can sense a tremendous unease,
a fear of the future.
And suddenly there’s this situation at
the end of the novel where things are unraveling,
where they start hitting each other,
where they’re cursing at the staff,
where the craziest ideas emerge,
and people are literally losing their minds.'
Thomas Mann writes about total polarization,
divisions, people who have stopped listening to each other.
Caren Heuer: 'We’re at that exact tipping point, today,
in this time of great irritability.
All you have to do is turn on any evening talk show
and you'll see that people are interrupting each other,
not listening, just yelling out opinions.'
Mann sees politics falling into populism
and what we now call hate speech and disinformation.
He sees the tensions and dangers that are later going to lead to
the fall of the Weimar Republic –
Germany's first attempt at a real parliamentary
democracy that ended with the Nazi era.
Hans Wißkirchen: 'You can follow it in the book in vivid detail.
He describes it with a tremendous aesthetic sense,
but also with tremendous psychological insight.'
Kai Sina: 'He creates an atmosphere where, at the end,
you just wonder who will shoot first.
First in the duel, and then at the very end,
the war in which the whole thing culminates.'
Who shoots first?
Even today, we see people turning to violence
when they can’t get their way with words.
Isabel Gracia Adabel: 'I think it’s sadly current.
We should keep that in mind, and not in a good way.
It's been a century, 100 years,
and we're still at the same place.'
At the end of The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann asks:
"Out of this universal feast of death,
out of this extremity of fever,
kindling the rain-washed evening sky
to a fiery glow,
may it be that Love one day shall mount?"
Caren Heuer: 'We should be ashamed that we still haven’t answered
the book’s great final question,
‘Out of this universal feast of death
may it be that Love one day shall mount?’
This question about the horrible 20th century.
The 21st century is starting the exact
same way with the next ‘universal
feast of death’ in Ukraine and the Middle East.'
A Queer Novel?
Mann was also ahead of his time when it came to sexuality.
His earlier novellas “Tonio Kröger”
and “Death in Venice” had strong
homoerotic undertones.
“The Magic Mountain” contains motifs
that are obviously queer.
Kai Sina: 'It’s one of the book’s great strengths –
that it breaks every cliché, especially
when it comes to question of how to talk about
the body, sexuality and eroticism.'
Hans Castorp falls in love with a woman,
Madame Chauchat,
but she reminds him of a male classmate
that he once fancied.
Kai Sina: 'The question of what a man is,
what a woman is, what’s masculine,
what’s feminine and what is perceived as attractive,
erotically attractive, all of that is fluid here.'
Gender fluidity was not mainstream
in Thomas Mann’s day.
Homosexuality was totally taboo for most of society.
Kai Sina: 'It was a criminal offense!
In the 1920s, Thomas Mann campaigned
against Paragraph 175,
which criminalized homosexual relationships and acts.'
Thomas Mann’s own desire for men was something
he lived out in secret.
To the outside world he was an upstanding,
heterosexual citizen with a wife and six kids.
Love, hate, politics and passion –
they're all here in “The Magic Mountain”.
Thomas Mann leaves it up to you, though, how you want to interpret them.
Isabel Garcia Adabel: 'We have to find our own way,
just like the character in the story,
and I think that in times of fake news
and everything happening quickly-
this idea of having to read with critical eyes
and do that for ourselves and stay awake -
that's the most current thing
and that's what I like best.'
And in case the idea of reading a thousand
pages seems overwhelming:
'You can always skip ahead.
Lots of readers have told me which parts they skipped.'
So let’s get to it.
What fascinates You most about “The Magic Mountain”?
Let us know in the comments.
