The Master of Contradictions

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—