Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere
Abstract
The historical context plays a decisive role for Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”. The novel is set in the years before World War I; the beginning of the war marks the end of the story. At the same time, Thomas Mann integrates essential political debates of the Weimar Republic into the pre-war debates, as represented by the characters Naphta and Settembrini in particular. This concerns above all the question of the best form of state – monarchy or republic – on which Thomas Mann himself had taken a stand in various publications. In his “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”, which appeared shortly before the end of the war in 1918, Thomas Mann had positioned himself in favor of the monarchy. As an antagonist, Mann used the so-called ‘Zivilisationsliterat’ [civilization’s literary man], a cosmopolitan and democratic character, as embodied in many respects by Settembrini in “The Magic Mountain”. At the same time, however, Mann’s position cannot simply be identified with that of Settembrini’s opponent Naphta; for Mann had distanced himself from his earlier position in his 1922 speech “On the German Republic” in which he called for the republic at least to be recognized as the actually existing form of state. Against the background of Thomas Mann’s political positionings, “The Magic Mountain” can be understood as a continuation of the debate by other – namely literary – means. In the political statements of his essays and speeches during World War I and the early Weimar Republic, Mann does not succeed in developing a coherent political position. In “The Magic Mountain”, by contrast, i.e., in the fictional work, the deficit of a clear-cut political position can be turned into an advantage: into an ambivalence that precisely does not take sides, but allows different voices to speak and contradict each other, without unifying or synthesizing them. “The Magic Mountain” can therefore be seen as Thomas Mann’s literary closing point of the political debates of the war and early postwar years – as an attempt of mediation between the different political positions by presenting a political plurality.
