Book Review

Thomas Mann’s magnum opus, The Magic Mountain, tells the story of young engineer Hans Castorp, who plans to visit his sick cousin for three weeks at a remote Swiss Alps sanatorium and ends up staying seven years. Among the memorable characters he meets at the fictitious Sanitorium Berghof in Davos are Lodovico Settembrini, the Italian humanist and champion of progress; Clavdia Chauchat, the Russian anarchist with lascivious tendencies (who Hans soon falls in love with); the radical nihilist Jesuit Leo Naphta, who sees communism as a way to bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth; and Mynheer Peeperkorn, the magnetic Dutchman whose forceful personality quickly wins him a following. The rarified alpine air is a perfect fit for the equally lofty speeches, debates, lectures, and symposiums the novel contains, on everything from science, religion, art, politics, philosophy, love, psychology, even the supernatural—all of which Hans Castrop, the stand-in for the reader, soaks up like a sponge. Yet it’s one of the novel’s greatest strengths, as the Danish literary critic Morten Høi Jensen rightly points out in his excellent new study, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain, that “its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent.”

Any summary of Mann’s grand achievement is likely to prove insufficient. Its initial publication saw a two-volume edition running over 1,200 pages. With a reputation that precedes it as an intellectual and critical “novel as architecture of ideas” (Mann’s phrasing), what’s often lost is just how mysterious and engagingly funny the book truly is—with its mixture of morbid medical language, comic set scenes, and digressions on life’s big enigmatic questions—all told in ironic tones both playful and serious. Like a fairy tale gone wrong, its remote mountainous setting and rest-cure routines are oddly comforting, including the camel-lined wool blankets the patients wrap themselves up in while enjoying the picturesque views on balconies, lounging in the “horizontal” position, often with a book in hand, mirroring the reader’s own experience of time passing with the novel. Even at its most melancholic, a cheerfulness persists.

Beyond its cozy strangeness, the extraordinary number of different worldviews, political theories, and philosophical debates contained in the book, and the depth and fervor with which they’re presented, shows Mann meant what he said in the preface to The Magic Mountain: “only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.” Thanks to Jensen situating the author in the tumultuous environment in which he wrote his famous novel, during and after WWI, the reader gains a greater appreciation for Mann’s ventriloquist abilities. Jensen writes, “Far from being divided into clearly delineated camps, the intellectual scene in the Weimar Republic was sometimes dizzying heterogeneous, leading to surprising or unusual ideological constellations. What made Mann such a perceptive analyst of this intellectual hodge-podge was that he recognized it in himself.”

As Jensen puts it, “The story of the writing of The Magic Mountain is a tale of two Thomas Mann’s.” There’s the author who “banged on the drum of German patriotism during the war” and the one who emerged as a “literary spokesman for democracy and humanism.” Alternating back and forth between the real and the fictional, Jensen weaves in accounts of Mann’s personal life, the challenges his family and country faced, his doubts and uncertainties regarding his political convictions, while also following Hans Castrop’s progress at the fictitious sanatorium. With great narrative skill, Jensen brings the whole thing together with superb results, outlining Mann’s change in world views, from once claiming western democratic principles would never take root on German soil and deeming democracy a “poison” for its civilization, to then championing western democracy in his writings and on lecture tours, demonstrating courage during a time when the far right was on the rise. Jensen persuasively shows how the writing of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a semi–“right wing manifesto” the author almost backed out from publishing on the eve of its release, allowed the author an “intellectual exorcism,” letting The Magic Mountain (also a pedagogical text of sorts) breathe and avoid the “intellectual overbearing” of the polemical essays.

Seasoned alpinists already familiar with Mann’s masterpiece will find enough in Jensen’s book to contemplate a wistful return to the source material and—as Mann always suggested readers should do if they enjoyed it—reread it. For newcomers, Jensen proves an astute, trustworthy guide to initiate a summit atop one of modernism’s grandest literary creations—a creation never intended to be so long! Its once working title, The Enchanted Mountain, humbly aspired to novella length proportions. Mann envisioned a humorous, lighter counterpart to Death in Venice. Jensen tells how the origin of the story lies in the autobiographical: Mann’s wife, Katia, undergoes open-air treatment at a Swiss sanitorium for tuberculosis (though it turned out it was a misdiagnoses). She provided her husband with plenty of fodder of the goings-on there, observations which Mann later used as “elements of composition” as he calls them in his slim autobiography, Sketches of My Life—like the patient who always let the door slam behind her. Mann visited the sanatorium himself and received a taste of the alpine medical rest-cure, as many world-famous authors did around this time, including H.G. Wells, John Steinbeck, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The doctor at the sanitorium asked Mann to extend his stay on account of a moist spot on his lung, just like Hans Castrop. But unlike Hans, Mann opts out and rejoins society. Jensen’s book blends in a brief history on tuberculosis, the ever extended, moneymaking medical treatments for it, and how the sanitorium-as-medical-cure took off in the first place.

