Adam Kirsch on Thomas Mann and Mortality
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In 1912 the novelist Thomas Mann visited his wife at a sanatorium in the Swiss town of Davos, where she was taking a rest cure after being misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. Mann himself came down with a cold during the visit, which the facility’s director was eager to believe was also TB, and thus, writes Adam Kirsch in the June 25 issue of the Review, “the seed of [The Magic Mountain] was planted.” As Kirsch elaborates:
It’s highly appropriate that The Magic Mountain should owe its existence to a misdiagnosis, since its great theme is ambiguity: the difficulty of distinguishing health from sickness, mind from body, time from eternity.
Below, alongside Kirsch’s essay, are five articles from our archives about writing in sickness and in health.
In writing The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann struggled to free himself from his artistic preoccupation with sickness and death.
“‘What right have I to grieve,’ Emerson writes, ‘who have not ceased to wonder?’ The world—nature—simply will not have it that we should give up our vivacity because others die, have died, will die. ‘Soon the ice will melt,’ he declares, and the blackbird will be singing again along the river where his brother used to walk.”
—March 7, 2024
“By the mid-seventeenth century, syphilis, the French Disease, had been an object of fear in Europe for over two centuries. Albrecht Dürer was in his early twenties when the disease first came to European consciousness, and he wrote in 1506, ‘Ask [our prior] to pray to God for me that I may be saved, and especially from the French [Disease] because I know nothing of which I am so much afraid, since nearly every man has it; it eats up many people so that they die.’”
—June 27, 2019
“I am a senior physician with over six decades of experience who has observed his share of critical illness—but only from the doctor’s perspective. That changed suddenly and disastrously on the morning of June 27, 2013, ten days after my ninetieth birthday, when I fell down the stairs in my home, broke my neck, and very nearly died. Since then, I have made an astonishing recovery, in the course of which I learned how it feels to be a helpless patient close to death. I also learned some things about the US medical care system that I had never fully appreciated, even though this is a subject that I have studied and written about for many years.”
—February 6, 2014
“Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.… Even the ultra-virtuous, when dying of TB, boost themselves to new moral heights. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Little Eva during her last days urges her father to become a serious Christian and free his slaves. The Wings of the Dove: after learning that her suitor was a fortune-hunter, Milly Theale wills her fortune to him and dies.”
—February 9, 1978
“Stephen Crane was one of those radically gifted people possessed of a bitter maturity and a prodigious, eternal youth. On June 5, 1900, he died of tuberculosis in a sanitarium at Badenweiler, Germany, at the age of twenty-eight.”
—August 10, 1972
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