Reluctant readers on Mann’s Magic Mountain (Ida Herz lecture 2020)

Sanatorium Arktur, Konstantin Fedin’s Russian novel of 1940, is fashioned as a communist response to Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924). In different ways, Fedin and his characters are shown to be both critical of the ideological backdrop of Mann’s novel and intensely drawn to the story world he portrays. This paper contextualizes a comparative reading of Der Zauberberg and Sanatorium Arktur with reference to discussions of and reactions to Mann’s work by many other communist, Marxist, or generally socially critical readers, ranging from Bertolt Brecht, Vittorio de Sica, and Thomas Bernhard to an anonymous Russian steamship machinist described by Peter Huchel.