Abstract

The paper aims to juxtapose and compare the notions of temporality, memory and civilization in Thomas Mann’s two seminal novels: Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. It sheds light on a range of Mann’s topics and motives, such as the tension between cyclic and linear time in the bourgeois milieu, the artefact mediated memory, the unobvious relationship of familial and social history and the role that fate plays within them, possible concepts of temporality in a metaphorically ill and weakened civilization. These analyses serve the aim of sketching out a philosophy of history which Mann tacitly but steadily employs throughout his oeuvre.

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