Davos Mann

A new book on ‘The Magic Mountain’ grapples with the contradictions of history.

By Anthony Curtis AdlerFebruary 26, 2026

• Philosophy & Religion

• Literary Criticism

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN is a monster: sprawling, maddening, imposing, unclassifiable. The ripe fruit of German realism, it nevertheless reads almost like a fairy tale, set in a frozen, enchanted milieu from which everyday life’s prosaic struggles, banished by omnipresent illness and death, have been replaced with interminable conversations, séances, and bacchanalia. It is a novel of ideas that, ventriloquized by the memorable eccentrics filling its pages, appear as so many symptoms of the malaise driving Europe toward ruin. It is a bildungsroman, but the Bildung it describes is more like the growth of a culture in a petri dish than the “progressive” development of a character engaged with the world. Living “horizontally,” Hans Castorp spends seven years in a suspended state of recovery before graduating into the catastrophe of a war for which nothing could prepare him—or anyone else.

Yet The Magic Mountain is also an endlessly charming monster, and perhaps its greatest charm consists in how, as if suspending time, it lets the reader luxuriate in a world she knows is doomed. Morten Høi Jensen, author of an acclaimed biography of the neglected Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, beautifully captures the quality of the novel in the prologue to his newest book, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (2025):

Hans Castorp doesn’t know it yet, but those three weeks will gradually, over the course of hundreds of pages, swell to seven years […] Many seasons that do not seem like seasons at all will pass, patients at the sanatorium will arrive vertically and depart horizontally, and down in the flatlands, unbeknownst to Hans Castorp, the world will move inexorably toward a terrible catastrophe.

Jensen is a gifted writer and a subtle, sensitive reader of Mann. To his credit, he resists the temptation to emulate The Magic Mountain’s timeless, time-suspending charm by writing one long book about another long book. Too much attention to the “the encyclopedic and intellectual aspects of The Magic Mountain,” he notes, have obscured the playfulness of Mann’s fiction. Master of Contradictions, if not quite playful, is entertaining: a brisk, captivating tour of the “lone summit” in the “jagged terrain of Thomas Mann’s middle career.” Deftly interweaving history, fiction, and biography, Jensen reads The Magic Mountain, first conceived in 1912 but not finished until 1924, through the author’s transformation from a reactionary Romantic conservative—hostile to democracy, convinced of Germany’s unique path among European nations—to an outspoken defender of the embattled Weimar Republic. The result is a remarkable, often dazzling counterpoint between the basso continuo of a grand historical narrative taking us from the outbreak of World War I through to the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, the soprano line of Mann’s domestic and personal life, and the novel itself, which, squeezed between the two, seeks to harmonize both. Especially captivating and sobering is Jensen’s vivid portrait of the political situation in Munich after the end of the First World War—its transformation from bohemian mecca to political hothouse to Nazi incubator.

Jensen doesn’t so much explain the novel through Mann’s life as explain Mann through the novel. There’s a risk in this, however: the danger of identifying the real author with a myth of the self, constructed by an artist too inclined to self-mythologization. Mann first approached politics through a narcissistic identification with the myth of the German Sonderweg (“exceptional path”), according to which the sensitive, inward-turned, irrational German soul—convulsed by music, seduced by Dionysian depths—can only be harmed by such foreign imports as democracy.

Jensen recognizes the potency and danger of this myth and Mann’s own struggles with it. Just as Hans Castorp heals in the International Sanatorium Berghof’s rarified air, so Mann, Jensen argues, recovers from this myth’s seduction through writing The Magic Mountain, though not without the more violent emetic of the Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). The latter offered an emotional and ideological catharsis but also articulated the perspective through which Jensen now understands the novel’s accomplishment. Invoking the Reflections’ rhapsodic praise of “aestheticism”—“art’s lively ambiguity, its deep lack of commitment, its intellectual freedom,” in Mann’s words—Jensen notes that, however fascinating and intellectually rich, it’s also a “spectacular failure of precisely the aesthetic point of view it affirms.” The “master of contradictions” ends up sounding “like the servant of a single position.” It is not that The Magic Mountain overcomes the aestheticism that underwrote Mann’s reactionary politics, but rather that the Reflections fails to live up to its own standard. It is not “aesthetic enough.” Concluding the last chapter, Jensen writes:

And what of himself? Hadn’t Mann triumphed over his sympathy with death? His Reflections, he now understood, was too much a product of that sympathy, that head-tilting temptation to kick over the traces and surrender to the permanent horizontal position. But it had been necessary, he thought: his love of humanity had more depth as a result of his having gazed into the abyss. Only by facing death can we choose life. It was, he’d decided, the way of genius.

