Book Review: Sven Hanuschek: Arno Schmidt: Biografie

Abstract

assessment of Mann’s methodology, which proves him to be less knowledgeable about the matters he discusses than he would appear to be. The average person finds the narrator ‘almost intimidatingly cultivated’ (p. 138), but this is merely a trap that Mann set for an easily browbeaten public. Watroba has little time for Hermann Kurzke’s eloquent if somewhat obscure characterisation of Mann’s ideal reader as ‘ein Bildungsbürger auf Abwegen, der sich nicht mehr mit den Interessen seiner Klasse identifiziert, aber auch keine andere Heimat findet’ (a cultivated bourgeois gone astray who no longer identifies with the interests of his class but has not found another home‘, cited p. 23). She sees things differently: ‘this self-indulgent spectacle of intellectual and cultural superiority ultimately draws so much attention to itself that The Magic Mountain ends up laying bare its own pretence’ (p. 139). Nowhere is this more obvious than in Castorp’s use of French, in which he displays greater fluency than Mann ever attained. The same applies to the prolonged, exceedingly wearying debates. Untutored readers are more likely to recognise their carefully staged artificiality than most scholars are willing to. Aware of the unequal distribution of cultural capital, Watroba reaches the sobering verdict that the novel is ‘all about feeling consigned to intellectual inferiority and passivity, and nevertheless trying to become intellectually independent and active, albeit with varying results’ (p. 154). A spark of hope may yet flicker on within the crepuscular world of the Berghof.