Muddy Times: The Magic Mountain and the Anthropocene, Lecture by Elisabeth Strowick, NYU

Muddy Times: The Magic Mountain and the Anthropocene

Drawing on theories of the Anthropocene, specifically “scale critique,” my lecture positions Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain within an Anthropocene framework. It is not the depiction of nature, but its use of scale that marks Mann’s seminal novel as an Anthropocene novel. My reading explores the novel’s obsession with scale in relation to its narrative technique and historical context. Arguably, no other German-language novel renders the long nineteenth century with comparable clarity against the backdrop of the First World War as The Magic Mountain. The First World War, as a modern war of annihilation, serves as the starting point for Mann’s literary scale critique. Its immeasurable destruction—not only of human lives but also of the environment—constitutes a caesura that reconfigures the spatio-temporal scales of narration. It is this “derangement of scale” (Timothy Clark) that The Magic Mountain explores to develop literary scales for representing the aftermath. The novel spans deep times/deep spaces of narration beyond the human, distorts the relationship between narrated and narrative time into the immeasurable, situates agency beyond the protagonist, undermines figure-ground distinctions, and creates (death) zones of narration in which snow and battlefield overlap. The temporalities explored by Mann’s “time novel” (Zeitroman) through this derangement of scale are muddy times—they do not merely intervene in the structure of past, present, and future, but also delineate the aesthetic scope that opens up within the novel’s intertextual horizon. This horizon extends from the radical experiments with scale in nineteenth-century realism to figurations of the future in the Anthropocene as “deep wartime” (Paul Saint-Amour), underscoring the continued relevance of Mann’s novel for our present moment.

Elisabeth Strowick is Professor of German at New York University. Before joining NYU, she was Professor of German and Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University (2008-2016). Elisabeth Strowick has held several academic positions, including visiting professorships, at universities in the United States (Yale, Vanderbilt), Germany (FU Berlin, Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, University of Hamburg), and Switzerland (University of Zurich, University of Basel). She was awarded a Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.