In a novel crammed with uncanny premonitions of the century to come, Mann’s sketch of the dynamics of online polarisation now seems especially acute. Published exactly 100 years ago, in November 1924, The Magic Mountain unfolds in its highland Alpine enclave — a small world, but the whole world — between 1907 and 1914. We learn that the young marine engineer Hans Castorp from Hamburg, the naive, questing hero with a spot on his lung, will share the fate of his generation on Great War battlefields. Mann, already a German literary heavyweight thanks to his family saga Buddenbrooks and later stories such as Death in Venice, embarked on Hans’s story in 1913. He set it aside during the war, and only finished his epic amid the tumults of the early Weimar Republic. The project began as a compact comic tale but ballooned into a zeitgeist-defining behemoth that took the temperature of an entire civilisation — and issued a grim prognosis. 

Make the long, but scenic, trek up Mann’s mountain, and you will be rewarded with vivid vistas of intellectual — and emotional — landscapes that have endured to the present day. Mostly composed when Hitler counted as a Bavarian beer-cellar ranter, and before Lenin’s regime in Russia had solidified into dictatorship, the novel presages, and models, a century of stand-offs, skirmishes, and brutal collisions, between competing world-views and ideologies that never quite triumph, but never quite surrender. That terminal moment of breakdown into “petulance”, when dialogue and disagreement fray into irreconcilable enmity, is a pivotal event. Until then, The Magic Mountain has staged a gigantic carnival of conversation between opposing principles — reform and reaction, health and sickness, flesh and spirit, lust and love, even (and above all) between life and death — that never entirely lose touch with each other. Now words will yield to deeds, chats to blows. 

Peopled by a droll, picturesque cast of eccentric characters, the International Sanatorium Berghof isn’t just a political or philosophical talking-shop. Young Hans, whose ambiguous passions encode Mann’s own lifelong predicament as a married paterfamilias primarily attracted to men, must learn about body and soul, love and death, as well as history’s Big Ideas. His infatuation with the alluring Clavdia Chauchat, a central-Asian Russian with her “Kyrgyz eyes”, often makes him despise the abstractions of the sanatorium’s warring ideologues. And Mann always embodies his ideas in oddball characters, with the high-minded Italian liberal humanist Lodovico Settembrini, and the “caustic” Jesuit-trained (but Jewish-born) radical reactionary Leo Naphta, as first among equals. Later they will be joined, and dethroned, by a sinister but spellbinding Dutchman, Mynheer Peeperkorn.

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Settembrini and Naphta are the two disputatious frenemies between whose poles the impressionable Hans bounces like a rubber ball. But they finally agree to settle their differences not, as before, over tea and wine or on hikes through the snow — but in a duel. Nothing except blade or bullet will resolve the endless arguments of liberal against conservative, freethinker against believer, progressive against reactionary. “The Absolute, the holy terror these times require,” thunders Naphta, “can arise only out of the most radical scepticism, out of moral chaos.” Only bloody convulsion will redeem a sick time. 

With their weak lungs and strong opinions, Mann’s pair of senior wranglers gaze out from their mountain vantage-point over future decades of furious debate. The terms of the Settembrini-Naphta disputes have not really aged. If you’d tuned in, for example, to this week’s American presidential election, you would have found that liberals and conservatives, utopians and authoritarians, still go to rhetorical war armed with the weapons his antagonists deploy. Partisans continue to scrap in the same way that Mann’s Italian literary scholar, with his belief that “the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race”, does with the feline Jewish Jesuit, who maintains that flawed, sinful humanity craves “discipline and sacrifice” under the benign rod of a hierarchical authority. No other great novel of the 20th century punctures a pompous and hypocritical liberalism with such relish and cunning — at the same time as it demonstrates that the puncturing, at the hands of a ruthless and illusion-free “realism”, may pose a greater risk than the pomposity. 

In an era once more beset by divisive wars of words, much of the book feels strikingly contemporary. Later writers who challenge its premises have echoed its procedures. In her newly-translated novel The Empusium, for instance, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk may probe Mann’s patriarchal blind spots with scenes of self-satisfied chinwags among bloviating blokes who believe that “a woman can only develop and retain her identity within the sphere of a man”. Still, her feminist take-down — which transfers the venue to pre-1914 Prussian Silesia — also acts as a spirited homage. Mann’s principal figures survive: Settembrini becomes “August August”; Naphta, “Longin Lukas”. 

