The Century-Old Book With a Message for This Season

“We live in an age of human self-contempt,” George Packer wrote this week. In an essay about Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, Packer tells readers that he believes the classic work of literary modernism saved his life during a dark time in his early 20s. It might also have something to teach us today. These days, Packer writes, people think very little of their neighbors, which is why so many are willing to accept when “our leaders debase themselves with vile behaviors and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud.” In some ways, we feel that “we deserve it.”

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Mann’s great work reflects his moral evolution in another dangerously divided era. When he started writing his novel, in 1912, he was an ardent defender of Germany’s culture—and its imperialism. He was also, as Packer puts it, “hostile to democracy.” When World War I erupted two years later, Mann stopped writing fiction and devoted his time to championing German domination and protecting his country from the spread of “liberal democracy.” He rejected, too, the idea of the political artist, dismissing those who were “using art as a means to advance a particular view.”

In 1919, after the war ended, he returned to his novel. Meanwhile, amid the chaos of a defeated Germany, the Nazi movement began to take shape. For a time, Mann hoped there might be some way to preserve conservative nationalism while staving off right-wing extremism. But he was frightened by strengthening reactionary currents, and horrified by the murder of his friend Walther Rathenau by ultranationalists; eventually, he came to accept what he called a “European-democratic religion of humanity” and fully embraced democracy.

The Magic Mountain’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, undergoes a similar transformation. Midway through the novel, a vision of “brotherly love” comes to him in a dream, and he embraces what Packer calls “the bond that unites all human beings.” By 1938, Mann was a champion of political freedom, a Nobel Prize winner, and an exile. Speaking against Hitler that year, he warned that democracy, “that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man,” was in danger. Like us, Mann was living through a dramatic and painful time. But, as Packer writes, he encouraged others to “resist the temptation to deride humanity.”

These are difficult but bracing—even necessary—words to read in the days after a vote that affirmed American support for a leader who has threatened to govern as a dictator on his first day in office and has a history of inciting violence. “As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country,” David Frum wrote on Wednesday. The uncertainty he describes—what kind of country will we be?—can provoke despair.

Mann’s story serves as a corrective to such pessimism. It took an entire war, and then the rise of fascism, for the author to let go of his old vision of order and embrace a new way of thinking. It took his protagonist seven years at a sanatorium to come to a novel, humanist understanding of life. The decades to come may bring their own shift away from an age of human self-contempt. As Mann wrote nearly a century ago, “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man, which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

The Magic Mountain Saved My Life

By George Packer

When I was young and adrift, Thomas Mann’s novel gave me a sense of purpose. Today, its vision is startlingly relevant.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Last Cowboy, by Jane Kramer

Henry Blanton wants to be a cowboy—a real cowboy. Never mind that he already runs a ranch, and the job is not all that great: He’s an unhappily married foreman of a 90,000-acre tract in the Texas Panhandle. But, at age 40, he still dreams of becoming an old-time gunslinger who roams the open plain, like the heroes of the Western movies he watches compulsively. The problem, as Kramer captures in this sharp 1977 book, is that modernity has made the free-ranging life of Blanton’s dreams almost impossible: Barbed wire constrains the cattle; Eastern conglomerates control many of the ranches; and paychecks are piddly for hired hands like Blanton, whose struggles to get by eventually drive him to a breaking point. Kramer, who’s in her 80s now and seldom publishes new work, has become a name that only serious magazine lovers would recognize, even though she spent decades covering Europe for The New Yorker. That is a shame, because her journalism at its best, as it is in this book, is as textured and compelling as that of her better-known contemporaries, and she masterfully captures life at the edges of America.  — Jared Sullivan

From our list: Seven true stories that read like thrillers

Out Next Week

📚 Set My Heart on Fire, by Izumi Suzuki

Your Weekend Read

Why Democrats Are Losing the Culture War

By Spencer Kornhaber

Social media’s role in the 2016 election—helping bundle a variety of grievances into one exciting, factually pliant narrative of elites oppressing regular Americans—has been highly publicized. What’s less talked about is that it triggered a strangely regressive counteroffensive. Democrats, of course, made memes and organized online during Trump’s first term, but they also channeled energy into reforming social media through content moderation and regulatory efforts. These efforts were prudent, and notionally bipartisan. But while Democrats seemed to yearn to bring back a less anarchic paradigm, Republicans railed against perceived liberal bias in tech—meaning they wanted, in effect, an even better mouthpiece. As media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan have long argued, new communication formats change the way a society thinks of—and speaks to—itself. By all rights, an effective political movement should prioritize harnessing such changes, not reversing them.

Read the full article.