In his study of The Magic Mountain, the critic Morten Høi Jensen writes that in 2018 he resolved “to figure out why Mann’s novel is so important to me.” That meant beginning “at the source,” in Davos, the town in the Swiss Alps where the book takes place in the years before World War I.
Today Davos is best known as the site of the World Economic Forum, where the rich and powerful gather every year “to improve the state of the world,” in the words of its mission statement. But Jensen discovered that Davos hasn’t forgotten The Magic Mountain, published in 1924: the town boasts a Thomas Mann Way and a Thomas Mann Place, as well as a series of plaques displaying passages from the novel. At his hotel he even found that the “sanatorium-world” Mann wrote about “is still intact.” His room came with a balcony and a wooden lounge chair for taking a rest cure, just as patients did a century ago.
In 1912 Mann’s wife, Katia, was one of them. Her chest complaint wasn’t severe, but her doctor sent her to Davos because any problem involving the lungs raised the terrifying specter of tuberculosis, at the time an incurable disease responsible for up to a quarter of all deaths in Europe. In the 1880s the pioneering microbiologist Robert Koch proved that tuberculosis, also known as phthisis or consumption, is caused by a bacterium that spreads through coughs and spittle. The discovery won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine, but it took a long time to translate into effective treatment: the first vaccine was administered in 1921, and the disease couldn’t be cured until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in the 1940s. Before World War I there wasn’t even an accurate blood test for tuberculosis. Diagnosing it was more an art than a science, based on listening for ragged or hollow sounds in a patient’s chest or scanning an X-ray (a recent invention) for cloudy patches in the lungs.
A sanatorium could keep tubercular patients from infecting their families and neighbors, but it couldn’t really treat the disease. In theory, dry mountain air was good for weakened lungs, and a prolonged break from daily responsibilities, with plenty of food and rest, surely couldn’t hurt. But the establishments that started to spring up in the Swiss Alps in the late nineteenth century, such as the Waldsanatorium, where Katia Mann became a patient, were essentially wellness resorts where affluent guests pampered themselves in the name of health. Some died of tuberculosis, while others seemed to get well or were never sick at all; it wasn’t always possible to tell the difference. In the 1960s Katia Mann—still alive in her eighties—was told by a doctor who examined new images of her lungs that there was no sign she had ever had tuberculosis.
It’s highly appropriate that The Magic Mountain should owe its existence to a misdiagnosis, since its great theme is ambiguity: the difficulty of distinguishing health from sickness, mind from body, time from eternity. Jensen shows that the seed of the novel was planted when Mann visited his wife in Davos in May 1912 and came down with a cold. He was examined by the sanatorium’s director, whose thumping revealed a worrisome spot on his lung. He was advised to extend his stay, but his doctor at home forbade it: “You would be the first one to be examined in Davos who did not have some spot or other. Return to Munich immediately. You have no business in Davos.”
Mann heeded the warning and came home after three weeks as planned. But while he may have had no business in Davos medically, imaginatively it was another story. As a writer, he had been concerned with sickness from the beginning. His debut novel, Buddenbrooks, published in 1901 when he was just twenty-six, tells the story of a sturdy old German family that becomes morally and physically feebler with each generation. In the end the main character, Thomas Buddenbrook, keels over in the street from a stroke, and his son, Hanno, dies agonizingly from typhoid fever. In the novella Death in Venice (1912), the Mann-like protagonist, a famous middle-aged writer, dies of cholera after choosing to stay in the city during an epidemic rather than leave the object of his erotic obsession, a teenage boy.
Mann never glosses over the clinical facts of sickness. Death in Venice includes a vivid description of what it’s like to die of cholera:
Water from the blood vessels collected in pockets, and the blood was unable to carry this off. Within a few hours the victim was parched, his blood became as thick as glue, and he stifled amid cramps and hoarse groans.
But he also refuses to reduce death to a mere biological process. Inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the music of Richard Wagner, which in different ways extol death as the consummation of human existence, Mann was convinced that everything great and noble—art, genius, passion, reverence—stands under the sign of death. In his work spiritual stature is inversely proportional to health. The Buddenbrook family develops a taste for art and books just as it begins to falter in its struggle for survival. Because Gustav von Aschenbach is a true artist, he can’t tear himself free from his beloved Tadzio, even to save his own life.