In any case, part of Mann’s evergreen genius is to show how, in ideological debates, binaries will tend to blur and categories crumble. His two champions intellectually cross-dress. They wrap themselves in contradictions. Both men’s gyrations now sound thoroughly familiar from social media, TV panels or campaign trails — early stirrings of the political whirlpool where liberationist progressives demand strict surveillance of words and deeds, while upholders of strong faith-based authority foment distrust, resentment, even insurrection. In an age of ever-proliferating polemics, warring camps may undermine not just one another but themselves. Naphta gleefully skewers Settembrini’s dream of a “capitalistic world republic” that champions freedom for both individuals and states but will require an all-powerful “bourgeois court of arbitration” to maintain harmony and control. Universal liberties will need, he insists, rigorous and intrusive policing. 

As for the “democratic empire” of equality and progress for which the Italian idealist yearns, it rests on one absolute deity: money, whose tyrannical power is now “making life a veritable hell”. Among Mann’s many prophetic ironies, none feels more piquant than his decision to set The Magic Mountain in Davos. Now, each snowy January, a legion of plutocrats land there with their PR retinue of spinning Settembrinis to mix unelected power-brokering with liberal-democratic pieties at the World Economic Forum. 

If Naphta exposes the muddles of Settembrini’s progressive humanism, he reveals some flagrant paradoxes of his own. With spooky prescience, Mann shows that the Jesuit’s devotion to divinely sanctioned unity and order might, in modern conditions, take the form not of stable conservatism but radical fervour. The reactionary morphs into the revolutionary. No passage strikes more of a knockout blow than the dawning realisation that Naphta’s disdain for “the political ideology of the bourgeoisie” has led him to espouse “the necessity of terror”. And that, at present, terror must take the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Bolshevism will hasten the advent of the anti-capitalist City of God. His church had always “inscribed radical overthrow upon its banner — destruction, root and branch”. Now, that banner may righteously be coloured in the deepest red.

Even in the early Twenties, Mann kept the keenest of eyes on the followers of both Hitler and Lenin. He saw, far earlier than most, how the foes of bourgeois liberalism might catch their common enemy in a vicious pincer movement. Naphta rails against the hypocrisy, duplicity and inequality of liberal humanism — “the freedom that has ruined the world” — in language found today more often on the Left than on the Right. And as often in the East as in the West: the recent Brics summit in Kazan gave the latest focus to Naphta-style arguments about the false claims and double standards of Euro-Atlantic corporate democracy. Meanwhile, the Jesuit’s invective against the illusion of “objective science”, and his contention that all secular knowledge and culture merely serves sectional interests, rhymes neatly with the anti-universalist doctrine of radical academia today. 

Mann undoubtedly gives the witty, corrosive Naphta most of his best tunes. The character we first perceive as an arch-reactionary was actually derived not from any Right-wing thinker but from the Marxist critic and philosopher Georg Lukacs, who revered Mann. As for Mann, he felt, then dramatised, the Marxist’s hypnotic eloquence: he wrote of Lukacs that “For as long as he spoke he was right.” In comparison, Settembrini — “forever tooting his little horn of reason”, Hans thinks — comes across as a prolix and puffed-up bore. His mindset of “shabby bourgeoisosity”, with as “its sole objective… for a person to grow old, rich, happy and healthy”, lacks the stardust of heroism. Meliorist democracy looks, and sounds, dull and plain next to the glamour and danger of transformative upheaval. Maliciously, Mann gave Settembrini the rhetorical tics as his older brother (and fellow-writer) Heinrich, much more of a conventionally “progressive” public figure. 

Naphta scorches, and seduces. Still, Mann understands that Settembrini should prevail. His own faith in democratic liberalism was no foregone conclusion. During the Great War he had written a grandiose tract in favour of a mystical German nationalism: his tortuous Reflections of an Unpolitical Man are far from the neutral testament that disingenuous title suggests. But by October 1922, when he gave a landmark speech in Berlin “On the German Republic”, he had made a lasting peace with democracy. Now, and ever after, he nailed his colours to the pluralistic mast as a Zivilisationsliterat: a member of the liberal literati. These days, some might just say “woke”. From the late Twenties, National Socialist propagandists sneeringly referred to his liberal disciples as the Thomasmänner, the Mann men. Their inspiration would leave Hitler’s Germany for exile as early as March 1933. 

