Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is a classic of Western literature. Starting just before World War I, it follows a middle class bourgeois, Hans Castrop, to a tuberculosis sanitarium on the top of a mountain (hence the title). His intended 3-week visit to his cousin turns into a seven-year internal odyssey among the sick.
The Magic Mountain is written as a bildungsroman – a genre wherein the main character develops his character via experience and help from guides. In this version, an advocate of Enlightenment values Settembrini and the Nietzscheian Naphta fight over Hans's soul.
Settembrini is working on an encyclopedia of suffering in order to help expunge suffering from the world; Naphta dreams of returning to Middle Ages values in which people knew their place and accepted suffering and shortcomings as a part of life. Settembrini's dreams are based on science and progress; Naphta's require and celebrate a bit of violence and oppression to keep man in order.
And this battle for Hans's soul reflects the battle over the Weimar Republic that Mann faced as he wrote The Magic Mountain. Many bought Naphta's appeal to save Germany via order during the inter-war period; they killed communists by the hundreds and spawned the Third Reich. In turn, the Weimar Republic called for calm and appealed to Settembrini's enlightened republican (small r) values.
Want to know what lessons this book holds for today's cultists?
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