Well, y’all produced Mein Kampf, which is a definite L for german literary culture (among other bad things), but y’all did produce The Magic Mountain which slaps so it is a mixed bag.
A very violent, uneven, mixed bag.
edit seriously though, to any Germans out there or people connected with German culture that are in deep despair right now, fucking read or listen to the Magic Mountain it is amazing and speaks to every part of German culture that resists fascism and celebrates what fascism abhors (love, weakness, sickness, fragility of body and the wisdom that brings the mind when the mind is willing).
Thomas Mann began writing The Magic Mountain before the outbreak of WW1 and initially it had much different philosophical conclusions/politics, but then WW1 happened, Thomas Mann turned directly towards writing non-fiction works on politics, eventually evolving to become much more humanist through the experience of WW1 and then after WW1 Thomas Mann returned to writing The Magic Mountain with an entirely new, much more nuanced and loving view of humanity. It is a wonderful, magic winter blanket of strangely hallucinogenic calmness, it is extremely dry in an unrelentingly hilarious way and it has sections of prose that rival any other modernist novel period, though I can only speak for the English translation (John E Woods translation).
If you are wondering why I am going on effusively about how relevant a long ass book about being in a sanitarium that was published in 1924 is to modern european, us and global politics, I don’t know what to tell you other than fuck just have to trust me…
I wrote neither book. Much like you probably had nothing to do with (random American things, think!) either of the following: the movie Clerks, the works of Hunter S Thompson, or the Liberty Bell.
As a German, yeah apparently we are. Starting to hate my country.
Well, y’all produced Mein Kampf, which is a definite L for german literary culture (among other bad things), but y’all did produce The Magic Mountain which slaps so it is a mixed bag.
A very violent, uneven, mixed bag.
edit seriously though, to any Germans out there or people connected with German culture that are in deep despair right now, fucking read or listen to the Magic Mountain it is amazing and speaks to every part of German culture that resists fascism and celebrates what fascism abhors (love, weakness, sickness, fragility of body and the wisdom that brings the mind when the mind is willing).
Thomas Mann began writing The Magic Mountain before the outbreak of WW1 and initially it had much different philosophical conclusions/politics, but then WW1 happened, Thomas Mann turned directly towards writing non-fiction works on politics, eventually evolving to become much more humanist through the experience of WW1 and then after WW1 Thomas Mann returned to writing The Magic Mountain with an entirely new, much more nuanced and loving view of humanity. It is a wonderful, magic winter blanket of strangely hallucinogenic calmness, it is extremely dry in an unrelentingly hilarious way and it has sections of prose that rival any other modernist novel period, though I can only speak for the English translation (John E Woods translation).
If you are wondering why I am going on effusively about how relevant a long ass book about being in a sanitarium that was published in 1924 is to modern european, us and global politics, I don’t know what to tell you other than fuck just have to trust me…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain
I wrote neither book. Much like you probably had nothing to do with (random American things, think!) either of the following: the movie Clerks, the works of Hunter S Thompson, or the Liberty Bell.
Nah I was the one who cracked the Liberty Bell tho