Magic Mountain Research Articles

The Ambiguity Commune of The Novel “The Magic Mountain”: Social Class Tensions and Inquiry of Self

The Ambiguity Commune of The Novel “The Magic Mountain”: Social Class Tensions and Inquiry of Self

Not on the magic mountain anymore

Not on the magic mountain anymore

Seafloor incubation experiments at deep-sea hydrothermal vents reveal distinct biogeographic signatures of autotrophic communities.

The discharge of hydrothermal vents on the seafloor provides energy sources for dynamic and productive ecosystems, which are supported by chemosynthetic microbial populations. These populations use the energy gained by oxidizing the reduced chemicals contained within the vent fluids to fix carbon and support multiple trophic levels. Hydrothermal discharge is ephemeral and chemical composition of such fluids varies over space and time, which can result in geographically distinct microbial communities. To investigate the foundational members of the community, microbial growth chambers were placed within the hydrothermal discharge at Axial Seamount (Juan de Fuca Ridge), Magic Mountain Seamount (Explorer Ridge), and Kama'ehuakanaloa Seamount (Hawai'i hotspot). Campylobacteria were identified within the nascent communities, but different amplicon sequence variants were present at Axial and Kama'ehuakanaloa Seamounts, indicating that geography in addition to the composition of the vent effluent influences microbial community development. Across these vent locations, dissolved iron concentration was the strongest driver of community structure. These results provide insights into nascent microbial community structure and shed light on the development of diverse lithotrophic communities at hydrothermal vents.

Усадьба-санаторий и город-сад: «счастливые пространства» в романе Н.А. Островского «Как закалялась сталь»

The article examines modifications of the “estate topos” in the novel by N.A. Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934), which is a landmark for the socialist realist canon.. In the first part of the work, the estate is a “heavenly” topos, a place separated from the unprepossessing working outskirts, a “shelter for the persecuted,” a secluded “happy space,” according to G. Bachelard’s definition. At the same time, the estate and the surrounding wild nature — lake and forest — are the birthplace of the socialist dream of a future happy society. The second part of the novel reveals the transformation of the “estate topos” in the literature of the USSR: “happy spaces” for the collective life of the new society are organized in the former owner’s estates. Ostrovsky’s novel demonstrates features of “crypto-estate mythology” characteristic of the estate topics of the Soviet era. The research shows a continuity of the “happy space” of the former owner’s estate with the phenomenon of the “collective paradise” of the Soviet sanatorium. In Russian and foreign literature of the 20th century, it becomes the place of initiation of heroes as writers (there is a parallel with the sanatorium utopia in T. Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, 1924). However, in the socialist realist novel, the sanatorium is perceived not as a solitary locus of subjective self-determination but as part of a larger world of united fighters for a bright future for humanity. Blind Pavel is introduced into the connection of spaces, a kind of “heterotopia,” by the radio receiver given to him, which returns the hero to the world as a large construction site, a “world plant.”

Back to the Magic Mountain

The paper seeks to highlight the precise sense of timeliness of one of the most relevant writers of the troubled 20th century. With his work “The Magic Mountain”, Thomas Mann reveals the ordeals of German society, which, in fact, mirrors the latent tragedies in Europe that triggered the First and, later, the Second World War. The leading role of German science and culture is explained by its economic and technological high standards at the beginning of the 20th century. If development at levels not seen before was able to provide improvements in life, it was not efficient in resolving human disputes marked by bloody conflicts. At the existential level, the ordeals were no less challenging. The description of a character’s change of life, the never-ending conflict of ideas arising from the coexistence of minds with distinct experiences, and the duality of ideas explored unfold in a unique narrative in this novel from the beginning of the century. This is a bibliographical and documentary research carried out in the theoretical field with a qualitative approach. We propose an analysis of the personal conflicts of each character, aligned with the underlying reality and connected to it. We conclude that Mann’s impact and understanding of the human condition goes beyond his time and is still meaningful in the 21st century.

Thomas Mann’s political writings between 1914 and 1918

The subject of this article is Thomas Mann's political writings from 1914 to 1918 and their place on the map of his work. The author argues that texts such as Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, considered by many scholars to be an exception among Mann's writings caused by an outburst of national feeling on the threshold of the First World War — as they gravitate towards German nationalism and revolutionary conservatism — are in fact an integral part of his oeuvre, as they complete the themes that the German writer had addressed in novels and novellas written before The Magic Mountain. Foremost among these themes is the situation of the Bürger as a specifically German form of citizenship at the moment of the clash between Kultur and Zivilisation. In Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann praises its twentieth-century, post-industrial incarnation, which Fritz Ringer calls the Mandarin. At the same time, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man serves as a space for the German writer to introduce irony as his leading artistic technique, preparing Mann to take no side in Settembrini's dispute with Naphta in a novel about a Swiss sanatorium.

