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Germany approves nearly $1bn in arms exports to Israel (thecradle.co)
submitted 5 days ago by supersquirrel@lemmy.ca to c/europe@feddit.org
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[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

You have to be joking the art can only be interpreted strictly in that linear fashion, by the same logic Mein Kampf is barely fascist.

Fascism brought nothing new to the table that The Magic Mountain hadn't already dismantled with fervor.

You have no conception of the relationships between simultaneous polarized reactions to the same perceived existential questions that dominate public discourse, what a morbid, lifeless view of history...

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain is a large modern epic-philosophical poem about the struggle between light and darkness, health and disease, life and death. Since the writer wants to depict this struggle in its ideologically pure, most abstract form, he chooses to a certain extent an abstract environment in which all the phenomena of the capitalist world appear in all their essence, not obscured by the petty events of bourgeois everyday life.

This environment is the “Magic Mountain” – a fashionable tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland. People from all strata of bourgeois society meet here; all of them are in a state of forced inaction, artificial isolation from everyday worries. Thus, their social position does not essentially change, according to circumstances they give the opportunity to the individual, the best of them to ponder over the meaning and direction of their life.

On this Wednesday, Thomas Mann introduces his hero – a decent, honest German youth from a wealthy family. Here, in contact with other patients, he gets acquainted with the spiritual trends of his time. The path of his inner development is the content of the novel. Thomas Mann shows what an almost magical attractive effect had the conditions of Germany at that time on the morally sensitive bourgeois: sickness, darkness, death. Dissatisfaction with one’s own, purely personal life, an existence aimed only at achieving material goals, a moral disgust for the rough, barbaric sides of this life and at the same time the inability to understand that they are generated by the lack of social freedom in Germany, made these people defenseless against dark forces.

These people are ready to accept fascist “socialism,” which is nothing more than a demagogic disguise of universal enslavement.

Thomas Mann understood even earlier this defenselessness of the German bourgeoisie in the face of the dark forces of reaction and showed it with tragic irony in his short stories.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1943/humanism-barbarism/ch05.htm

Robert Heynen’s article, “Cultures of Confinement: Health, Illness, and Madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Magic Mountain” details the parallels of the theme of mental illness and the rise of authoritarianism in the real world, historical Weimar Germany, and the events within the film (Heynen 683). Heynen explains how mental asylums were a strategy for authority figures in Weimar Germany, in which they could place individuals who started leftist coalitions and organizations, as a way to squash such political opposition (Heynen 683–684). Through the lens of this theory, Dr. Caligari would represent an authoritarian fascist figure responsible for gaslighting his citizens, or patients, to commit murders through some sort of hypnotic mind control or brainwashing, as well as imprison revolutionary figures who pose a threat to his authoritative reign of his domain. Heynen also points to the writer Kracauer as an influential interpreter of the film as depicting the early breeding grounds of Nazism and authoritarianism in Germany at the time (Heynen 685).

https://dainealmaclean.medium.com/how-the-cabinet-of-dr-73660400e5e3

And yet how could Europe resist a novel that ends with the outbreak of a world war during which, to quote The Magic Mountain’s narrator, ‘so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased’.

As the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote, ‘We’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain.’ And, let’s add, Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus Zeitblom, the ‘heroes’ of Doctor Faustus. But Thomas Mann did more than simply write about the cultural and spiritual transformations of German society in the early 20th century. He lived them. The reason that he became such a forceful foe of Nazism is because he shared the same intellectual and cultural roots.

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/thomas-manns-cathedrals-in-prose/

[–] geissi@feddit.org 1 points 11 hours ago

You have read your own sources, right?

The first one, from marxists.org is an article about the Germans and why they let the Nazis seize power. The The author attests that

And the German people, intoxicated by demagoguery, driven by the scourges of terror, with barbarously perverted instincts, wandered towards death.

And uses The Magic Mountain and Heinrich Mann’s novel The Loyal Subject as examples for the then current condition of Germany. At no point does it mention anything anti-fascist about either book by the way.
It tells us that Mann identified mental conditions, the dissatisfaction, moral disgust, inability to understand why.
These are themes the reviewer identifies in the book.

That the people thus affected are ripe to accept fascism, later when it eventually comes about, is the reviewers conclusion.
It is not something expressed in the book.

Further down, other works are discussed and they are specifically called "anti-fascist" unlike The Magic Mountain.
About Farewell by Johannes Becher it says:

Although the action of this novel, like the action of The Magic Mountain, is played out before the first world imperialist war, it is inspired by the modern anti-fascist struggle.

It draws the parallel of both books being set before WWI and the distinction that only one of them is is inspired by the modern anti-fascist struggle. It is not Mann's.

Your second quote mentions The Magic Mountain in the first line and is then entirely about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

And the third one

he became such a forceful foe of Nazism

Yes, we've been over this. He didn't like them from the beginning. Certainly didn't improve his opinion when they set up their fascist regime, years after 1924.
All the same arguments about the passage of time and when things happen, that I've made before.