Works like Zauberberg and Doktor F austus, in particular, belong to this vein. In contrast, his didacticism is refreshing. They are remarkable because Mann wrote at a time when it was so easy not to be these things–his was the age of surrealism, absurdism, symbol and neo-Romanticism, and many of his contemporaries were falling away from reality. His works, read from the perspective of early 20th-century Europe, are ideological, painful, inescapably overt. Thomas Mann is the most unflinching of writers. The quotations are from the estimable John Woods translations, with occasional edits of my own. Rather longer and more academic than most posts here. Various thoughts on the worldviews, music, and endings of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and The Magic Mountain ( Der Zauberberg), inspired by studying for my German Comps.
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