Written seated under a Robinia tree in Dwellingup – 29th Dec. 2024
She said to him (in Zurich; Aug. 1982), “before I decide to take you seriously, you will have to tell me what you think of Thomas Mann.”
He said to her, “Who the hell is Thomas Mann?”
She said to him, “Thomas Mann represents German and European literature at its best. What sort of education system do you have in Australia if you can call yourself educated and never heard of Thomas Mann?”
Well, that discussion has worried me, until now (Dec. 2024), when I had time to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, given to me by my former Swiss-Austrian fiancé Elfi (in Sept. 1982) with the following inscription;
Well, here I am, seated under a Robinia tree in Dwellingup on 29th December 2024 with Thomas Mann in hand.
W.H. Auden (1) who married Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, sight unseen, in order to provide her with a British passport, wrote, “Who is the most boring German writer? My father-in-law, Thomas Mann.”
With such a glowing recommendation, I have resisted any urge to explore Thomas Mann, but curiosity has now tempted me to cross this ‘paywall’ and delve further.
Colin Toibin’s book The Magician delves deeply into Mann’s life and the reasons for his sobriquet The Magician bestowed upon him by his children who spent much of their lives seeking to escape his spell.
This book The Magician outlines a family touched by tragedy. Both of Mann’s sisters, and his despised sister-in-law, committed suicide, as did his oldest and youngest sons – the latter after Mann’s death, and one of his sons-in-law drowned during the second World War when the ship taking him to Canada was torpedoed.
Toibin’s book identified the defining event of Mann’s middle years being the rise of Nazism, which forced him into exile, first in Switzerland and then in America.
Mann’s failure to speak out against Hitler, fearing that his books would be banned in his homeland, comparing this to Richard Strauss’ justification for staying in Germany because it ‘had eighty opera houses’ – leads us to question the morality of a man for whom art was paramount.
Preparing myself for the onslaught of confronting this 716-page book, reveals two coincidences.
Firstly, it is exactly 100 years since Magic Mountain was published, the other is that the book was written in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos, better known now for the annual ‘talkfest’ of that sinister gathering of elites (the World Economic Forum – WEF), designing even more sophisticated schemes whereby government funding can be directed toward the concentrated beneficiaries (themselves) with the total costs widely dispersed amongst unsuspecting taxpayers of many countries.
Accompanying the WEF master strategy are their reassuring words that, “We will all own less, but be supremely happy.”
Their catchphrase should be banished with other remnants of witchcraft from medieval times.
So, now to the magnificent Magic Mountain book itself, allow me to approach it from two directions.
Firstly, has the book been relevant for its first century of existence?
Secondly, is the Magic Mountain still relevant for the coming century?
Firstly, in retrospect, this is a vital book as it allows us to look inside the minds of a cosmopolitan collection of people; an Italian Liberal, a Jew turned Jesuit, a doctor, and a seductive Russian woman. Their occupation is constant discussion.
Their conversational exploration reveals disturbing aspects of the pre-First-World-War society, and perhaps a sick Europe.
The characters, uneasy with the ‘emerging modernity’, torn between noisy ideologies. Temperaments, philosophies, and arguments that reflect bourgeois intellectual life, in the early 20th century, in the clashing wake of Hegel, Marx, Weber and Freud.
The book was written before and after WW1 and underlines the sense of encroaching conflicts and, more importantly, how far to confront or appease the aggressor.
Secondly, now one hundred years later, with the world again in turmoil; this brutal assault by Russia on neighbouring Ukraine, resulting in a war of attrition resembling the bloody grind of the First World War, causing again divisions in Europe, once again conflicted on how far to confront or appease the aggressor.
Even here, in far-away Australia in 2024, it is easy to conclude that the international political settings are even worse than one hundred years ago.
Now, we have the continuing theatrics of well-financed Islamic barbarism, resulting in the Israel-Hamas conflict and the rise of the Axis of Autocrats (the term used by Rebecca Weisser – Quadrant Editor) – the CRINKS; China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.
Yes, there is much in Magic Mountain for us to consider, again in 2024 – 25, even if it is simply to highlight the huge price we will be forced to pay unless we (yes all of us) shake loose from the debilitating disease of appeasement.
P.S.
Whilst Magic Mountain is described as a literary masterpiece, it could equally be described as a plodding challenge of fatigue, due to the lack of sparkling wit.
However, linking Davos, the town where he wrote his masterpiece, together with Mann’s 30-page description of Snow and Snowstorms, contains an element of irony.
In Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF) continues to escalate the Climate Crisis as they (the elites) tap into unlimited taxpayer funds to ‘tackle the climate crisis’. The Snow / Snowstorm chapter of the book presents a strong case in favour of adding a few degrees to our world’s temperature.
Thank you for reading.
Ron Manners AO
(1) The poet who once said, “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know!”
