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

The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos

"A lavish work of historical analysis that doubles as a kind of psychological thriller. Mann's magnum opus is not just a novel, Jensen suggests, but a thinly veiled spiritual autobiography."-Anna Ballan, New Criterion

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 Hoi 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.

Hardback | 248 pages | Published January 2026