Up The Magic Mountain, Again

 The celebrations continue for Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; just as the times keep it relevant.

Fascism. The meaning of life. What is a healthy life for individuals and nations? And then there is more.

Almost of the following rehash the novel's plot.

The Role of the Modern Writer by Morten Høi Jensen (Yale Review) was the first I read of today's selections, but it may be better read last. It reeads less over the background of the novel and more about  it themes, and Mann's themes generally.

As the critic Henry Hatfield observes in his essay “Achieving the Impossible: Thomas Mann,” which appeared in TYR in 1977, Mann “generally included an element of self-portraiture in his essays on figures which especially interested him.” These reflections were part of the larger self-examination of his life and work, the adhesive that binds his fictional and political writings. To the question raised in “Address at the Dedication”—“how can the natural modesty and the ironical disposition of the artist be reconciled with a certain unironic, rather decisive, and somewhat moral attitude towards the outer world and its social problems?”—Mann offered the drama of his innermost being.

Deutsche Welle published Suzanne Cords' Why Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' resonates 100 years later opens the view from Germany to the rest of world, does more to encourage reading the novel:

Hans Castorp may have hoped for further favors from the beautiful Russian, but when the First World War breaks out, the patients flee the Berghof. Castorp joins a volunteer regiment; his trail is lost on the battlefield.

At the end of "The Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann asks: "Will love one day rise from this world festival of death?"

The novel has been translated into 27 languages.

For Isabel Gracia Adabel, who has translated "The Magic Mountain" into Spanish, the novel has lost nothing of its relevance: "A century has passed and we are still the same, resolving conflicts with wars."

Still, she adds: "It's about very serious things, but the book itself is an enjoyable experience. And you don't need three doctorates to enjoy Thomas Mann, because his writing is full of irony and humor." 

Australian Alexander Howard's The Magic Mountain is a sweeping critique of totalitarian Europe. 100 years later, its warnings feel urgent (The Conversation) also addresses the novel's relevance.

Would he, for instance, discern echoes of the same forces he grappled with in his modernist masterpiece, now manifesting in new, yet strangely familiar ways? And would he recognise the dangers of cultural and political polarisation and the allure of authoritarian forms of thought and activity that are currently casting increasingly long shadows over our own precarious moment?

I suspect he might. In any case, these are just some of the questions worth asking as we mark the anniversary of a novel that, much like its creator, challenges us to confront the currents of history and their unsettling tendency to repeat.

Near the end of the book, Mann writes: “These were such singular times.” Viewed from the perspective of 2024, I’m not so sure.

I quibble over the idea that there are ever singular times; humanity keeps repeating itself. 

"The Magic Mountain": A novel of the century turns 100 (Blue News) is - relatively speaking - the lightest read here.

Google News also turned up a few older articles. These were the ones catching my attention.

The Harvard Crimson published Jack M. Schroeder's It’s Time to Revisit ‘The Magic Mountain’

There was a demand for escapism among Mann’s contemporaries, for works of art that ignored the ugly reality of life in a defeated power. However, Mann cannot divorce his prewar narrative from the death and destruction that immediately follow. It haunts “The Magic Mountain” and everyone involved, constructing a dramatic irony that the world these characters know will be forever changed. Joachim yearns to be a soldier for his homeland, but the reader knows he is doomed should he leave the mountain. One character, a Romantic idealist, yearns for a new world order as he downplays developments in the Balkans. The mountain is magical because it insulates Hans from what happens below until the entire continent falls into a hellish apocalypse. One could even say it quarantines him.

The mountain does more than just protect Hans from geopolitical machinations. It obscures his own mortality. Death constantly surrounds residents of the Berghof, but much like Mann’s contemporaries, they prefer to hide from painful thoughts, refusing to mention sickness in social interactions. Even in a glorified hospital, suffering can be reduced to a statistic. Hans has to actively expose himself to it in the “Danse Macabre” section to fully gauge the misery around him. That realization is only temporary, though, as Hans falls deeper into the mountain’s trance. It takes a near-death experience in the beautifully written “Snow” section for him to recognize his limitations and acknowledge the frailty of his own life. It is a self-contained adventure and dream sequence — one that reads well on its own if the novel’s size proves too formidable — that packs in enough metaphor and symbolism to fill multiple books. Indeed, Mann noted later in life that “The Magic Mountain” contains so much that it should be read twice.

