“What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even fisticuffs.” Near the end of his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann presents its snowbound setting — a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Davos, Switzerland — as the microcosm of an ill-tempered age on the edge of an abyss of violence. “Every day fierce arguments, out-of-control shouting-matches would erupt between individuals and among entire groups; but the distinguishing mark was that bystanders, instead of being disgusted by those caught up in it or trying to intervene, found their sympathies aroused and abandoned themselves emotionally to the frenzy.”
In a novel crammed with uncanny premonitions of the century to come, Mann’s sketch of the dynamics of online polarisation now seems especially acute. Published exactly 100 years ago, in November 1924, The Magic Mountain unfolds in its highland Alpine enclave — a small world, but the whole world — between 1907 and 1914. We learn that the young marine engineer Hans Castorp from Hamburg, the naive, questing hero with a spot on his lung, will share the fate of his generation on Great War battlefields. Mann, already a German literary heavyweight thanks to his family saga Buddenbrooks and later stories such as Death in Venice, embarked on Hans’s story in 1913. He set it aside during the war, and only finished his epic amid the tumults of the early Weimar Republic. The project began as a compact comic tale but ballooned into a zeitgeist-defining behemoth that took the temperature of an entire civilisation — and issued a grim prognosis.
Make the long, but scenic, trek up Mann’s mountain, and you will be rewarded with vivid vistas of intellectual — and emotional — landscapes that have endured to the present day. Mostly composed when Hitler counted as a Bavarian beer-cellar ranter, and before Lenin’s regime in Russia had solidified into dictatorship, the novel presages, and models, a century of stand-offs, skirmishes, and brutal collisions, between competing world-views and ideologies that never quite triumph, but never quite surrender. That terminal moment of breakdown into “petulance”, when dialogue and disagreement fray into irreconcilable enmity, is a pivotal event. Until then, The Magic Mountain has staged a gigantic carnival of conversation between opposing principles — reform and reaction, health and sickness, flesh and spirit, lust and love, even (and above all) between life and death — that never entirely lose touch with each other. Now words will yield to deeds, chats to blows.
Peopled by a droll, picturesque cast of eccentric characters, the International Sanatorium Berghof isn’t just a political or philosophical talking-shop. Young Hans, whose ambiguous passions encode Mann’s own lifelong predicament as a married paterfamilias primarily attracted to men, must learn about body and soul, love and death, as well as history’s Big Ideas. His infatuation with the alluring Clavdia Chauchat, a central-Asian Russian with her “Kyrgyz eyes”, often makes him despise the abstractions of the sanatorium’s warring ideologues. And Mann always embodies his ideas in oddball characters, with the high-minded Italian liberal humanist Lodovico Settembrini, and the “caustic” Jesuit-trained (but Jewish-born) radical reactionary Leo Naphta, as first among equals. Later they will be joined, and dethroned, by a sinister but spellbinding Dutchman, Mynheer Peeperkorn.
Settembrini and Naphta are the two disputatious frenemies between whose poles the impressionable Hans bounces like a rubber ball. But they finally agree to settle their differences not, as before, over tea and wine or on hikes through the snow — but in a duel. Nothing except blade or bullet will resolve the endless arguments of liberal against conservative, freethinker against believer, progressive against reactionary. “The Absolute, the holy terror these times require,” thunders Naphta, “can arise only out of the most radical scepticism, out of moral chaos.” Only bloody convulsion will redeem a sick time.
With their weak lungs and strong opinions, Mann’s pair of senior wranglers gaze out from their mountain vantage-point over future decades of furious debate. The terms of the Settembrini-Naphta disputes have not really aged. If you’d tuned in, for example, to this week’s American presidential election, you would have found that liberals and conservatives, utopians and authoritarians, still go to rhetorical war armed with the weapons his antagonists deploy. Partisans continue to scrap in the same way that Mann’s Italian literary scholar, with his belief that “the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race”, does with the feline Jewish Jesuit, who maintains that flawed, sinful humanity craves “discipline and sacrifice” under the benign rod of a hierarchical authority. No other great novel of the 20th century punctures a pompous and hypocritical liberalism with such relish and cunning — at the same time as it demonstrates that the puncturing, at the hands of a ruthless and illusion-free “realism”, may pose a greater risk than the pomposity.
In an era once more beset by divisive wars of words, much of the book feels strikingly contemporary. Later writers who challenge its premises have echoed its procedures. In her newly-translated novel The Empusium, for instance, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk may probe Mann’s patriarchal blind spots with scenes of self-satisfied chinwags among bloviating blokes who believe that “a woman can only develop and retain her identity within the sphere of a man”. Still, her feminist take-down — which transfers the venue to pre-1914 Prussian Silesia — also acts as a spirited homage. Mann’s principal figures survive: Settembrini becomes “August August”; Naphta, “Longin Lukas”.
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SubscribeA wonderful piece on a wonderful writer.
A fortnight spent sensitively reading Mann, or Conrad, or Lukacs for that matter is worth a semester in any college in Britain. Lukacs was also a great admirer of Walter Scott, whom he took highly seriously.
Manns essays are also absolutely essential. His work shows for all time the hairs breadth permeability of art, politics, religion and, for want of a better word, psychology, in the European mind and culture. The profesionalised distinctions which our modern world works so hard to keep up between the humanities and the ‘social’ sciences are shown to be a mirage.