A tuberculosis sanatorium was therefore just the setting to spark Mann’s imagination. By the time he left Davos, Jensen writes, he had begun to plan a novella set there, a “light and humorous” counterpart to Death in Venice, to be titled The Enchanted Mountain. Looking back decades later, Mann recalled that he envisioned a comedic story about “a simple-minded hero, in conflict between bourgeois decorum and macabre adventure.”
By the time The Magic Mountain was published, it had grown into a magnum opus. The book became an unlikely commercial success and secured Mann’s global fame, helping him win the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Master of Contradictions can best be described as a study of how the book Mann first planned became the one he wrote. Jensen charts the biographical, historical, and intellectual influences that turned The Magic Mountain into an encyclopedic novel of ideas in which all of twentieth-century European thought seems to be summarized and interrogated. He brings to the subject the breadth of knowledge and the critical insight it demands, while maintaining a clear style and quick pace. The combination makes The Master of Contradictions the rare work of literary criticism with real appeal for the common reader.
The Magic Mountain is a weighty book—ponderous, detractors like Vladimir Nabokov would say—but Mann’s original comic vision never entirely disappeared. This is the comedy of “an ordinary young man,” as the protagonist is described in the first sentence, who finds himself grappling with the darkest intellectual mysteries. At twenty-three Hans Castorp—Jensen observes that the novel always refers to him by his full name, as if it’s needed to keep his blurry personality in focus—already has the sedate complacency of middle age. He is interested in eating, sleeping, smoking Maria Mancini cigars, and not much else—certainly not the meaning of life. He has just passed his examinations to qualify as an engineer and is about to start his first job, in a Hamburg shipyard. But before that he plans to spend three weeks visiting his cousin Joachim, who is trying to recuperate from tuberculosis at the (fictional) International Sanatorium Berghof.
Mann lends a number of his own Davos experiences to Hans Castorp: the young man complains that the thin mountain air makes cigars taste bad and encounters a middle-aged woman who buttonholes strangers to lament that both her sons are dying, “tous les deux.” Like his creator, too, Hans Castorp comes down with a cold and is advised by the sanatorium’s director, Dr. Behrens, to stay a while longer. But unlike Mann, he yields to the suggestion, bewitched by the circular relationship between disease and the institution dedicated to treating it. People were sent to a sanatorium because they were suspected of having tuberculosis, but in the absence of accurate medical tests, the most legible sign of having tuberculosis was being a patient in a sanatorium. In a place where, by definition, everyone was sick, how could anyone be confident of being well?
In fact, Mann shows, it is possible to resist the siren song of illness; you just have to be dull and respectable enough. About halfway through the novel, Hans Castorp’s uncle James, a stolid businessman, arrives in Davos on a rescue mission, intent on bringing him back to what the patients snobbishly call “the flatlands.” At first James, too, seems stupefied by the air, the food, the isolation. But at dinner one night, Dr. Behrens treats the table to a graphic description of how a dead body decomposes:
The gases, you see, swell you up, blow you up until you’re immense, the way frogs look when naughty boys blow air into them, until you’re a regular balloon, and then your abdomen can no longer take the pressure and bursts. Bang!
James is scandalized back to his senses and leaves the next morning, not even pausing to say good-bye to his nephew.
It’s one of the broadest comic moments in the novel, but even here Mann’s ambiguity is at work. James’s flight shows that he has healthy instincts; he shuns talk of death and decay, and places where such talk is permitted. Hans Castorp’s interest in those subjects, by contrast, is why he finds himself strangely at home in Davos and keeps putting off his departure, until the planned three weeks stretch into seven years. Yet by removing himself from the sanatorium, James also removes himself from the novel, never to be heard from again, while Hans Castorp’s rejection of “real life” is what turns him into the hero of the book. Death, which we ordinarily think of as the end of every story, thus turns out to be the precondition of storytelling; for Mann, it is life that is unnarratable.
