TO THE WORLD-CLASS AUTHOR, THE MAGICIAN, CONGRATULATIONS FROM THIS
SIDE OF THE WALL OF TIME: 150 YEARS AGO THOMAS MANN WAS
BORN.
Anniversaries are often celebrated and even
exploited for commercial purposes. The year 2025 may also be the case
for Thomas Mann. But publishers, sellers, and critics must survive,
and we will leave them alone, since this "anniversary"—Thomas
Mann was born on June 6, 1875, in Lübeck—does not need an alarm
clock.
The "state of the world", which stumbles daily from one "crisis" to another, and the "world elites," or rather, those who have no idea where the world is heading to, force people suffering from Weltschmerz to at least find refuge in the great European novels, perhaps even a few tips regarding a way out, albeit an emergency exit that doesn't lead directly into the abyss.
Thomas Mann has much to offer, as his work is not demarcated, temporally reduced, or limited by the historical framework in which it was created and which it reflects. Therefore, there is no claustrophobia that corresponds to the zeitgeist. He was able recreate a specific era literarily, meticulously and linguistically brilliantly, but because poetry is present, the "material" in the text has an impact far beyond its chronological limitations.
This applies above all—but not only—to Thomas Mann's most famous novel, The Magic Mountain(1924).
At first glance, one is in danger of fixing The Magic Mountain in the years before the First World War, of fossilizing it as a kind of Wagnerian prelude that usually unfolds amidst high society in a luxury hotel "way up there."
In our broadcasts about The Magic Mountain, in German and English, "Conversations on the Spree" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC_7BthzxvU) in November 2021, we, the author of this blog and his colleague Joachim Schmidt, emphasized that although this novel supposedly describes the atmosphere that would lead to the First World War, at the same time it anticipates, "pre-empts," the intellectual and political atmosphere that would lead to the Second World War.
We emphasized, "without him being aware of it." It was the poetic prose that, unconstrained, of its own accord, set this metamorphosis in motion.
And in 2024, the centenary of the publication of The Magic Mountain was celebrated. On December 31, 2024, on the last day of the "Year of the Magic Mountain" and shortly before entering the 150th birthday of the most famous "Lübecker," Roman Bucheli wrote a resonant article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
"With The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann prepared for the fight against Hitler, only he had no idea of it at the time. Thomas Mann's masterpiece was published one hundred years ago. In it, the author looks back on the First World War and reveals the future."1
"If The Magic Mountain had
a time in mind, it was not the moral and political decay of the years
before 1914, but rather the year of its publication and the
subsequent times of renewed civilizational disruption. Neither the
author had any idea of this, nor does the novel anticipate what
was to come: This ignorance of its fate also reveals the
monumentality of this work of art. What it spoke of only became clear
in its future. What happened on The horizon of the novel's ending may
have seemed like an image from the past in 1924. In truth, as it
later turned out, it revealed what the world was yet to come."
2
We are pleased that our interpretation, three years
later, is receiving additional resonance.
Why do we need
to read The Magic Mountain today?
The
Magic Mountain will always be there. As the Spaniard Jorge
Bustos wrote in an excellent article published in EL Mundo on March
21, 2024:
"Why do we need to read The Magic
Mountain? A "counter-cultural" book in this era of
technological vertigo." Reading it throws us into disturbing
parallels with our present."
Jorge Bustos emphasizes
that if a mountaineer's life is divided into two stages, before and
after climbing Everest, perhaps Mario Vargas Llosa, the recently
deceased Peruvian writer, was right when he said that a reader's life
changes forever after reading The Magic Mountain. A book
that represented the "intellectual, moral, and political crisis
in Europe..."
Back then. Or perhaps even today?
In
Friedrich Nietzsche's famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra decided to leave the solitude of the mountains and go
"down" to confront humanity with "news." In "The
Magic Mountain," Hans Castorp and other people, more or less
sick, climb the mountain to let body and soul be purified, "up there".
Perhaps
unconsciously, they also brought with them the sick Zeitgeist from "down below," the very same one that Zarathustra
confronted.
Zarathustra's famous, and infamous, phrase,
"God is dead," which, according to Martin Heidegger, must
be interpreted as a "metaphor," "the end of Plato's
metaphysics," is transformed in the sanatorium on the mountains
of The Magic Mountain into a pressing question: "Is
humanity standing on the brink of the abyss?"
The
Magic Mountain remains one of the most beautifully camouflaged
literary warnings ever created in European literature.
But
not only The Magic Mountain continues to be read and
sought after as the literary text that could serve as a decipherer of
today's turmoil.
- The Buddenbrooks (1901),
the novel that made the author world famous and also earned him the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, is subtitled "The Decline of
a Family." Could this novel hold the key to unmasking the
decline of a nation, even an empire?
Christina Neuhaus examines the "Buddenbrooks Syndrome" in an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from January 4, 2025. She makes a risky point:
"Thomas Mann describes in almost 800 pages what the first German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, needed one sentence to describe: 'The first generation creates wealth, the second manages wealth, the third studies art history, and the fourth degenerates completely."
In principle, that is supposed to be the specter that terrifies Switzerland today. And other countries as well.
- In a worthwhile article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Rüdiger Görner categorizes the novella Mario and the
Magician (1930) as "required reading for democrats."
It "warns against radicalization" and also shows how
"majorities can be wrong."
"The Russian
person is the most humane person."
Thomas Mann once
said: "The Russian person is the most humane person." This
sentence is mentioned in an article by Ulrich Schmidt in the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung of June 27, 2024, where he comments on the
"stereotypes" of Germans in Russia and Russians in Germany,
using the examples of Thomas Mann and Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov
(1812-1891), the Russian writer and author of the famous novel
Oblomov.
In times of shrill, dangerously theatrical
"Russophobia," it might be worthwhile to take a look at
Thomas Mann's assessment of Russians.
Two more remarks
that should enrich the anniversary celebration:
1. The
Magician, by Colm Tóibín, a fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann,
received the Rathbones Folio Prize in England in 2022.
2.
The Danish author, Christina Hesselholdt, paraphrases Thomas Mann's
famous novella, Death in Venice (1912), which was
published in German as "Venetian Idyll" earlier this
year.
Our heartfelt thanks to the Lübeck master.
1Thomas
Mann unconsciously prepared himself for battle...
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/mit-dem-zauberberg-bereitete-sich-thom...
Roman Bucheli, December 31, 2024.
2Thomas Mann unconsciously
prepared himself for the fight...
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/mit-dem-zauberberg-bereitete-sich-thom...
Roman Bucheli, December 31, 2024.
