What makes The Magician so unique as a novel is its depiction of writing as an all-encompassing creative activity that consumes the author’s full psychic energy and that emerges out of his personal struggles as an individual. It would be impossible to affix The Magician to the back cover of all editions of Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain. Tóibín offers more than a page of scholarly references to help a reader gain background knowledge about Mann, his life, and the times. But if you are interested in what it might have been like for Thomas Mann to compose these monumental works, Tóibín’s book might offer the best entry point into Mann’s artistic mind and his creative persona.  

The novel covers the full panorama of Mann’s life, from his somewhat pampered childhood in Lübeck, Germany, to his final years spent in the German expatriate community of Los Angeles. The writer’s camera is laser focused on ground level details and refuses to zoom out to the big picture and lose its granular tone. The texture of the bourgeois lifestyle of the Mann family is captured in all its minutia including rowdy family meals, community engagements, and professional insults. One can almost feel the temperature rise and the climate change as Mann and his family move from Munich to Princeton and finally to Pacific Palisades. Mann exerted very tight control over his daily routine and one senses his absence on the page as he withdraws to his private study every morning after breakfast to write without any interruptions. We are excluded from this sanctuary just like his wife and children as they waited for him to emerge after lunch for his afternoon walk and some playtime with them.

Mann was more than a prominent novelist. He was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, globally recognized and one of the most famous personalities of his time. He hobnobbed with dignitaries and the leading figures of the pre-World War II era, including Einstein and FDR. They parade across the pages of the novel with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies. Tóibín details Mann’s tempestuous relationship with Agnes Meyer, a leading figure in high society along the New York-Washington DC corridor. I had to look her up to learn that she was a well-known journalist and civil right activist and Katherine Graham’s mother to appreciate her impact on the world during the 1930s and 40s. 

The most striking feature of the book is the intimate recounting of Mann’s tortured struggles with his sexual orientation, which infiltrated his fiction from the very beginning of his career. He never denied his homoerotic longings and Tóibín delicately describes the many occasions during his long life when Mann was overwhelmed with desire for a particular man and his secretive attempts to act on his cravings. But he was a man of his era and was forced to submerge his identity as a gay man most of the time. The emotional cost of a life lived closeted on the one hand, and as the married father of six children on the other, is readily apparent. Reading The Magician motivated me to reread Death in Venice and made me realize the courage it must have taken for Mann to portray Aschenbach’s tragic story in such complex but precise prose, to reify his own emotional turmoil without sanctimony or defensiveness. Tóibín’s prose is the ideal conduit to channel the roiling interface between the Mann of the larger world and the inner literary mind of a flesh and bones historical human being. 

The Magician is an engrossing reading experience that also has special salience for followers of the MedHum website, which explores the role of the individual in a changing society. A key element that drives the narrative forward is Mann’s engagement with the political developments in Germany over the long period spanning from the lead-in to World War I, to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 and again in September 1939 and the devastating war years, and ending with the rebuilding of his native country. At the start, Mann saw himself as heir to a tradition of German intellectual excellence and nobility. He took great pride in his country and patriotically defended the decision to go to war against France, Britain, and Russia in August 1914. However, he recognized the dangers posed by the Nazi seizure of power and openly decried the degradation of public life. Mann felt the Nazi destruction of the German cultural heritage as a personal betrayal. Mann recognized early on the brutality of the antisemitic legislation and the attacks on his Jewish colleagues. He was forced to weigh loyalty to country against the defense of universal humanistic principles and he struggled to find a path forward between these competing ideals.  

As Hitler rose to power, were Mann’s instincts right that this would bring calamity to Germany, or should he have had trust in his fellow citizens that things would right themselves? How much could Mann rely on his interpretation of unfolding political events and his prediction of what the future would look like? Once the Nazis consolidated their dictatorial control of the Reich and set out on a course for total war and extermination of the Jews, should Mann have been a strident and outspoken opponent of the regime or should he have worked more discreetly behind the scenes? Should he have remained in Germany and risked his own life and the safety of his family, especially his wife’s Jewish relatives, or sought refuge in America, where he could serve as a champion of cultural enlightenment and world peace? How does one weigh the facts and decide on an effective course of moral action? How does one choose among imperfect options? 

Like all of us, Mann was forced to anticipate events and make painful decisions—decisions that would play out over time and have consequences for others– in real time and with only partial or inaccurate data. Much like the case with physicians and other health care professionals, most of these decisions will work out well, some will be imperfect, and a few will even be wrong. Tóibín’s novel, history as fiction, vividly illustrates the human predicament of living while moving forward with uncertainty and anxiety because full clarity only comes in retrospect — something that doctors understand because they experience it nearly every day in encounters with their patients.  

The Magician – Reading by Colm Tóibín & Conversation with Friedhelm Marx at the Thomas Mann House 

The Magician: A Novel 
Colm Tóibín 
New York: Scribner, 2021, 512 pages  

Photo of Thomas Mann generated from Wikicommon Photos

Strauss and Schonberg were products of high German culture and were inspired by the notion of bildung, that man’s perfection is achievable by embracing the humanistic arts. Of all the elements of culture – visual arts, literature, sculpture, dance – for Germans, music was considered the ultimate and most noble embodiment of the human spirit. How could one maintain this enlightened vision of bildung after witnessing the dark years of the Third Reich? That is the tragedy that confronted these two men. Strauss, a non-Jew, had to reconcile his prestigious position in the German musical establishment and his social status with the need to toady up to the Nazi brass to save the lives of  members of  his family by marriage who were Jewish. He never renounced Hitler or the Nazi party. Schonberg, who earlier in his life followed Gustav Mahler’s lead  and converted out of Judaism to the Lutheran church, was still forced into exile to escape the Nazis, and thrived in a German expatriate community in Los Angeles. The world war reawakened his self-identity as a Jew and forced a reassessment of his relationship to his fellow Jews. Eichler sees Strauss’ Metamorphosen and Schonberg’s Survivor of Warsaw as timeless musical monuments to those who suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis, works that gain their special power by being expressions of each man’s inner turmoil.