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For Hans, Settembrini comes to stand for light, and life; Naphta for darkness and death. The latter realm still tempts him but, stranded in a snowstorm after a rash skiing expedition, Hans comes to acknowledge that “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts”. However, The Magic Mountain assumes that the principles of life and death, freedom and order, will always need each other. Settembrini without Naphta subsides into flabby and invertebrate windbaggery — but Naphta without Settembrini may drown the world in fear and hate. The dialectic is all.

Readers might conclude that an insipid liberalism depends on the vigour of an abrasive, sceptical conservatism to keep it on its toes. Maybe: but that takeaway reckons without Mann’s late arriving curveball. Just when we, and Hans, imagine that the Naphta-Settembrini discussion group can trudge on forever across the white slopes of Davos, along comes Mynheer Peeperkorn. This stupendous Dutchman, a wealthy retired coffee planter from colonial Java, adds an even more timely voice to the mountain’s debating chamber. Peeperkorn represents politics, and power, as pure “personality”. He is deeply stupid, and deeply charismatic. Call him Reagan, call him Trump, call him Corbyn if you wish: in him, ideology melts into mushy uplift while a vague verbiage (“By all means! Permit me to say —settled!”) leaves his listeners bewitched. Temporarily, he unites Naphta and Settembrini in mystified contempt at this “hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry”. Yet, fatally, this brainless enchanter has “killed the spark” of their dialogue. “Nothing crackled between the antagonists now, no lightning flashed, no current surged. The presence that intellect thought to neutralise, neutralised intellect instead.” 

Some critics view Peeperkorn as a Hitlerian figure. Although scary as well as absurd, his bumbling, stumbling air of unearned profundity has more in common with the folksy content-lite populism — offered from Right and Left alike — that frequently thrives at the polls. Today you may detect Peeperkorn-ish tendencies both in Brazil’s Lula and Argentina’s Milei. If Trump looks almost too close a fit, then surely so was Biden.

Peeperkorn soon dies; his “staggering mystery” vanishes from the sanatorium. The “great petulance” of simmering rancour and suspicion takes its place. A delicate dialectical balance dissolves like the valley’s snows in spring. Rivalry turns into hatred. The duel beside a frozen waterfall ends in symbolic fates for both parties. True to his values, Settembrini altruistically fires into the air. Naphta, whose voluptuous radicalism has always danced over a pit of despair, shoots himself in the head. Within a few pages, we flash forward to a glimpse of Hans amid the mud and gore of the looming “worldwide festival of death”. Up on the Davos heights, the interminable but rule-governed wrestle among ideas and ideals may exhaust its combatants, and bewilder its witnesses. But the true threat to health — of the mind, and of society — will begin only when it stops.

Even paying for it at a second-hand bookstore near Columbia gave me pause. It’s huge, I thought, as the cashier frantically wiped it down (we didn’t wear masks at this point.) I’m never going to read this. I’m not one of those bores who reads colossal, painful tomes just to feel educated. Why would I do that to myself, just as everything I really enjoyed — bars, friends, flights — had suddenly been taken away from me? On the drive out of the city it kept nagging me. As the world was ending and there were a million new things to process, why did I rush out to buy a Weimar novelist?

For the first weeks in Massachusetts, I sat in the spare room and read tweets and The Magic Mountain. I took screenshots of the death toll: 100 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus, 1,000 Americans, 10,000 Americans. Around 100,000, I gave up. Never quite letting go of my phone, I drifted in and out of the 796-page novel. Der Zauberberg, in German, is about a man called Hans Castorp who spends seven years in a sanatorium, without really doing very much, on the eve of the First World War. It is a strange thing — a Zeitroman or “time-novel” — about the dissolution of time both in the passing of an age and in the loss of one man’s ability to experience its flow in the way he’s used to.

I didn’t enjoy it. I was consumed by it. I was so used to doing the consuming, quickly and easily — Netflix, Sally Rooney — that being consumed was an uncomfortable, odd, experience. I almost couldn’t read it: I’d become so used to skim-reading feeds — and so used to the kind of extractive get-to-the-point reading of novels with nut graph-like points about what they are supposed to represent — that I’d forgotten the experience of a totalising work of art.

