Cherrypicker | Literature  Thomas Mann on a downhill slide

Heinz Strunk brings Thomas Mann's “Magic Mountain” to the lowlands. The son of a merchant's family becomes a man in his mid-thirties who has sold his start-up company. It's not the lungs that whistle, but the psyche that suffers.

Heinz Strunk's last novel Ein Sommer in Niendorf (A Summer in Niendorf, 2022) was already linked to Thomas Mann, as a North German variation on Mann's story Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice). And his satire on writers' diaries Nach Notat zu Bett (2019) also included the old Hanseatic man: “One should keep a diary like Th. Mann... static, succinct, meteorological circumstances, what and where he ate, who visited whom and when, food, illnesses, done.”

In his new novel Zauberberg 2 (Magic Mountain 2), he has included Thomas Mann's monumental work, published in 1924, in the title. The shimmering silver typography on the cover is an ironic reference to the sequel film Terminator 2 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everything one size smaller

Strunk does not presume to have written a new Magic Mountain. With him, everything is one size smaller. The protagonist Jonas Heidbrink, a former start-up entrepreneur who has sold his company, initially only wants to stay for a few weeks and then stays for a year, which is nothing compared to the seven years that Hans Castorp spends in his mountain sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland.

Instead of the high mountains, Heidbrink's clinic is located in the flat and swampy no man's land of Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania near the Polish border. The intellectual depth of Strunk's characters is also much lower; at best, they can be seen as a reference to the world of the great role model.

Life as a man of independent means has left Heidbrink in a state of depression. He has fits of crying in the bathtub for no reason, life seems to him to be “an endless succession of days that stand empty before me, a permanent state of fear, panic, agonising boredom, forlornness, hopelessness, and all the other loses”. In the anamnesis interview with his attending physician Dr Reuter, he relativises his condition as “pubescent world-weariness,” adding that nowadays every mood swing is “immediately hyped up to depression”. Like Hans Castorp, Heidbrink also has reservations about “dissecting the soul”.

Vital signs, soup and boredom

This is followed by everyday hospital life, which is almost unbeatable in terms of bleakness and boredom. His vital signs are measured regularly, Heidbrink goes to various treatments, has trivial conversations in the dining room: Thanks to his good powers of observation, Strunk creates the cosmos of characters in the clinic in his usual confident, always somewhat mocking manner. There are characters such as fat Uwe,
“one of those phlegmatic, slightly underexposed, sexless, uncle-like men who, because they are so harmless, pass as likeable”, or Heinz-Christian, a sporty, successful type, actually “too attractive for problems” and therefore “the only one in the group without penitential clothing”. Zeissner, “the embodiment of natural authority, one of those expansive men that Heidbrink has never felt up to”, incessantly spouts “calendar wisdom for the upper classes” without any interest in his counterpart.

Heidbrink befriends the chain-smoking Klaus, born in 1944. He makes an appearance as part of the group therapy programme and talks in epic detail about his Nazi family history with a hateful, cruel father. This perhaps also explains his penchant for nihilistic and crude jokes: “I'm going to be buried on my stomach so that everyone can lick my arse forever”, Klaus says at another point.

People, mud, sludge

The penultimate chapter, entitled “Kirghiz Dreams”, consists largely of quotes from The Magic Mountain – the sources can be found in the appendix of Strunk's book. The great master's assessment of human life sometimes sounds very similar: “It's just as if you were looking into the human being, how it looks there – all mud and sludge.” In this text collage, Heidbrink dreams himself back to the clinic more than a year later, although it has since closed and – like the patients – has been left to decay: It is pointless to measure Strunk's pastiche against its great predecessor. Nonetheless, he uses his literary means to deliver a gloomy diagnosis of the times, in which the characters in the closed society of the sanatorium – as always with Strunk – are described in all their unsightly physicality and mental and moral corruption. So let's wait and see who will write Zauberberg 3 in 100 years' time and what it will be about.

April 2025