Thurs 10/23 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Join us for a discussion on the arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain while a defeated Germany descended into political chaos.  In his new book The Master of Contradictions, 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.

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.

Deftly weaving together elements of biography, history, and literary criticism, Jensen’s book is a poignant biography of Mann’s great novel and its evolution from a short story into a two-volume masterpiece and one of the bestselling novels of the Weimar era. 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 the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Commonweal, and Liberties.

Florian Fuchs teaches German and Comparative Literature in the German Department at Princeton. He is the author of Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature, the co-editor and co-translator of History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader and has published widely in New German Critique, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Athenäum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University's Department of German, Princeton's Humanities Council, and Labyrinth Books.