Britten and Shostakovich lived in an entirely different world than Strauss and Schonberg. Nonetheless, they too suffered though the ravages of the Second World War. Britten, a gay man and committed pacifist, never served in active military duty. But he witnessed the nightly bombings of England and the German artillery attacks along the coastline near where he lived. Shostakovich was alternatively celebrated and reviled by Stalin. He lived a life of continuous dread, trying to survive as a person and musician when a death sentence could come at a moment’s notice at the whim of the Great Leader. Britten was commissioned to write a musical piece to accompany the dedication of the Coventry Cathedral which had been nearly destroyed by a night-long Wehrmacht bombing raid; Shostakovich was inspired to write his 14^th Symphony after reading  Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1962 poem “Babi Yar”.  For Britten, the War Requiem was a pacifist’s response to the self-destructiveness of war and the grievous loss of a generation of young able-bodied men; Shostakovich’s work was his attempt to come to grips with the moral blindness of the Russian people who denied their complicity with the Nazi murder of 33,000 innocent Jewish men, women, and children at the ravine outside Kyiv in broad daylight, in one ghastly day.  

This overview hardly captures the dense description of these four men and the turbulent times they lived through. There are astonishing subplots and characters in each composer’s narrative. Eichler retells how Schonberg originally reached out to Serge Koussevitsky to premiere Survivor of Warsaw. When the conductor demurred, the inaugural concert ended up being performed by a community orchestra and choir in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When Britten toured the Displaced Person camps after World War II and played piano accompaniment with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin at Bergen Belsen, the intensity of his playing profoundly affected a young Venetian woman named Anita Lasker, who survived the Holocaust only because she had been enlisted to play in the inmates’ orchestra, directed by a colleague of Strauss and Schonberg. There is so much in Time’s Echo and the best advice is to allow yourself to be immersed in the book. 

Eichler is a precise and enthusiastic writer, and he fully captures the emotional toll of living through the two World Wars, in Germany, England, and Russia. The inhumanity of the trench warfare in World War I, the insane hatred driving the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in Europe, the unprecedented destructiveness of World War II, the senseless starvation and killing of millions of Russians during the forced agricultural collectivizations and the German siege of Leningrad – all of these are depicted by Eichler in stark prose. 

There is so much to comment on. Let me focus on one point – Eichler’s assertion that music is the optimal way to memorialize events in the past. To begin, one might question the need to remember altogether. In Zachor (University of Washington Press, 1982), Yosef Dov Yerushalmi documents how important memory is to the Jewish people. History is not a simple record of dates and facts. Instead, history and memory are meant to bring the past to life and reinforce faith and commitment. But David Rieff, in the book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies (Yale University Press, 2016), suggests that overemphasis on memory of past events can ensnare people in a web of accusations and counterclaims and weaken individual agency. And do the musical memorials composed by the four composers point a way forward to overcome the failings of the past or do they create an emotional trap? The swirling currents of hatred circling our world today give pause to any notion that the works of these composers have brought us any closer to a world of tolerance and peaceful coexistence.  

All of the senses participate in the formation of memory. Proust famously wrote about how the smell of a madeleine evoked deep-seated memories in one of his characters. Eichler gives pride of place to hearing and music. There is no question that hearing a particular popular song or piece of music often triggers recollection of pivotal moments in a person’s life. Eichler has a wonderful feeling for the musical compositions, which range from seven minutes to over an hour long and play such a central role in Time’s Echo. However, I wonder whether most of us can delve as deeply into the content and feelings articulated in a piece of music. It is not the evanescence of sound per se that makes me uncertain, because all sensory perceptions are transitory and both sights and sounds can be captured and reserved for posterity in photographs and recordings. But it is the complexity of classical music that I find daunting. In Rebecca Goldstein’s book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon, 2010), there is a scene in which a math prodigy and his genius friends are sitting around and for entertainment, they challenge each other to sing variations of famous classical music pieces like a Bach prelude shifted up by a third, changed from the major key to minor, or starting from the middle and going backwards. Do we need to understand music with such precision to be moved by the complicated creations of Schonberg, Straus, Britten, and Shostakovich? I’ve listened to the four pieces of music discussed in the book, and though I was moved, I know I was not as appreciative as Eichler of their artistry and nuance.  

Three of the compositions were accompanied by text to focus and amplify the impact of the music. Some of the choices were straightforward, like the poem by Yevtushenko. But the selection of works by Wilfred Owen to accompany the War Requiem and the words that Schonberg wrote to be read during the performance of Survivor of Warsaw contribute greatly to the emotional power of the two works. So much to ponder, so much to learn.

Echoes lose their intensity as they bounce off surfaces and spread out in space. Eichler’s book does not echo, it resonates and amplifies. It is overflowing with content that touches on so many topics and issues. It activates each one and gets them vibrating, different frequencies, different pitches. In the end, Time’s Echo creates a symphony of ideas that we can all read and listen to, one glorious mixed metaphor

TIME’S ECHO
Jeremy Eichler
Knopf, 2023, 386 pp