THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain

JENSEN Morten H?i

ISBN 10: 0300233744 / ISBN 13: 9780300233742

Published by Yale University Press, 2025. 9780300233742, 2025

About this Item

1st edn 1st printing. 8vo. Original silver lettered grey cloth (Fine), dustwrapper (Fine). Pp. 238 (no inscriptions).

Seller Inventory # 198291

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain
• Publisher: Yale University Press, 2025. 9780300233742
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300233744
• ISBN 13: 9780300233742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature crit

About this title

Synopsis

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

“Jensen brings to the subject the breadth of knowledge and the critical insight it demands, while maintaining a clear style and quick pace. The combination makes The Master of Contradictions the rare work of literary criticism with real appeal for the common reader.”―Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books

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 Høi 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.

About the Author

Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer and critic. He is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen and has contributed to numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Commonweal, and Liberties.