Voltaire is a man of thought Frederick, a greater hero, is a man of action. Mann opposes Frederick the Great and Voltaire as archetypes of the opposition. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Culture isĬompatible with all kinds of horrors-oracles, magic, pederasty, human sacrifice, orgiastic cults, inquisition, witch-trials etc.-by which civilization would be repelled for civilization is Reason, Enlightenment, moderation, manners, skepticism, disintegration-Mind (Geist).* His ‘Thoughts in War’, his praise of Frederick the Great as a man of action, his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, are definitions of the German genius which, he asserts, is concerned with Nature, not Mind, with Culture as opposed to Civilization, with military organization and soldierly virtues. Mann spent the war years writing passionately in support of the German cause. Work on the novella was interrupted by the First World War. Both tales represented the fate of someone out of context, on a holiday visit, encountering love, sickness and death with a peculiarly German mixture of fascination and resignation. The Magic Mountain was to be the satyr play that accompanied the tragedy-the comic and parodic tale of a jeune homme moyen sensuel, caught up in the dance of death, amongst the macabre crew of the sanatorium. Death in Venice was a classically constructed tragedy of the fall of a great artist and intellectual. Its intellectual germ is related to Mann’s great novella, Death in Venice. This is the biographical germ of the novel. There is an ironic twist to this story which would have amused the novelist-Katja, it appears was misdiagnosed, whereas Mann himself, in his post-mortem, was indeed seen to bear the marks of an earlier tubercular illness. Mann, however, did not stay in the magic mountain, but hastened back to Flatland and Munich, where his own doctor advised him to pay no attention.
Behrens in the novel diagnoses Hans Castorp. The consultant diagnosed a ‘moist spot’ of tubercular infection, just as Dr. During that time, he said, he suffered a troublesome catarrh of the upper air passages, owing to the damp, cold atmosphere on the balcony. Mann himself visited her for four weeks in May and June. Friedrich Jessen’s ‘Waldsanatorium’ from March to September, suffering from a lung complaint. In 1912 Thomas Mann’s wife, Katja, stayed in Dr. Titles in Everyman’s Library INTRODUCTION
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