The story of Hans Castorp seems at first to prove Mann’s old thesis that genius and sickness go hand in hand. Under the influence of death, an “ordinary young man” is transformed into “one of life’s problem children”—a title bestowed on Hans Castorp by Settembrini, an Italian man of letters whom he meets up on the mountain and who becomes a kind of moral tutor. Settembrini contrasts Hans Castorp with his cousin Joachim, who genuinely loathes being sick and wants nothing more than to get back to the flatlands and take up his commission in the army. This is a sign that his soul is healthy, even if his body isn’t; Settembrini calls him “a respectable fellow…not prone to spiritual dangers.”
Hans Castorp, however, has the root of sickness in his soul, even though it’s never quite clear whether his body is actually diseased. He is “the more important personality—and the one in greater danger,” Settembrini warns. And as his physical existence atrophies in the sanatorium’s unvarying routine, his mind wakes up for the first time. He becomes interested in biology and cosmology, psychoanalysis and music, the fate of Western civilization and the possibility of life after death. The novel’s length is largely owed to the many conversations and essayistic digressions on such subjects; one chapter is titled simply “Research.” Jensen writes that while visiting Davos, he overheard a waiter ask an American tourist what exactly the book is about, to which she replied, “Everything.”
If The Magic Mountain followed the same pattern as Mann’s earlier work, Hans Castorp’s education would have to climax in his death. But while several characters in the novel do die on the mountaintop, he survives, and the novel ends with him returning to the flatlands. As Jensen explains, The Magic Mountain turns out to be the story of how Hans Castorp—and his creator as well—is cured of his “sympathy for death.”
This change in Mann’s philosophy of life and art required nothing less than a world war. By the time the Great War broke out in August 1914, he had written roughly the first quarter of The Magic Mountain. But “Mann found the discipline that novel writing demanded difficult to sustain” in wartime, Jensen writes. This was not just due to material disruptions but because the war raised political questions central to his identity as a writer.
Like most German artists and scientists, Mann greeted the outbreak of the war with patriotic enthusiasm, believing that his country was defending itself against encirclement by the hostile Allied powers. He wrote that he felt “the deepest sympathy for the execrated, indecipherable, fateful Germany.” But he was aware that most of Europe took a very different view. In democratic France and Britain, Germany was “execrated” as a belligerent autocracy that trampled on international law. What troubled Mann most of all was that this view was shared by his older brother, Heinrich, a successful novelist whose style and worldview were diametrically opposed to his own.
In a provocative essay published in 1915, Heinrich Mann recounted Émile Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, when the French novelist defied the claims of patriotism to expose the injustice committed against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer framed for espionage. The implicit rebuke to German writers who rallied to their country’s flag was unmistakable. Thomas Mann took his brother’s words as a personal indictment and an unforgivable betrayal. For the next three years, he set aside work on The Magic Mountain to write a polemic justifying himself and his country.
In its own strange way, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is as remarkable as The Magic Mountain (and nearly as long).* It’s best described as a work of ideological mythmaking, in which Mann interprets World War I not as a geopolitical conflict but as a Manichaean struggle between two worldviews. On one side is France, parliamentary democracy, and the shallow ideal he calls “civilization”; on the other is Germany, aristocratic disdain for politics, and the profundity of German “culture.” This division is held to explain the entire history of Europe, beginning with the Roman Empire’s failure to conquer the German barbarians, continuing through the Protestant Reformation, and culminating in the Great War. At the same time, it explains why Thomas Mann is a better writer than his brother and why his artistic vocation compels him to hope for a German victory, no matter what the rest of the world has to say.
Reflections, which Jensen describes as “a reactionary manifesto brimful with all the tropes of German nationalism,” was published in October 1918. Just weeks later Germany surrendered, leading to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new democratic government, the Weimar Republic. In Munich, where the Mann family lived, a Communist regime seized power for several months. Most Germans who shared Mann’s wartime views responded to these events by lurching to the right. Munich in particular became a hotbed of far-right extremism; in 1923 Adolf Hitler made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power in the city with his Beer Hall Putsch.
