Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer whose recent book, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press, 2025) presents, through the lens of one of the foremost German novelists, a sweeping view of the cultural and political situation in the years leading up to the triumph of fascism in Germany. Jensen narrates in lyrical and painstaking detail the internal contradictions at the forefront of Mann’s political leanings as he penned the novel that would solidify his place in German letters. In the process, he sheds a light into the darker corners of the life of a writer who would become renowned for his principled stand against fascism. I spoke with Morten Høi Jensen via Zoom about the research process for this book, the fragile conditions of social democracy in Germany in the years preceding its dramatic decline, and the lessons that our contemporary societies might draw from our writers and artists as the conditions of our own democracies decline.
One thing that struck me about the book is how unique it is in terms of the generic forms it straddles. At times, the book reads as biography of Thomas Mann, literary analysis of The Magic Mountain, and cultural history of Germany from the Imperial period through the rise of Nazi Germany. It would seem to be of academic interest, and yet it’s so accessible. Was it your idea to do something unique, or were you sort of surprised about where the project took you?
I think that reflects my own slightly wayward career. I’m not an academic, despite being published by Yale. I have taught, but I’ve taught writing to undergrads, and English composition to nurses. I’m not an academic or even an expert on the subject of Thomas Mann. So I think that the form of the book reflects very much my own literary background, and also the things that I like to read in the sense that a strong narrative current is something I always appreciate in writing. I’ve always tried to be accessible. I think it’s of very central importance that you try to lull the reader in some sense into interest in a subject that may not come natural.
What is your literary background?
I have an English undergraduate degree, and then I got my Master’s in something called Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. That was a mixture of literature, philosophy, politics—kind of like a broad intellectual history degree. Then after that I worked in publishing and began freelance writing, mostly book reviews. I think the form of the book reflects that for about a decade now, I have been someone who mostly writes book reviews. So being able to synthesize and summarize a great deal of content in as little time or space as possible is something I’ve become fairly good at. I think the book review and literary essay is very detectable in this book, stylistically.
Can you describe your research process? What volume of Mann’s letters did you have to read, for example, and how many times did you actually read The Magic Mountain?
Good question. I think I’ve read The Magic Mountain six times from the first page to the last page. But obviously there are entire sections and chapters of the novel that I’ve read over and over and over. And I can’t even say how many times because there are, as you’ll remember from the book, certain pivotal moments in the novel that I isolate and write about at somewhat greater length. My research process was very chaotic and scattered because I was writing this book as I was leading my life and trying to make ends meet, which was not always easy. I was living in Brooklyn when I wrote most of the book. For long stretches, I had to put the book aside, as I didn’t always have the time required to work on it. So, the research process was very reading-based. It’s going to sound terrible, but I don’t take a lot of very careful and detailed notes. I sort of type notes into the chapters themselves with references to the books, but pretty much all of the research was just a matter of reading a lot, including, of course, Mann’s letters, reading books about The Magic Mountain, reading biographies, and reading his diaries. And then sort of trying to read around the subject matter as well. Obviously, a lot of German history. And I tried to read a lot of contemporary novels as well. Contemporary to the time, I mean. So, many of the novels that were being published at the same time as The Magic Mountain, which is a fairly interesting thing to do because it’s very dissimilar to the other novels of the modernist period, especially in Germany, but also more broadly. It really does kind of stick out, and it is somehow a very strange outlier of a novel. So, the research was very reading intensive. And then I had to let the all the reading that I’d done marinate in my mind and it took its time to become cogent thoughts and so on.
I think it’s of very central importance that you try to lull the reader in some sense into interest in a subject that may not come natural.
Just to make explicit some of those contemporary German novels, you mention a number of times in the book Joseph Roth, Erich Maria Remarque. Were there any others you had in mind?
Certainly Thomas Mann’s own brother Heinrich Mann. I don’t think I mentioned Alfred Döblin in the book, but Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is a kind of anti-Magic Mountain, because it’s set the heart of Berlin during the Weimar era, and it’s this collage novel, really in tune with the metropolis experience. It’s very reflective of the 1920s in a direct stylistic way that The Magic Mountain just isn’t. I think this is something that Mann was very aware of, and wary of because he feared several times when he was writing The Magic Mountain that it would not be of interest to anyone, that it was already an old-fashioned book stylistically, and he sort of wondered why he was continuing with it at certain moments of writing it. I think Döblin is a good example too because they knew each other fairly well. He’s a good example of a more or less contemporary writer who’s nothing like Thomas Mann.
One thing that emerged from the biographical aspect of the book was how very unlikable Thomas Mann as an individual seemed to be. I was surprised by how inflexible he was in his interpersonal relationships.
