The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain

The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos

Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) welcomed the outbreak of the First World War. He viewed it as a spiritual necessity, a chance to reassert German cultural dominance over Western ideas of democracy and enlightenment. Then, in 1924, he published The Magic Mountain, a massive novel that culminates in the slaughter of war and foreshadows the Nazi terror to come. One of the central achievements of modernism, The Magic Mountain bears testimony to its author’s dramatic political reorientation as a defender of democracy.

This poignant book is a biography of Mann’s great novel--its evolution from a short story into a two-volume masterpiece and one of the bestselling novels of the Weimar era. Deftly weaving together elements of biography, history, and literary criticism, Morten H i Jensen reveals how writing The Magic Mountain against a backdrop of world war, revolution, hyperinflation, and rising right-wing terror moved Mann to embrace the democratic and humanistic ideas he once scorned.

One hundred years after The Magic Mountain was first published, at a time when democratic ideas are again under threat, Jensen reveals the universality and timeliness of Mann’s great novel--its still-resonant debates over democracy and tyranny, time and place, illness and death.

Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer and critic. He is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen and has contributed to numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Commonweal, and Liberties.