I and We: Hannah Arendt, Participatory Plurality, and the Literary Scaffolding of Collective Intentionality

ABSTRACT This article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to notions of the “We” and tests key Arendtian concepts through relation and juxtaposition with philosophical and literary texts from different periods, thereby complicating discussions of (1) how individuals participate in, shape, and are shaped by various forms of “We”; (2) how, within collective participation, individuals come to care about being themselves; and (3) to what extent literary texts enable and encourage processes of identity construction and (re)configuration. For Arendt, the “place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (2017, 387–88) is “the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice” (2017, 393)—the shared practices and institutions that Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (2009, 15). In this article, the authors argue that by exploring and critiquing “forms of life” literature can expand the range of activities we recognize as fostering “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 465). The three literary provocations presented here—Callimachus’s “Hymn to Apollo,” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace—all interrogate the situated interactions of “I’s” and “We’s” that instantiate the “participatory plurality” of the shared world.

Possible Futures

Possible Futures

Unmasking the Red Death: Introduction

During the so-called High Lockdown in the UK (March to June 2020) a group of staff and students from University College London’s School of European Languages and Cultures (SELCS) gathered weekly for a Summer Book Club (SBC) to discuss works as diverse as Thomas Mann’s epic tale of convalescence and philosophical exploration The Magic Mountain and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s captivating comparison of the experience of race in Nigeria, the UK, and the US in Americanah. Among the true “pandemic-lit” that we chose to focus on was Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. In discussing this tale, we could not help noticing the parallels between ourselves and Prince Prospero and his courtiers, who—in the face of devastating disease sweeping the realm—devoted themselves to aesthetic pleasures within their castellated abbey, just as we too found refuge in (closed) community and culture. Another of our book choices revealed a similar and uncanny parallel: in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven a band of actors and musicians roam a devastated America, putting on Shakespeare for the survivors of another deadly pandemic. Their motto, “Because survival is not sufficient”, a quotation from Star Trek, chimed with our sense too that, in the face of the pandemic, culture had a central role.

A Sympathy with Death: Weimar Politics from Heidegger to Mann

The controversial issue of Martin Heidegger’s Nazism has posed hermeneutic challenges since well before the philosopher’s death. This essay approaches the political-philosophical conflict of Heidegger’s early work not through consideration of explicitly problematic statements and writings but through comparison of the structural framework of Being and Time (1927) with Thomas Mann’s roughly contemporaneous theoretical accomplishment in The Magic Mountain (1924). Specifically, the essay argues for a deep affinity between the two texts’ constellations of language, temporality, and death. By demonstrating the extensively documented ties between the novel’s philosophical framework and Mann’s politics, the essay claims that any understanding of Heidegger’s work must be contextualized alongside its concrete political valences in shifting ideological paradigms of the early Weimar Republic. This analysis suggests a new mode of ethical critique of Heidegger’s magnum opus that focuses more on the text’s greater theoretical edifice than on the problematization of localized passages.

ITALIJA U STVARALAŠTVU TOMASA MANA: NOVELA „SMRT U VENECIJI“

Whether it is travelers who visited Italy: Paolo Hofmann (The Will to Happiness), Tonio Kröger (Tonio Kröger), Gustav von Aschenbach (Death in Venice), Adrian Leverkühn (Doctor Faustus) or Italians in literary works: Girolamo Savonarola and Lorenzo de’ Medici (Florence), Ludovico Settembrini (The Magic Mountain), Mario and Cipolla (Mario and the Magician), of Thomas Mann’s oeuvre, the image of Italy and Italians is seen directly or indirectly in relation to Germany and the Germans. Behind the terms SOUTH and ITALY, a complex relationship is revealed that reflects Mann’s political and intimate understanding of these terms. Relying on the achievements of imagology, this paper asks, based on the novella Death in Venice, how the perception and presentation of oneself and the other support and maintain established images and notions of Italy and Italians as different, unconventional and exotic.

СЮЖЕТНЫЙ МОТИВ «РАСТЯЖЕНИЕ ВРЕМЕНИ» (по роману Томаса Манна «Волшебная гора»)

The paper deals with the subject-plot motif “time extension” in the novel “The magic mountain” (“Der Zauberberg”) by Thomas Mann. The following constitutive features of this motif have been singled out: 1) the ability of the main character to concentrate on his inner world by means of a close introspection; 2) the usage of hermetic encapsulation device which consists in the limitation of the time and space conditions of the main hero’s life; 3) rethinking of values and life orientations forming new basic world-view concepts, such as life, death, disease, love. The application of the leitmotiv treated as recognizable main hero description and reiteration of other characters’ actions makes it possible to create the tonality of cantilena in the novel.

