The first layer, which forms the basis of Jensen’s book, is a gripping account of the personal transformation that Thomas Mann underwent during the writing of The Magic Mountain. For, as he was working on the novel, it was working on him. The transformation was so drastic that Jensen speaks of “two Thomas Manns”: the one who started the novel in 1913 and another who finished it in 1924. The “first” Mann was the celebrated author of such masterpieces as Buddenbrooks (1901) and Death in Venice (1912)—books as exquisite aesthetically as they were cosmopolitan in tone and vision. Even though Mann’s fiction was, as Jensen observes, “closely associated with a fin-de-siècle atmosphere of decadence and decline,” when the First World War broke out, he adopted a strikingly nationalist stance, defending all things German against foreign (especially French) influence, as well as against the cosmopolitanism displayed by the German authors—including his own brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann—who opposed the war. Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann thought that Germany (along with the rest of Europe) was sick. Unlike others, however, he believed that he had found a cure: the war itself. The bloodshed, in his view, was exactly what Germany needed not only to overcome its sickness but to assert itself against a Europe in decline. He speaks of “the need for a European catastrophe,” which would give Germans the chance to “elevate” themselves and become “prouder, stronger, freer, happier.” You can’t help thinking, as you read such things, of the “terror” Leo Naphta celebrates in The Magic Mountain, the terror which “our age” needs and “will create for itself.”
Rather than giving Thomas Mann reasons to worry, the war seems to have offered him a new joie de vivre. Not even the prospect of personal loss deterred him. In a letter he sent to Heinrich only a few days into the war, he wrote:
It is fairly certain that if the war lasts long, I shall be what is called “ruined.” So be it!… Shouldn’t we be grateful for the totally unexpected chance to experience such mighty things? My chief feeling is a tremendous curiosity—and, I admit, the deepest sympathy for the execrated, indecipherable, fateful Germany.
Less than a month later, in another letter to Heinrich, he speaks of “this great, fundamentally decent, and in fact stirring peoples’ war.” One of the first victims of this stirring war, as far as the two Mann brothers were concerned, was their own relationship: they quarreled and would not speak to each other for some seven years.
The culmination of Mann’s bellicose nationalism is Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), which he wrote while he was in the middle of writing The Magic Mountain. Jensen deems it “the strangest and most puzzling book Thomas Mann ever wrote.” It combines political analysis, philosophical essay, cultural criticism, autobiographical writing, and other things besides. There is considerable rambling in this book, along with shrill expressions of anguish and rhetorical exaggeration—“not exactly qualities the coolly ironic author of Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice was known for,” as Jensen observes. A brief sample should suffice:
Whoever would aspire to transform Germany into a middle-class democracy in the Western-Roman sense and spirit would wish to take away from her all that is best and complex, to take away the problematic character that really makes up her nationality; he would make her dull, shallow, stupid, and un-German, and he would therefore be an antinationalist who insisted that Germany become a nation in a foreign sense and spirit.
The “second” Thomas Mann is the one most of us are familiar with: the tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal Mann, the strong supporter of the Weimar Republic, a “literary spokesman for democracy and humanism”—Thomas Mann the antifascist figure. The shallowness and cynicism of the German politicians, the incompetence of those charged with running the war, and the blunders and eventual defeat of the German army certainly had something to do with the birth of the “second” Mann. Yet, as Jensen persuasively shows, something else played a part: his work on The Magic Mountain during those years. In a 1922 letter to Arthur Schnitzler, written while he was still working on the book, Mann admits that his recent infatuation with humanism “may be connected with the novel on which I have been working for all too long, a kind of Bildungsroman and Wilhelm Meisteriade in which a young man (before the war) is led by the experience of sickness and death to the idea of man and the state.”
It would be simplistic to reduce the first Thomas Mann to Naphta’s views and the second to Settembrini’s, yet the two characters cannot be overlooked by anyone trying to make sense of Mann’s great transformation. Indeed, the reason why Naphta and Settembrini are so compelling, and so haunting, may be that there is so much of Mann himself in both of them. Naphta is certainly disturbing, but he is also fascinating. He may be a dark thinker, but that’s precisely what we need if we want insight into our own darker side. Mann pours considerable sarcasm into his portrayal of Settembrini, yet there is a sublimity about this character that wins the day. The values Settembrini preaches—tolerance, humanism, liberalism—may not seem the most exciting things, but it is the internalization of precisely such prosaic values that, in the long run, prevents us from devouring each other. This is something Mann himself must have realized as he tried to make sense of the formidable political jungle of the Weimar Republic, and Settembrini helped him figure it out. As Mann wrote The Magic Mountain, the novel gradually rewrote its author.
One of Jensen’s most astute observations in the book is about the relevance of Mann’s novel for the world we live in today. It is “impossible to read The Magic Mountain a hundred years after it was first published,” he writes, and “not feel a shiver of recognition.” The novel forces us to face “our own nihilism and political backsliding,” and supports our intuition that “what is past rules the thoughts and deeds of humankind today”; it forces us to contend with the “all-too-real possibility of a new, more terrible thunderbolt shaking the foundations of the earth.”
Exactly a hundred years ago, when influential prophets of doom such as Oswald Spengler were announcing that the age of democracy, humanism, and liberalism was over, Thomas Mann had the saving naïveté to believe that it was not. He knew that the Weimar Republic, though so precarious in appearance, was the best hope that decent Germany had at the time. In the short run, that hope was utterly crushed, but in the long run, Mann proved the prophets wrong. That’s why, in the dark and hopeless place in which we find ourselves today, besieged by so much indecency, the story of The Magic Mountain can teach a lesson not just about the importance of remaining decent, but also about the proper horizon for hoping. And for all that we have Morten Høi Jensen to thank.
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