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The Master of Contradictions
Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain"
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Brief Description
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...
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The Master of Contradictions
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Description
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 Høi 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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780300233742
Publisher: Yale University Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 06 January 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Yale University Press
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 248
About the Author
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.
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