Literature and Music: Thomas Sarbacher reads Mann

Perhaps the men in "The Magic Mountain" do not die of tuberculosis at all, but simply of: Exhaustion. They are still fulfilling their roles, but they are already staggering towards the nothingness nesting in their lungs in the dance of death of the Occident. Of his great love for the cat-eyed Madame Chauchat, the main character Hans Castorp is left only with an X-ray of her ventricle. And even the loftiest discussions with Settembrini can no longer make sense of the senseless against the backdrop of the First World War.
Only one person is not exhausted: Thomas Mann himself. In his descriptions of the waterfall in the Sertig valley, he soars to almost orchestral symphonies of language, in which a thousand thundering drops condense into eloquent clouds. Then again, he scatters the stylistic flowers and garlands of thought of his time over his characters like confetti that one picks out of one's sticky hair on New Year's Day. And as pleasurable as Thomas Mann's irony is for us, it is deadly for his characters. And not only for the men.

Translated with DeepL.com