How Thomas Mann Wrote the Magic Mountain

Summary

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,” he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.”Morten Høi Jensen’s approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.Despite the doubts Mann expressed to Gide, The Magic Mountain – a very strange, very long novel – was embraced throughout Europe, and three years later in America, too. Its publisher there ignored the strangeness and proclaimed its “use value … for the practical life of modern man”. While that makes it sound like Jordan Peterson-style cod philosophy, in fact it stands alongside In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities and To the Lighthouse as one of the summits (apologies) of literary modernism.The novel describes its youthful protagonist, Hans Castorp, visiting a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos where his cousin is a patient. Intending to stay a few days, he doesn’t escape for seven years. The novel’s plot mirrored its composition: it was first conceived as a novella, a lighthearted counterpart to the gloomy Death in Venice. But Mann began writing in 1913 and didn’t finish for more than a decade. Between those two points, the first world war radically changed the book’s size, scope and temper because it radically changed the political and moral outlook of its author.Mann began the war a staunch conservative. Yet by the early 1920s he was making speeches in defence of the maligned Weimar Republic. (In time, and in exil...