For weeks, I felt like I, too, was locked in the sanatorium where people carried little pulmonary x-ray cards around in their pockets and met for splendid dinners in the hall. It was almost too much: the endless arguments between Naphtha and Settembrini — the Polish Jew-turned-Jesuit-turned-Marxist totalitarian and the blinkered Italian libertarian rationalist — seemed to echo too loudly the argument going on around me. “Zero Covid” or let it rip? The whole world had turned into a hospital, in which we were all dwarfed by a figure like Mann’s gargantuan Dutch colonialist, Mynheer Peeperkorn: Donald Trump.

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But as I read The Magic Mountain, there was something I didn’t quite understand: how can three weeks have turned into seven years up there — just like that? Why doesn’t Hans Castorp want to come down from the sickbay? In the meantime, I was still panic-scrolling. There was still drama in the air. Things weren’t as slow as they were going to get.

Then we went back to New York. It was around then that I lost my sense of time. For weeks on end, my routine was so simple it seemed to go on forever and then disappear in seconds. I’m looking at the blank weeks of my iCalendar and I remember what I was doing: working in the morning, running in the afternoon, binging The Bureau in the evening — but I can’t remember any of those days distinctly. They’ve become one totalising moment — like Mann’s routine in the sanatorium.

At first Hans Castorp stops carrying his pocket watch. Finally he forgets his own age. “Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time,” warns the narrator.

Looking back now, I can only sort my memories into my obsessions: 5Ks, wine, Mastering Spice by Lior Sercazz, the Peloton app, online diplomacy. My notes from that time are completely circular: without time my head, like Castorp’s, looped in on itself in increasingly futile fancies. I seem hardly to have realised, like everyone on the mountain, that this period of paralysis was not a blip. It was a glimpse of a future in which we live online.

It was a year without markers, in which I felt like just another of the sanatorium’s patients lying half-frozen in their camel-hair blankets on the same balconies day after day. The regular patter of holidays, birthdays, office get-togethers, occasional synagogue services and trips back to England for the Christmas holidays was wiped clean. Can any of us really remember the things we did on Zoom?

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I do remember walking in Greenwich Village with everything shut, thinking: this isn’t New York, this is a place that used to be New York. But try as I might, I can’t place the date. I know I was crossing Sixth Avenue in the rain when I suddenly froze: there are no cars, there are no people, there’s nobody here — I stood in the middle of the road and for five seconds I closed my eyes. Those crowds, that thundering traffic, those people yelling — “Get outta da way buddy!” They felt as distant, then, as a dream.

That was the mountain. But which is harder: being on it, or coming down from it? Because when — exactly, again, I can’t really tell you — I found myself on the Subway to the mass vaccination centre somewhere out in the Bronx, I suddenly found myself full of regret. I can’t believe it’s over so soon. I’ll never be able to read or write so peacefully again. You were outside time — inhabiting Eliot’s heavenly “still point of the turning world” — and you squandered it roleplaying as Gran Colombia in a 22-player board game run through Slack instead of writing the novel you always fantasised was there inside you. It lasted only a few seconds: I was scared to come down. I wanted to stay safe in the sanatorium forever. It turns out I was not the only one.

Flights, parties, distinct memories of different days. By the summer they had crept back. And it was then that I got another nagging feeling about The Magic Mountain. That I had to re-read it. But, my normal sense of time restored — constant inputs, activities, lots of different situations coming and going very quickly requiring very different bits of my brain — I couldn’t.

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It’s almost a hundred years since The Magic Mountain first appeared. This isn’t the kind of book that, I think, can be written anymore. It is slow and enormous because it wants to teach you something you can only learn in something slow and enormous. Internet people like you and me don’t think and consume like that anymore. I’m not sure it’s possible for people who primarily communicate on WhatsApp or argue on Twitter to sink into something that is more like a gigantic symphony (you have to listen carefully) than a straight book. Trying and failing to re-read Thomas Mann, taught me that the reason we are so frustrated with these kinds of novels is we don’t experience time in the way their original readers once did. Our minds can’t stay still, in one place, for an hour — let alone a week. The Magic Mountain, in ordinary times, could only ever be a struggle.

But lockdown allowed me — allowed many of us — to feel time the way it felt a hundred years ago. It allowed me to read slowly, scene by scene, through the sanatorium, some of which I didn’t understand; some of which — the snow, the seance, the young women that takes him smiling into the cemetery — left me tingling with that feeling that made me fall in love with books in the first place. This is it — that magic thing you can do with them, that no other art form can replicate, and that, perhaps for only a brief time, I was able to summon the ability to truly sense again.