The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain"

By Morten Høi Jensen

“A nuanced portrait . . . thoughtful [and] perceptive.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The Master of Contradictions is many things: a biography of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a history of the Weimar Republic, and a story about one reader’s relationship to the most beguiling novel of the twentieth century. Morten Høi Jensen writes from a place of profound feeling and deep erudition. He is the perfect guide to the novel’s intricate, enchanted world; I did not want to stop exploring it with him.” —Merve Emre, contributing writer, New Yorker

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.

Hardcover
248 Pages 
Yale University Press, 2025    
5.50 x 8.50 inches 
ISBN 9780300233742
History