Reascending the magic mountain: Thomas Mann's Dr Krokowski and modern psychiatry – psychiatry in history

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Stanley Kubrick's Magic Mountain: Fiction as History in The Shining

AbstractStanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann's novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick's horror film reflects its creator's and its era's struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust.

In Interview: On the Development of Video in the Theatre

German film artist Jan Speckenbach ingeniously contributed to the development of live video on the stage, and this discussion focuses on his education, as well his as experimental collaborations with director Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne Berlin, starting in 2000. Speckenbach’s background in film and media studies facilitated his explorations of uncharted territory in the theatre, going from a set of fixed cameras on the stage to the use of a camera crew with live-editing for augmented images as part of the whole directing concept and process. His first-hand insights into how actors have interacted with this new technology and how filmmaking can be an integral part of the theatre indicate clearly that filmmaking has played an invaluable role in recent theatre history. Speckenbach here also speaks of his collaborations with other directors, notably Sebastian Hartmann and René Pollesch, and about the future perspectives of this technology, which has changed the theatre altogether.Jan Speckenbach studied art history, philosophy, and media in Karlsruhe, Munich, and Paris during the 1990s. At the beginning of the new millennium he participated in the development of video theatre with Frank Castorf and, now a successful filmmaker, he also continues to work in the theatre. His short film Gestern in Eden [Yesterday in Eden] premiered at Cannes in 2008, while the full-length feature film Die Vermissten [The Missing] was shown at the 2012 Berlinale and Freiheit [Freedom] at the 2017 film competition at Locarno. In 2020 he directed the live-stream of Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain, after Thomas Mann’s novel] at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (premiered online in November 2019), which was subsequently invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Thomas Irmer is the editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based monthly Theater der Zeit. He has co-edited two books on the work of Frank Castorf – Zehn Jahre Volksbühne Intendanz Frank Castorf (2003) and Castorf (2016). During the last forty years he has authored, among other significant writings, numerous analytical articles and interviews on Castorf’s creative output.

Time and Death: Heidegger’s Temporality in The Magic Mountain

Time, is a classical motif both in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Heidegger’s ontology. Reading The Magic Mountain in terms of Heidegger’s ontology helps us generate a totality view of temporality in Heidegger’s sense and a fresh approach to interpreting the age-old discussion in the novel. This essay attempts to offer up Heidegger’s ontology on time and death as a way of revisiting the classical motif — the meaning of time that illuminated in Thomas Mann’s narrative experiment, the Zeitroman or time novel. The novel’s portrayal of death makes it possible for Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the novel, to understand ‘authentic temporality’ what Heidegger calls ‘the meaning of the Being’. In this sense, the bewitchment of the magic mountain lies in the magic of time and death. Castorp’s closeness to death enables him to understand death in the authentic way, which is in Heidegger’s words, ‘enter into death advance’ or ‘Being-towards-death’ and experience a ‘free and pristine’ state, as Mann puts it. By extension, the experience of Castorp provides readers a perspective of apprehending Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ and ‘authenticity’. Dasein or Castorp is not Being only to grow to well understand himself or live a new life under the influence of illness and death as many protagonists in conventional Bildungsroman, but Being that understands himself in terms of his Being-experiencing time’s authentic temporality in authentic ‘Being-a-whole’ through ‘Being-towards-death’.

Two banks of the same river. Thomas Mann and his publishers Samuel Fischer and Gottfried Bermann Fischer

The enduring collaboration between the outstanding German writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and the Frankfurt-based publishing house S. Fischer Verlag started in the late 19th c., with the publication of Mann’s early novella Little Herr Friedemann [Der kleine Herr Friedemann]. The year 1897 marked the start of Mann’s correspondence with Samuel Fischer and then his successor Gottfried Bermann Fischer, which spanned more than fifty years; the committed publisher saw to the publication of such landmarks of 20th-c. German literature as Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks — Verfall einer Familie], The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg], Lotte in Weimar , the four installments of Joseph and His Brothers [Joseph und seine Brüder], Doctor Faustus [Doktor Faustus], and Felix Krull [Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull]. The novels appeared in print even during the author’s enforced emigration at the time of Nazi persecution. Resulting from this collaboration with the publisher, which exemplifies preservation and propagation of German literature’s humanistic traditions, was the fact that, upon Mann’s death, none of his completed works ended up locked up in his desk — all having been published.