I’ve been wondering about this a lot because it’s actually something that comes up quite a lot with Thomas Mann in biographies and in memoirs, and in writing about him. In his defense, I’m obviously writing about him at a really dramatic time in his life. We see him at one of his worst moments politically and we end with, I think, a much more sympathetic character. I do leave him right at the moment when Mann is his best, which is in the following two decades, until the end of the Second World War, because he is quite courageous and uses his enormous fame and his reputation to really fight the Nazis, especially when he comes to the United States. He does a lot of honorable things. But it’s true that on a purely personal level, you’d be hard pressed to find a single line anywhere describing Mann in favorable terms. You know, I’ve never come across someone’s diary entry that was like, “Oh, I was over at Thomas Mann’s house the other night. What a great guy.” And according to his own children, he could be a quite forbidding and austere and cold father. I’m sometimes kind of tempted to defend him on these points. I don’t know what it is about him, but I sympathize with his neuroses and anxieties. He was an intensely neurotic and a very fearful person, and it comes out a lot in in his fiction. I do feel somewhat protective towards him, in a weird sense. But yeah, it’s certainly the case that he wouldn’t have won any popularity contests in school.
It’s a blunder that he recognizes belatedly, of course, to have defended the German war cause and to have ever entertained the idea that the war served anything but destruction and death and annihilation.
I wonder how many other people would be surprised, given his posthumous reputation as a staunch anti-fascist, to learn about his support for the First World War. I wonder what his about-face tells us about his personal convictions, if anything.
He’s very typical of the German intellectual circa 1914 when he joins the war cause at the outbreak of the First World War, because to the German state—despite this famous line about Germany being the land of poet and thinkers—writers were not of much importance to the post-1871 Bismarkian German Empire. It was a very centralized state bureaucracy. It was a state for bureaucrats and lawyers and economists, not philosophers and poets. And so it was quite easy for writers to feel that they had no real connection to the state itself, and that it was something remote from them. Of course, this divide collapses with the outbreak of war, and suddenly they feel that there is this fusion happening between German culture and the German state. Mann is caught up in all that and suddenly the war provides a solution to his own artistic and personal crises, especially vis-a-vis his brother, who was a much more overtly political writer. It’s a blunder that he recognizes belatedly, of course, to have defended the German war cause and to have ever entertained the idea that the war served anything but destruction and death and annihilation. The idea that Thomas Mann believed in, that it was somehow a fight for Germany’s existence, or that Germany was defending its cultural and intellectual achievements, that was, of course, just total make-believe. That war was so hideously pointless. And he couldn’t see it at the time. You can say a lot of negative things about him, but but he conducts himself, I think, quite honorably after the war, as he begins to revise his political wrongdoings and his misplaced sympathies, especially as he recognizes that there was a little overlap there with what becomes the National Socialist Party.
In Reflections, Mann paints social democracy as poison or alien to German culture, and then, as you narrate, does an about-face on that in the wake of the First World War, with the rise of fascism, and the fragile but promising covenant of the Weimar Republic. Why did he think that social democracy was antithetical to the German temperament? Is this just some kind of tragic misreading of Nietzsche that was prevalent in Germany at the time?
It wasn’t even just social democracy. It was democracy itself that he thought was poisonous to the German soul. It is a very weird idea with a very weird history. Every time I thought I had wrapped my head around it, I discovered that there was more to it. It’s an idea that is not unique to Thomas Mann by any means. It was very, very common among conservative German intellectuals at the time. It has its origins in the wake of the French Revolution, and a certain fear of popular political uprisings as being something very dangerous. And that combines with this very strange idea that the German people were were fundamentally different than the French or the English or the Italians or what have you. Germany’s fate was to be a kind of bridge—and here we’re getting into some very weird geo-spiritual politics—or some kind of mediator between an enlightened West and a “barbaric” east. By a barbaric east what they meant really was Russia. Additionally, the Germans saw themselves as a uniquely musical people, a people in which the interior life had greater depth than among other people. Walter Lepenies calls this the specific German ideology. It’s related to the genre of the Bildungsroman, which is the novel of spiritual inner development. There was this cultural belief that the British and the French were concerned with more superficial things, that what mattered to them was mercantilism, Republicanism, liberalism, rationalism, that this was all a way of making society fundamentally mediocre, that greater equality on a political level would result in general mediocrity. And what mattered to Germans was not democracy and reason, but a connection with some kind of darker human nature, with darker forces in human nature. So, it’s a very strange idea that had a lot of cultural mileage in Germany in the nineteenth century, especially as the nation was being unified. And this was one of the unifying ideas, usually expressed as a German Kultur versus Western civilization.
[T]he Germans saw themselves as a uniquely musical people, a people in which the interior life had greater depth than among other people.
The Magic Mountain is hailed as a quintessential European novel, and yet it eschews simple categorization. How do you view the position of this novel in literary history? We talked about it a little bit alongside its contemporary novels, but how do you view it like if you take a wider lens?
