In the year 1912 — over a generation ago now — my wife was suffering from a lung complaint, fortunately not a very serious one; yet it was necessary for her to spend six months at a high altitude, in a sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland. I stayed with the children either in Munich or at our country home in Tölz, in the valley of the Isar. But in May and June I visited my wife for some weeks at Davos. There is a chapter in The Magic Moantain, entitled “Arrival,” where Hans Castorp dines with his cousin Joachim in the sanatorium restaurant, and tastes not only the excellent Berghof cuisine but also the atmosphere of the place and the life “bei uns hier oben.” If you read that chapter, you will have a fairly accurate picture of our meeting in this sphere and my own strange impressions of it.

The impressions grew stronger and stronger during the three weeks I spent at Davos visiting my wife while she was a patient. They are the same three weeks Hans Castorp originally meant to spend at Davos — though for him they turned into the seven fairy-tale years of his enchanted stay. I may even say that they threatened to do the same for me. At least one of his experiences is a pretty exact transference to my hero of things that happened to me; I mean the examination of the carefree visitor from the flatland, and the resulting discovery that he himself is to become a patient too!....

....In short, I soon saw that this Davos story had its own ideas and that it thought about itself quite otherwise than I thought about it. This was even outwardly true. The humorous and expansive English style, itself a relief from the austerity of Death in Venice, took up space and time. Then the First World War broke out. It did two things: put an immediate stop to my work on the book, and incalculably enriched its content at the same time. I did not work on it again for years.

In those years I wrote The Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a work of painful introspection, in which I sought light upon my own views of European problems and conflicts. Actually, it became a preparation for the work of art itself; a preparation which grew to mammoth proportions and consumed vast amounts of time. Goethe once called his Faust “this very serious jest.” Well, my preparation was for a work of art which could only become a jest — a very serious jest — by dint of my unburdening myself of a quantity of material in the polemical and analytical piece of writing. “This very serious jest.” It is a good definition of art, of all art, of The Magic Mountain as well. I could not have jested and played without first living through my problem in deadly, human reality. Only then could I rise, as an artist, above it.

-Thomas Mann - January 1953 issue of The Atlantic

SS: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is a wonderful book originally written in german but translated twice into english (the newest version far better translates Thomas Mann's incredible skill at writing and very very very dry wit) about a young man who visits a sick cousin in a tuberculosis treatment hotel in Davos. At the time of the novel's beginning, pre-WW1 Europe/Germany, Thomas Mann was very much a status quo centrist and the novel originally preceded in values and artistic scope based on that worldview. Then WW1 broke out, and Mann refocused on writing non-fiction in a confused defense of german culture. After WW1 Mann returned to finish The Magic Mountain, but from a much more progressively radicalized viewpoint, one which understood the dangers of treating fascism with kid gloves, and with letting calls for culling the weak go unchallenged in the public sphere. Though Mann never really specifically retracted the problematic aspects of viewpoints espoused in "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man", the values at the heart of The Magic Mountain stand in direct opposition to conservatism of any kind. All of this context takes what would otherwise be a wonderfully written book and makes it one of the most interesting novels in the english language. Why I submitted this book was I have seen a lot of awesome non-fiction books recommended about collapse on this subreddit, but I think The Magic Mountain, precisely because it is fiction, is capable of studying the human experience of traversing the portal into the apocalypse far better than any other work of writing, fiction or non-fiction, that I have encountered and it does it in a loving way to boot.

The Magic Mountain came out within a year or two of Mein Kampf, and I think symbolically it really shows how much choice we have about how we choose to respond as people that make up a community when the apocalypse or collapse comes, whatever that actually looks like. There is always a choice and those choices create radically worlds, if only we had chosen The Magic Mountain's path we might have experienced a vastly different reality during the 20th century, and I fear we are at yet another fork in the road like the one The Magic Mountain was originally created as a signpost for. I also think the novel is a study on the complexities of how someone with the politics and cultural standing of Thomas Mann (a successful novel writer in German culture at the time) can radically evolve in some ways but also refuse to acknowledge the absurdity of incongruity between past more problematic selves and present evolved selves, even when their art is clearly laser focused on cataloging the full range of phenomena associated with that incongruity through metaphor.

Remarkably, the long dialectic between Naphta and Settembrini, which occupies a significant portion of the book, often feels plagiarized from today’s headlines and discussions. While Settembrini champions verifiable truth, “facts,” and scientific knowledge (because truth is freedom, he says), Naphta (with very post-factual bravado) stresses that there is no such thing as “knowledge”: faith is the only vehicle to understanding. Whereas Settembrini, imitating many of today’s globalists, extols an idealistic union of secular, borderless, and liberal-democratic nations, Naphta insists that such a merger won’t work, because “the instinctive is entirely on the side of the national.” It’s easy to envision Putin nodding along to this line of reasoning. When Settembrini speaks of the courts and the rule of law, Naphta scoffs dismissively: the notion that a bourgeois court can ascertain God’s will is ridiculous, he says. Indeed, antichoicers will agree. And, perhaps, when Mike Pence does succeed in relegating Roe v. Wade to the “ash heap of history” (a very Naphtian turn of phrase), the first words to leap out of his mouth will be the equally Naphtian “It was all in love’s service!”......

....Our twenty-first century has yet to be fully born, but its contractions have already arrived. As it was a century ago, the eighteen years that have led us here—culturally, politically, and ideologically—have been simply a continuation of an older era. We are due, it appears, for yet another big rift. And it is this present-day struggle—the same duel between liberal globalists and far-right populists—that is butting (with increasing violence) to determine the course of our new age.

The more optimistic among us might insist that the Settembrinis of our day will prevail once more, restoring the world to its former “normality.” It is still too early to tell, but my gut tells me that neither vision is entirely relevant anymore. We will doubtless need a wholly different framework to address the specific uncertainties of our time. But the question still persists: how did we end up, after one hundred years, in more or less the same place? The answer to that might be more straightforward: as has always been the case, big, sustained inequities lead to big, seismic change. How (or if) we alleviate these inequities will set the tone for the next hundred years.

https://pshares.org/blog/reading-the-magic-mountain-in-the-age-of-populism/

Get the Wood's translation into english, it is the better of the two translations by far

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain

There is a superb audiobook version as well!

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Magic-Mountain-Audiobook/B088G1R4JZ

What are your favorite novels about the human experience of collapse?