The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain, Morten Høi Jensen, Yale University Press, £22

Some novels can be read on the hoof – a page here, a page there. Others demand blocks of our time. And then there are those novels that quietly persuade us to relinquish whole days, weeks even, to a world that steadily eclipses our own. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is of this kind. Pick it up in the morning and you won’t put it down until bed. Like its protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intends a three-week visit to an alpine sanatorium but ends up staying for seven years, the reader loses all track of time. That is not to say that this 900-page book is easy-going. On the contrary, those who finish it are likely to feel that, intellectually speaking, they have scaled a mountain – one that is both steep and riven with obstacles. Anyone considering this journey, therefore, whether for the first or third time, will be glad to find that Morten Høi Jensen is standing at the base with his new book The Master of Contradictions in hand. Like a Sherpa, Jensen leads us towards the summit, his extensive knowledge of the terrain as indispensable as the glacial water we sip on along the way.

As well as being a guide to The Magic Mountain, The Master of Contradictions is also ‘a tale of two Thomas Manns’. Twelve years separate the inception of the novel from its completion, during which time the ‘thunderbolt’ of the First World War changed Mann forever. If he began the novel as a conservative Romantic, ‘obsessed with death and decay,’ Mann finished it – after nearly 20 million men had been buried in the mud – as a democratic humanist, a staunch defender of life. It was a journey, as Jensen lays out, that cost him a brother temporarily and a homeland permanently, but it also yielded a novel in which his hard-won education in the dangers of Romantic death-longing is made eternally available to us all. With the world as it is today, Jensen urges in his epilogue, we ignore its lessons at our peril.

Young Hans Castorp is a man with a predilection for Maria Mancini cigars and cuts a fine figure in his thickly lined Ulster coat. Yet however particular we may find him at first glance, he is ultimately a product of his time. As Georg Lukács observes, through him Mann reveals ‘the inner social mechanism of the modern German bourgeois psyche.’ Whereas his burgher grandfather, with his stiff collar and patrician values, embodies the old spirit of the mercantile class, Hans Castorp represents their decadent heirs. He belongs to a generation born at the ‘twilight of meaning’, when God was dead and nothing had replaced him – a generation for whom, though ‘outwardly stimulating’, life was ‘at bottom empty’. As Jensen puts it, Hans Castorp ‘bears the burden of the nihilism of his time’: the horror of what Mann, in a Nietzschean key, called the ‘hollow silence’ that follows the question ‘why?’

Periods of decline throughout history are often marked by a fixation on death and decay. Fin-de-siècle Europe, as Jensen writes, was no exception. ‘Beset by a post-Darwinian anxiety about health, hygiene, virility and nerves’, it was a civilisation in a permanent state of convalescence. In Germany, with its long tradition of Romanticism, this preoccupation with illness was arguably more acute. One of the many strengths of The Master of Contradictions is how it traces these long roots – from the poet Novalis, who wrote that ‘illness is the highest, the only true life’, to The Magic Mountain, in which the patients of the Berghof view disease as a mark of honour. Without this knowledge, as Jensen makes clear, it is impossible to comprehend how German culture gave rise to anti-Enlightenment sentiments that, in turn, paved the way for fascism. When the belief that to be alive is to suffer – and that suffering itself confers depth and distinction – is endemic to a culture, it is easy to see how Germany came to define itself against reason and discipline, against the rest of the modern world.

It is a mark of a talented writer that, in the span of a single page, Jensen shifts from lucid, informative prose to vivid, novelistic storytelling. When he describes Mann’s journey to a sanatorium in Davos – where his wife Katia was convalescing, and which would eventually be fictionalised in The Magic Mountain – we could well be reading the novel itself. The station is ‘abuzz with the commotion of travel: bent porters pulling handcarts heaped with trunks’, and the train’s ascent, ‘climbing and weaving through forests, tunnels, ravines, and narrow crevices’, makes Mann ‘dizzy’. By the time he reaches the top, with its ‘celebrated Alpine air, so unlike the salt and brine of his native Lübeck’, we too feel that we have arrived in a strange land.

The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky famously argued that ‘the technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”’. It is by foregoing the automatic and habitual ways of seeing the world, he suggests, that the artist renews our perception of reality. In The Magic Mountain, the Berghof sanatorium is the real world made strange – a place where the decadence of fin-de-siècle Europe, taken to a fantastical extreme, amounts to a life ‘lived horizontally’. From this estranged vantage point, Hans (and, through him, the reader) is invited to perceive bourgeois life afresh. Thus, while he arrives at the Berghof expecting a holiday from reality, Hans Castorp discovers, paradoxically, that he has been drawn much closer to it. He may sleepwalk up the mountain, but he descends fully awake.

For all its philosophic depth and symbolic complexity, and its elastic treatment of time, The Magic Mountain is, at base, a novel about Hans Castorp’s journey from ignorance to knowledge – it is a Bildungsroman. But as Jensen shows, this is not a term to be glossed over. Much of the novel’s innovation, he argues, lies in its ‘self-conscious… challenge’ to the conventions of the genre itself. If the traditional structure of the Bildungsroman shows the hero’s progression from naivety to productive maturity, then Hans Castorp does not entirely fit the mould. Led away from his incipient career as an engineer to the cloistered world of ailing consumptives, only to emerge at the crest of the First World War, his education unfolds, and ends, in a suspension from the duties of everyday life. What kind of maturity, then, if not of the productive kind, does Hans Castorp achieve? Here we get to the real meat of Jensen’s book.

The Master of Contradictions is deceptively slim, in that its modest length belies the breadth of its intellectual and historical reach. Packed into just under two hundred pages is a survey of Germany’s descent toward fascism, the story of how Mann became a stalwart defender of democracy, and a deeply scholarly evaluation of the literary culture from which The Magic Mountain emerged. What is most impressive about the book, however, is how Jensen manages to weave this information into his reading of the novel. When he introduces us to the troop of characters at the Berghof, it feels as though we have witnessed their growth in Mann’s mind as he absorbed, and eventually gave form to, the problems of his time. In Settembrini we can identify the voice of reason and liberal humanism; in the proto-fascist figure of Naphta, we see death-longing reach its apotheosis in a worship of terror; and in the alluring Clavdia we see that European culture’s obsession with illness amounts to a choice of death over life. Crucially, it is by preparing us to grasp the significance of these characters that Jensen is able to deliver such a convincing thesis: Hans Castorp’s journey to maturity mirrors Mann’s own – he becomes a master of contradictions.

As is the case for Hans Castorp, Mann’s journey towards contradiction entailed exposure to competing ideologies. In place of Settembrini he had his brother, Goethe and Whitman – all of whom taught him that love of humanity, a commitment to democratic ideals, and a respect for form were bulwarks against moral and cultural decay. Where Hans Castorp has Naphta and Clavdia, Mann had the gathering spectre of National Socialism to teach him ‘a silent regard for the bloody banquet’ that forever threatens civilisation. He learned the hard way that to ‘form opinions!’, as Settembrini so often demands of Hans Castorp, is to become a slave to a single view, to foreclose the possibility of truth. To become a master of contradictions, Mann had to reconcile life with death, democracy with Romanticism, decay with form. They are all, as he came to see, part of what it means to be human – balanced as we are ‘with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair.’

The Master of Contradictions is a biography, a history book and a work of literary criticism, but it is also a provocation to the present. At a time when ‘Naphta’s demonic whisper’ has found newly receptive ears, Jensen shows us that we have much to learn from Mann. Not least that democracy, as the only system that affords us the freedom to live with contradictions, must be continually reaffirmed.