Even accepting such aestheticism, one may still wonder whether the pat moral with which Jensen ends—“Only by facing death can we choose life”—articulates a truly “aesthetic” mastery of contradictions. Is the mastery of contradictions just a matter of balancing life and death against one another, hovering between them, choosing life while facing death—walking forward while facing backward?

Such aestheticism, indeed, offers a purely aesthetic solution to a problem posed in aesthetic terms—a mythic solution to the problem of myth. Mann’s struggle against the German myth—itself very much a product of the 19th century—seems to take place entirely in a mythic element, or, rather, within a reality that remains paired with myth, just as the ordinary first name Hans remains hitched to the odd family name Castorp. “Time,” Mann writes in the first chapter (in John E. Woods’s translation), “is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.” The International Sanatorium Berghof in Davos, Switzerland, is the kingdom of the shades, and Castorp, who arrives bearing a possibly fatal disease within him, will be treated by his mentors and guides to a gigantomachia of Europe’s ideological specters: the dead battling, and burying, the dead. Indeed, the enchanting power of The Magic Mountain owes much to how everything in the novel, starting with the sanatorium, claims dual citizenship—in reality and in myth. Just as Castorp’s grandfather appears most like himself when his waxen body lies in state, so every description, painting a world “on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and consciousness,” is a death mask.

The final chapter’s closing words assure us that “mastering” contradiction is the “way of genius,” and, consequently, that The Magic Mountain is a work of genius, and Thomas Mann is a genius, as is the blond, bland, affable, indolent Hans Castorp, “life’s problem child”—a sponge for the habits around him. Yet this identification of a certain kind of mastery with genius is not innocuous. The mastery in question—the mastery of contradictions—is, after all, ultimately self-mastery. One need only look at Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to realize that such mastery, far from being the task of the few and rare, was the way of mediocrity, moderation: the mainstay of the everyday virtue expected of the average citizen—who, in all things, but especially in the habituated relation to pleasure and death, should never be or do too much.

But if such a prosaic mastery becomes so difficult in Hans Castorp’s time, it is neither because death was more in-your-face than before nor because people had lost sight of “timeless values.” The problem, rather, comes from transplanting such an ethics of self-mastery from the archipelagic world of the Greek polis to the flatlands of history, where the individual is confronted with its monstrous, destructive, anonymous powers. It is precisely with the rise of the philosophy of history in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany that ethical self-mastery will become comprehensible only through an aesthetic concept of genius. Since history is the work of geniuses—world-historical geniuses, but also the “genius” of the people—only the genius can master history. This tradition culminates in another mountainous, monstrous masterwork: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927, shows how everydayness is grounded and sustained by authentic moments of resolute being-toward-death, thus offering the most profound and rigorous articulation of the “aesthetic” ethics that Jensen discovers in Thomas Mann. Unlike Mann, however, Heidegger could not resist Hitler’s siren call. Is this because, failing to learn his own lesson, Heidegger became the servant of a single position? Or is it not rather that Heidegger, despite his knack for sniffing out the backstory of philosophical concepts, never disentangled himself from the concept of genius?