Yet at this critical moment, Mann made a surprising political about-face. Instead of attacking the new republic, he called on young Germans to support it. He reconciled with Heinrich, essentially admitting that his brother had been right about politics and he had been wrong. In the 1920s he became one of the leading defenders of German democracy, using his international reputation to sound the alarm about the rise of Nazism. After Hitler took power in 1933, Mann was so identified with anti-Nazism that it was too dangerous for him to return to Germany from a speaking tour abroad. A writer who had put Germanness at the center of his identity ended up spending the rest of his life in exile, refusing to move back home even after the end of World War II.
In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers had to negotiate what Lionel Trilling called the “bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” None did so more inspiringly, overcoming greater inner and outer dangers, than Mann. How was he able to avoid the temptations that snared so many of his contemporaries on the right and the left? And what can we learn from his example?
The best answer to these questions, Jensen shows, can be found not in Mann’s political essays and speeches but in The Magic Mountain. Returning to the manuscript in 1919 after a four-year hiatus, he realized that it was impossible to continue the story as if the war had never happened. As Mann writes in the novel’s foreword, Hans Castorp’s story takes place “before a certain turning point, on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and consciousness.” The Magic Mountain thus became a pre-war story viewed through a postwar lens.
There are few overt references to the coming cataclysm. One of the most poignant comes late in the book, when a group of patients holds a séance and succeeds in summoning the ghost of Joachim, who died of tuberculosis many pages earlier. He appears wearing a strange metal helmet, as if he “had plopped a bit of field gear, a cooking pot, down over his head and then fastened it under his chin with a strap.” Hans Castorp doesn’t realize, as Mann’s early readers would have, that this is the kind of steel helmet German soldiers wore in the trenches in World War I to protect against flying shrapnel. It is as if Joachim, the aspiring soldier, has posthumously enlisted in a war he didn’t live to fight.
The most profound effect of the war on Mann’s novel was to change his judgment on “sympathy with death.” He had long believed that death was beautiful and profound, and he supported Germany’s war in part to defend this belief, which he saw as distinctively German. But the deaths of some nine million soldiers in World War I—including roughly two million Germans, the most of any country—could not be described as beautiful or profound, and after 1918 Mann revolted against the prospect of his country embracing a new cult of war and death.
In The Magic Mountain, that prospect is embodied in the character of Naphta, a Jesuit pedagogue who appears in the second half of the novel as a foil to Settembrini. While Settembrini is constantly insisting on the importance of reason and progress, Naphta tries to win Hans Castorp over to a comically grotesque blend of Catholicism, communism, and fascism. For a reader familiar with Reflections, the running debate between Settembrini and Naphta is clearly a reprise of Mann’s wartime argument with himself: civilization versus culture, the West versus Germany, progress versus reaction. But in fiction, Mann found a freedom that polemic couldn’t offer.
The climax of these arguments, and of the novel, comes in the chapter “Snow,” in which Hans Castorp goes skiing and gets caught in an Alpine snowstorm. Blinded and disoriented physically, as he has long been intellectually, he has an epiphany on the brink of death: there is no need to take a side in the contest of opposing values, because they are not really opposites. “Death or life—illness or health—spirit or nature”: these ideas appear to be mutually exclusive, and Mann long believed that it was nobler to choose the first set of alternatives over the second. But now Hans Castorp realizes that even contradictory ideas have the most important thing in common: they can only exist in the mind of a human being. As he puts it, “Man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.”
Jensen takes his title from this famous sentence. On its own, however, the phrase “the master of contradictions” is potentially misleading. It seems to suggest that the novelist triumphed over contradictions by resolving them, overcoming them. Mann means something different: the human being is the master of contradictions because the human mind is their medium or substrate. The preservation of life is therefore the precondition for all the values Mann associated with death—for art, irony, passion. Only the living can feel sympathy for death; the dead are simply dead.
For that reason, Mann concludes, sympathy with death must not become absolute, in the way that Naphta or Hitler would make it absolute—by killing other people or oneself. “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts,” Hans Castorp vows. A century later this principle remains the basis for any liberalism worthy of the name, and whenever liberalism is under threat from fanatical ideologies, The Magic Mountain will remain relevant—which makes Morten Høi Jensen’s book only too timely.
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