Navigation Stars

Navigation Stars John Barth (bio) Navigation Stars from postscripts: just desserts (Dalkey Archive Press, October 11, 2022). The firmament of literature is ablaze with stars of every magnitude: too many even to count, much less to read. But just as celestial navigators of old chose from that dazzling overabundance certain first-magnitude beacons to steer by, writers of fiction or poetry will have been significantly influenced by particular predecessors, as well as by particular life events, mentors, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other circumstances, and will consciously, half-consciously, or unconsciously steer by those stars through their artistic odyssey. Speaking of which (the Odyssey): my own short list of principal literary navigation-stars begins with Homer’s Odysseus, the paragon and prototype of the Mythic Wandering Hero, as famously defined by Joseph Campbell. Homer’s epic Iliad impressed but never much moved me: those crazy-jealous Olympian deities, the slam-bang warfare, the Trojan Horse gimmick. . . . But the post-war Odyssey, with its stressed-out veteran’s long journey home, his temptations and seductions by Circe and the sirens and his resourceful dealing with them (plugging his shipmates’ ears against the sirens’ irresistible calls, e.g., but lashing himself to his ship’s mast with ears unplugged in order to hear the sirens’ song but not be seduced thereby), and his equally resourceful wife Penelope’s strategy of forestalling her persistent suitors by endlessly unweaving and reweaving her web—brilliant! And a hard act to follow, as they say in showbiz. But my second navigation-star (historically second, not second in importance: these four are equally important to me) follows Homer easily by being nothing like him: It’s Anonymous’s Scheherazade, the heroine of the Kitab alf laylah wa-laylah, or Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, or The Arabian Nights, depending on the translator. Scheherazade’s bedtime stories to her homicidally demented royal spouse are certainly entertaining, but her entertain-me-or-die “ground-situation”—the oral-narrative equivalent to “publish or perish”—is what sets Nights apart from such other admirable tale-cycles as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with their multiple tale-tellers: They tell their tales to stave off boredom; she tells hers to save her life and her country. I came to know Ms. Scheherazade (and Boccaccio and Chaucer and many another yarn-spinner) as a very green undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University, helping to defray my tuition expenses [End Page 155] by working part-time as a book-filer in the university’s “classics” library and not infrequently borrowing from the return-cart items not included in my course curriculum: such genre-busting (or at least genre-stretching) marvels as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Somadeva’s Ocean of Story, Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, and many another. Star #3 is less dramatic, but no less richly entertaining: Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Him too I first met as an undergrad, not this time on the book-return cart but in a wonderful “Great Books” course in which we studied each item with a professor whose specialty it was: Dante’s Divine Comedy with Charles S. Singleton, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain with Leo Spitzer (a refugee from Hitler’s Germany) and DQ with Pedro Salinas, an elderly poet-refugee from the fascist Spain of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Splendid mentors all, and I have a particularly fond memory of reading Cervantes with Salinas en español, not only because I so enjoyed that book and that professor—I enjoyed them all!—but because of a moment especially felicitous for a callow undergraduate like my then-self, less prepared than my classmates who’d graduated from good urban high schools or private schools, unlike my poor dear rural high school, which back then didn’t even have a 12th grade. “When is the first moment in the book,” Salinas asked us, “When Don Quixote acts on his mad delusion of knight-errantry?” The consensus of the class was that it was when Quixote mistakes the windmills for giants, attacks them on horseback with his lance, and...

"The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann: from the Idea to its Actual Implementation

"The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann: from the Idea to its Actual Implementation

Принцип замкнутого становления музыкальной формы: функциональный и семантический аспекты

In the artistic process the task of creating an artistically integral and completed form is initially set and then solved by the artist who created it. A work of art appears as a result of the decisions made, the outcomes of which compel the recipients of the art work to interpret their role and meaning. Being present in a broad field of compositional possibilities induces the analyzing musician towards a search for the criteria of their arrangement. In the present research work the present function is assigned to two principles, universal in their nature, formulated in Russian musicology by O. Sokolov – those of progressive development and self-contained formation. Turning her attention on the second of them, the author of the work examines its manifestation in various genres – from small-scale works to cyclic forms. By the example of works by Mussorgsky, Debussy, Webern and Prokofiev, as well as Chopin’s Prelude No. 2 opus 28 (1831) and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7 (1960), original variants of implementing the phenomenon of self-containment capable of expanding the perception of its functional-semantic potential. The chosen angle of research appeals not only to Sokolov’s terminology brought out into the article’s title, but is also relatable to the methodology of the scholar who diffuses the laws of musical form on literary writing. The present circumstance makes it possible to turn to verbal sources – Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, Anton Chekhov’s novelette The Black Monk, and Alexander Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan. During the process of studying the mechanisms of self-contained formation their dependence on the level of the complexity of the form and the particularities of style and genre is discovered. In the small-scale compositions the action of the principle is realized by means of intonational evolution on an inner-thematic level; the self-contained quality of the large-scale forms becomes the result of a special strategy of juxtaposition of themes. Frequently both processes are predetermined dramaturgically, which inevitably implicates not only functional, but also semantic waymarks into analytics.