There’s a Mann scholar, Hermann Kurtzke, who said that The Magic Mountain is unique in that it has no successors. He said it wasn’t a particularly influential novel. It was a big and important novel, but he argued that it was not an influential novel. And I sort of know what he means because if you pick a novel like Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses or The Great Gatsby, if you sat down and made a list of all the novels that they subsequently inspired or influenced in some way, you could probably come up with very long lists, whereas The Magic Mountain doesn’t have that inspirational or generative kind of afterlife. I think what I’ve come around to is that it did found a very short-lived Central European novel genre. I can only really think of three novels, including The Magic Mountain in this genre. The other two are Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and then Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers. Both those novels are sort of similarly big novels, and they all deal in one way or another with the First World War. Musil’s novel is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the First World War. And Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, which really consists of three novels, is set immediately before and immediately after the First World War. And like The Magic Mountain, they are filled with with a kind of novelistic essayism in which some of the ideas of the time are taken up for debate, whether in the form of characters or dialogues. They’re idea-heavy novels. Both Musil and Broch were Austrian writers, but of course wrote in German, and they sort of resented Mann a little bit, both for his wealth and stature, but also, I think, because he helped them both quite a lot, including financially. It’s a bit of anxiety of influence, I think. So I really see The Magic Mountain now as this unique starting point of the Central European novel. It’s probably controversial to say it’s “Central European” because Germany is not usually included in a definition of Central Europe. But if you look at the term historically, then it absolutely was. But in terms of novels that came directly out of the First World War, they are very reflective of some of the tensions happening in German and Austrian society, and in European societies more broadly, and then are filled with ideas and have the reputation of being intellectually very heavy.
Is there a contemporary literary culture that could breed a book like The Magic Mountain? Do we see any of those similar concerns reflected in the work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai who just won the Nobel Prize in literature, for example? Could we see any kinds of parallels in the work of our intellectual heavy-hitters today?
That’s a really interesting question. I was an intern at New Directions in 2012 when Santantango was published, and Krasznahorkai did an event in New York with James Wood. It was a huge occasion. It felt very meaningful to see a “difficult” Central European writer of long and demanding novels win that award. I think one should always be careful about playing the prophet when it comes to where things are going and so on, but we do inhabit right now, similar to the the years before modernism, a sense that that our world as we have known it for the last many decades has irrevocably changed. Perhaps we have felt this way for some years, but it seems to have accelerated, especially in 2025, this feeling that we are living through some sort of rupture in time. We haven’t experienced a war on the magnitude of the First World War, but you don’t necessarily need to in order to live through a similar sense of world historical change. The destruction and genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration’s assault on American democracy, also, I suspect, some after-effects of the pandemic. And then, of course, the widespread collapse of the neoliberal political project, all those things mean that we are now in this very unfamiliar territory, where even thinking a year ahead seems perilous. I do think that there are parallels that you could make to the moments right before and right after the First World War. And so it is very interesting to think what will happen and what kind of artistic movements and projects will grow out of this rupture in time.
I try in the book not to belabor any historical parallels. I wanted them to kind of arise of their own.
That speaks directly to my final question, a loaded question. I was wondering if you could unpack some of the ideas that you alluded to in the epilogue, about how the political, social, economic contingencies of interwar Germany are echoed in our current climate. The rise of a strident, uncompromising, intransigent right-wing parties across the world comes to mind. Why does it feel so important for you to be publishing this book now?
I first had the idea for the book in 2017. Back then, I thought that there might be some contemporary relevance to The Magic Mountain. I couldn’t tell you what that was because I didn’t even know it myself yet. I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books on Thomas Mann, and something about him—his struggles and political battles—just kind of stuck with me. And then, purely by accident, it took me as long as it did to actually finish the book. But certainly, in the last two years, and when I was really finishing it last year in the spring of 2024, it felt at times like I was writing about contemporary history. Same thing when Covid happened. All of a sudden there was a worldwide respiratory illness. I’m sitting here writing about tuberculosis, etc. At the same time, I try in the book not to belabor any historical parallels. I wanted them to kind of arise of their own. I think in the Epilogue, which I wrote in February of this year, I would not have written it that way today because in that moment, I truly didn’t know what to say. Like many other people, I was totally shell-shocked. And so it ended up being much shorter than it should have been. But what it means to publish this book now, I wish I could say. It’s hard to be optimistic. Although even something as seemingly innocuous as Krasznahorkai winning the Nobel Prize is something to cling to. But it makes me somewhat fearful for the future, knowing what comes after this sort of cataclysm. And as you say, with a similar political movements, and Europe, where I live now, on the point of complete disintegration after many decades of peace and cooperation. We know the history and yet we seem incapable of acting. We seem to insist on behaving as if we don’t know the history of what happens when these movements come into power.
I think that if I were to simplify things, I would say this book is a story of a conservative who recognizes where the conservative movement is headed, and out of the sense of wanting to do the right thing, defends democracy against what becomes national socialism. And one wishes that more conservatives had similar crises of faith, if we can call them that, in the last few years, because they still, to me, seem like Trump cheerleaders in the United States and the same thing in Europe. I guess I would say that I wish more conservatives had been as principled as Thomas Mann was back then. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain is now available from Yale University Press.
Morten Høi Jensen is a Danish-American writer and the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (2017) and, most recently, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. He has contributed to the New York Review of Books, Commonweal, the Washington Post, and is the European Liaison for Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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