What often confuses the Western mindset is the difference between ideals and practical approaches. This concept is like playing with words and language, encouraging a one-directional way of thinking: one person thinks this way, another thinks opposite, but both could hold conflicting ideas simultaneously, moving beyond a binary perspective.
This makes them more pragmatic and realistic, rather than idealistic. Ideals follow a single path, with an opposing path viewed as contradictory. When you combine an idea and its opposite, you reach what’s behind both — a space where the Western mind often gets stuck, trapped in ideals and endless debate. Debating is not intelligent if it leads to paralysis! Acceptance of reality is tangible!
In reality, however, the outcome is physical, embodied. All nations—Russia, China, America, and others—experienced revolutions or major changes around the World Wars. If China is succeeding more effectively than us today, we don’t need words to recognize we are falling behind; they’ve realized that economics can’t be separated from the power of the people.
This is something they understood 80 years ago, while we continue to debate it still… If we as the West want to die on the hill of ideals not reality, then we must accept being like Serbia or turkey or Venezuela etc….living but not world leaders. Words are cheap…look around even AI can talk now! Lol
This contrast reveals that much of our discourse only circles around what they have already processed, and they’ve moved beyond it. In fact we should be humble and apologize keeping Davos (G7) away from them and ask how we should avoid their revolutions and painful processes today.
It is embarassing to have their revolutions now!
It is obvious the pendulum has swang!
Great comment, and one with which i largely agree. To add: if we take the Chinese way of thought, it’s difficult for Westerners to reconcile our worldview with theirs since the way language itself is constructed by the Chinese language(s) appears to lead to a different conceptual framework.
I’ve frequently advocated that we should at least try to divest ourselves of the “-isms” – the ideologies around which discourse seems to occur. The majority of people who’d consider themselves ‘educated’ just seem to do exactly what you’ve just described – circle around received intellectual ideas, most often getting precisely nowhere, but becoming more and more agitated with it! If anyone puts forward something which diverges from this framework, the result is a sense of alienation.
It’s also worth pondering on how this sense of alienation has impacted upon our immigrant communities, however welcoming or not we may have been as hosts; and part of that sense will be due to different patterns of thought. That’s not a criticism of either host or immigrant, just an observation.
I am a very successful immigrant lol. I love what you say about language framework… would like more of that.
It may (in the case of Chinese script) be as straightforward as the characters being based upon symbols, rather than letters of an alphabet (i’m no expert, i hasten to add!) but this would lead to a different conceptualisation of thoughts around how something is being expressed, which could – almost certainly does – lead to misunderstandings between the two frameworks.
What is better; deeds not words or words not deeds?
Great piece that. Thank you, worth the small monthly sub in it’s own.
I’ll get my coat
Really enjoyed reading this and must read the book. Not really a surprise that the behaviours and tendencies that are so amplified by social media these days are nothing new. But I’ve seen no one really make this point quite this clearly until reading this today.
Not sure that it’s quite correct to label Reagan, Trump and Milei (a professor) as stupid though.
At least trump can make a speech without a teleprompter.
The author draws parallels between Mann’s The Magic Mountain and today’s polarized world, particularly in highlighting the risks of authoritarianism and populism. However, the analysis overemphasizes external threats to liberalism while underexploring Mann’s critique of liberal democracy’s internal contradictions, such as its struggle to reconcile liberty and equality. This instability in the author’s perspective overlooks the potential for progress through the multiplicity and tension of opposing forces that Mann might find hopeful in today’s context.
The Magic Mountain thrives on the interplay of opposites—freedom and order, progress and reaction, life and death—arguing that dynamic tension, rather than static unity, drives cultural and societal evolution. The author’s insightful identification of the antagonism between Settembrini and Naphta as a microcosm of ideological conflict captures this dynamic but misses Mann’s broader implication: that neither side can fully prevail without the other. This tension remains essential today, especially as the forces at play have multiplied in our interconnected digital world.
Mann might see today’s era of social media and AI not just as a threat but as an opportunity to enhance cultural creation and sustain the tension that fosters progress. Social media amplifies diverse voices and perspectives, creating a mosaic of ideas that resembles the lively debates of the Berghof sanatorium. AI, when guided ethically, can analyze these diverse viewpoints and uncover patterns, enabling nuanced dialogue that transcends binary oppositions.
The proliferation of ideas and voices today represents a level of complexity Mann might have envied—a true challenge to the dominance of singular ideologies. However, Mann would also warn that unchecked fragmentation risks chaos, eroding the shared values necessary for productive dialogue. Just as The Magic Mountain underscores the necessity of balance between competing forces, the digital tools of our age require stewardship to prevent tribalism and cultural stagnation.
The optimism Mann might draw from today lies in the potential for these technologies to democratize cultural creation and foster the interplay of ideas he saw as vital. Social media and AI could offer not only platforms for dissent but also spaces for synthesis, where liberty, equality, and diversity are held in productive tension. By embracing tension rather than fearing it, we can build a fragmented yet interconnected world that thrives on the same creative conflicts Mann celebrated in his work. This multiplicity, if balanced, offers a profound cause for hope.