Mann’s mastery, indeed, seems to have rested on an especially volatile foundation: repression. Jensen treats the question of homosexuality with a delicacy both admirable—it has the charm of Mann’s own gentle irony—and frustrating. After admiring his 13-year-old son Klaus in his bathing suit, Mann writes in his diary that it seems “quite natural that I should fall in love with my son.” A chat with an attractive young man in a train leaves Mann wondering if he’s “once and for all done with women.” André Gide sends him his Corydon (1920), but Jensen tells us neither about its scandalous content (a philosophical defense of pederasty) nor what Mann, if anything, thought of it. The Magic Mountain, one suspects, is also a volcano, built on the pyroclastic pressures of unresolved desire. Robert Musil, who found the novel “intellectually glib and exasperating,” writes: “What does his problem child, Castorp, do in all that time on the Magic Mountain? […] Obviously he masturbated! But [Mann] removes the private parts from characters as if they were plaster-of-Paris statues.”

Jensen cites this passage, along with much else casting an oblique light on his own argument. But he does not draw any conclusions from it. Mann’s ultimate enthusiastic support for the Weimar Republic, Jensen argues, resulted from lessons learned while working on his novel. Did this support rest on a genuine, radical, deep vision of democracy, born from a confrontation with history’s contradictions? Or was his vision of democracy built on repression and compromise, and hence doomed to explode, volcano-like, just as the Weimar Republic exploded into the catastrophe of National Socialism?

When Mann finally wrests himself from the abyss, it is, Jensen reminds us, through an “unexpected source: the American poet Walt Whitman,” whose works had just appeared in German translation. Enthusing over this “gift from heaven,” Mann remarks: “[N]ow I really see that what Whitman calls ‘democracy’ is nothing other than what we, in an old-fashioned usage, call ‘humanity.’” Jensen concludes that “to achieve what Mann, with an eye to the future, called ‘the new humanity,’ Germany could not rely on Goethe alone: ‘a shot of Whitman will be necessary.’” This “shot” of Whitman recalls the “nice daily glass of porter” that the slightly anemic Hans Castorp, still a schoolboy, was prescribed, already presaging his illness. Yet Whitman, the poet of a new world, of a vital, electric eroticism, is a draft that must be drunk full. Mixing a shot of Whitman with his Goethe, Mann appears not as a master of contradiction but as a symptom of the contradictions of his time; Jensen has not found the “fullness of harmony”—the title of his final chapter before the epilogue—but rather a false utopia, suppressing real contradictions in the name of a false conciliation. This is not a moral failing on Mann’s part: we are creatures of our times, as he knew better than most. But it is perhaps a critical failure of Jensen’s The Master of Contradictions, delightfully readable and admirable in so many ways, that it allows the myth of genius and mastery to conceal an all-too-human truth.

The world of The Magic Mountain is cut off from the time when it was published by the chasm of the First World War. But it also stands in a mysterious affinity to the present, which now witnesses the global order built on the ruins of the Second World War strained to the point of collapse. This correlation haunts the reader of The Master of Contradictions throughout, but Jensen does not speak of it until the epilogue, which begins by summoning, séance-like, The Magic Mountain’s characters: “They’re still with us, Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen, Naptha and Settembrini (those two especially), even Clavdia Chauchat and Mynheer Peeperkorn.” Recalling the novel’s final sentence (“And out of this worldwide festival of death, the ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love rise up out of this, too?”), Jensen concludes his own book on a prophetic note: “For the sake of the future, we had better find a way of answering The Magic Mountain’s final question in the affirmative.”

But another correlation also haunts us: the Davos of the sanatoriums has become the Davos of the World Economic Forum, where the world’s business leaders and political elite gather yearly. Jensen’s silence on this is unnerving. Is Mann’s “idea of education and democracy[,] a continuing process with no end point of perfection”—his Goethean “pessimistic humanism”—so far apart from the neoliberal global order that, to a significant measure, the World Economic Forum has advanced, and which now, with the likes of Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, is morphing into something different and worse? Earlier, Jensen tells us that “The Magic Mountain’s brilliance is produced by instability attempting to preserve form, by a process of ceaseless dissolution and renewal of itself.” This sounds uncomfortably close to the “creative destruction” that the Silicon Valley elites extol. If there is another “festival of death” in our world of drones, autonomous agents, hypersonic missiles, and hydrogen bombs, and if anyone will survive it, one hopes that the survivors will have learned something more than those lessons that could not save us the first time around.