Readers may already have some understanding of Mann’s key influences for the novel, like how vital Nietzsche’s work was to the author or that the Russian literary critic George Lukács was the inspiration behind the Jesuit Marxist character Leo Naptha. But Jensen uncovers much more, including details of Mann’s memorable first meeting with Lukács at a luxurious Vienna hotel. For an hour, Lukács, the author of The Theory of the Novel, “droned on” about his theories to Mann, who later recalled: “For as long as he spoke, he was right. And even if after his talk there remained with me an impression of almost uncanny abstractness, I also felt his clarity and intellectual generosity.” Those words could just as easily double for how one feels when encountering the array of viewpoints found in The Magic Mountain. Jensen also mentions how the coming-of-age novel Damien, published pseudonymously by the then-elderly Herman Hesse, helped set the tone and formulate the novel’s ending, using the outbreak of the First War as a natural conclusion; he shares that Mann had the American poet and Bard of Democracy on his mind while completing it, “a shot of Whitman will be necessary.” Mann found in Walt Whitman something of the robust pedagogical spirit he admired in other literary giants, like Goethe and Tolstoy—two figures who incidentally constituted a major essay for Mann, which Jensen also expertly dissects.

The Master of Contradiction covers an impressive amount of territory in just a couple hundred pages. From biographical details, including Thomas’s sibling rivalry with Henrich—a radical novelist not much read anymore—and Mann’s repressed homoerotic themes and longings, to lively historical accounts that contextualize Germany’s transitioning era. Adding a personal touch to his critical study, Jensen also describes how meaningful The Magic Mountain has been to him since he first encountered it at age twenty-three—the same age Hans Castrop was when the novel begins. A travelogue bookends The Master of Contradictions, not unlike the kind of literary tourism reminiscent of Elif Batuman or Geoff Dyer. We see the intrepid Jensen visiting the site from the novel, now a modern-day popular ski resort, hiking the same mountainous trails through six feet of snow as Hans did, smoking the same brand of cigars he favored, and drinking a cocktail in the bar (which formerly housed the X-ray examination chamber). In short, he lives, if only for several weeks, “horizontally.”

Enthusiasm for the novel and the time spent researching and even reenacting the “horizontal life” at its source shines throughout The Master of Contradictions. It’s clear from the results that Jensen hardly succumbed to the kind of proscribed idleness many of the characters faced, but enjoyed a very productive stay indeed, reading over Mann’s oeuvre, letters, diaries, as well as taking into account the literary criticism, critical reception, and other scholarship of the Nobel prize-winning author. All this helps convey how Mann used his fiction to clarify his politics, grapple with life’s deepest mysteries, and cure himself of German Romanticism, or “sympathy with death,” the kind of suicidal thoughts he suffered from in his youth. The seven chapters of The Master of Contradictions consist of titles all borrowed from subchapters in the famous novel.

The title of the book refers not just to the author, the magician himself, but to humanity in general, focusing on a line that appears in the tour de force chapter, “Snow.” Hans, lost in a snowstorm up on the mountains, dreaming and delirious, has an epiphany: “Man is the master of contractions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.” Insofar as the novel provides a message, it’s ironically lost, covered up, as it were, in the snow. When Hans wakes up, he doesn’t even remember his own insights gleaned from his dream: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.” Jensen later points out that other lines from this chapter are paraphrases from a speech Mann gave shortly after the war. All this demonstrates how far Mann tried to keep The Magic Mountain proscriptive free: nothing expounded, nothing too direct, only metaphors permitted.

Whether intentionally or not, perhaps the book wouldn’t be complete without ending on a somewhat contradictory note itself. In the epilogue, after making the case for how The Magic Mountain differs in so many ways from its shadowy book, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (just take the example from the “Snow” chapter above), he suggests that reading Mann’s masterpiece today, in these disturbingly eerily similar times to the decades in which it was first published over a hundred years ago, may just be what the doctor ordered. A recent appreciation of the novel in The Atlantic argues along similar lines. The ascent of the far right, defunding of arts and universities, high inflation, hostile treatment of immigrants, government agents on residential streets shooting to kill, all are no doubt indicators of a sickening world. I think it isn’t so much that The Magic Mountain has all the answers, but that we’ve managed to lull ourselves asleep again, and best soon wake up.