That the mountain gives not a perspective on life below but is a quarantine from the madness below intrigues me - who lives in the flatlands of Indiana. 

LitHub's “Will I Come to a Miserable End?” Jenny Erpenbeck on Thomas Mann (2020) - Erpenbeck is famous enough of a writer that even I have heard of her - writes of Mann's influence on her without failing to connect him to our times.

Thomas Mann’s humor and his uncompromising portrayals would have been unthinkable if he had not already looked upon his own society from a tremendous distance, even long before he was expelled from it in 1933. It was his job, so to speak, to know what it means to be “outside.” That is at the root of Adrian Leverkühn’s entire bargain: the price that he pays for his art is that even in moments of happiness, reflection makes him a stranger. And, on the other hand, there is the power of feeling, the uncompromising will, the ruthlessness with respect to both himself and others. To be a drifter, an outcast, a third rail in a no-man’s-land, in an inhospitable territory, always engaged in an intimate dialog with borders.

I had not thought of how The Magic Mountain touches on my ideas for "Chasing Ashes" - I had more of Gabriel Garcia Marquez on my mind - only now do I see where The Magic Mountain impinges on my story. When the idea came to me, Trump was not even on the horizon; then I started writing, he was in descent; and now he is again ascendant.

sch 11/27

The Times Literary Supplement newsletter arrived in today's email, and with it a link to Karolina Watroba's Mann and the main man; The Magic Mountain at 100: a century of literary rivalries. It presents a different perspective on the anniversary - literary rivalries. Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, 

Over the past century the fortunes of these two very different masters of the German language have reversed in popular culture and scholarship alike. At the outset of the twenty-first century, David Damrosch compared the fates of the two in an entertaining footnote to his influential study What Is World Literature? – “The MLA Bibliography shows that during the sixties, Mann was more often written about in English (142 items) than Kafka (111 items). They were in a dead heat in the seventies (476 entries for Mann, 478 for Kafka), and then Kafka took a decisive lead in the eighties, rising to 530 while Mann dropped dramatically to 289. Kafka dipped somewhat in the nineties, to 411 items, but still retained a substantial margin over Mann, who had 277”. This trend continues today. In 2024, the death of Kafka has overshadowed the centenary of The Magic Mountain.

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A much more direct influence on Mann’s portrayal of Peeperkorn was Gerhart Hauptmann, the author of naturalist novels and plays such as The Weavers (1892). He was also Mann’s natural literary rival. While not exactly a household name today – though he is still regularly staged in German theatres and taught in German schools – in the early 1920s Hauptmann was the most celebrated German writer alive. Widely regarded as Goethe’s twentieth-century successor, he had been the most recent German winner of the Nobel prize in literature, in 1912, at the age of fifty. Now in his early sixties, he was an unquestionable literary icon, an imposing presence with a characteristic mane of grey hair and a repertoire of memorable mannerisms. Mann, the master of vivid description, made Peeperkorn look and sound just like him.

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This intertwining of literary rivalry with sexual and imperial politics has become particularly ripe for reassessment today. Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A health resort horror story rewrites The Magic Mountain from the perspective of feminist and postcolonial critiques. Published in Polish in 2022 (and just recently in English, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, reviewed by Claire Lowdon in the TLS, September 20, 2024), it is her first novel since she won both the International Booker and Nobel prizes in 2018. Elegant and witty, Tokarczuk’s novel pays homage to Mann’s luxuriously descriptive and effortlessly atmospheric style, but displays as much irreverence towards Mann as the latter showed towards Hauptmann.

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The centenary of the publication of The Magic Mountain may have been overshadowed by the centenary of Kafka’s death, but the English translation of Tokarczuk’s novel is not the only new publication to mark it. Not one but two new English translations of Mann’s magnum opus are in progress: Susan Bernofsky’s for W. W. Norton and Simon Pare’s for Oxford World’s Classics. Both translators have been reporting on their work on their respective blogs. In Germany, Fischer has released a handsome “deluxe edition” of the novel and Rowohlt another literary rewriting, Heinz Strunk’s pointedly titled Zauberberg 2, while C. H. Beck is preparing a dedicated compendium. A week-long celebration of the original Zauberberg took place in August in Davos, where the novel is set, and another in the autumn in Lübeck, Mann’s birthplace. Centenary events offer a chance to reflect and mark the passage of time, but the real fun lies in seeing who makes the next move as a new century of literary rivalries unfolds.

And the people up on the hill think I'm ok.

sch 11/28