62 pages • 2-hour read
The Magician
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide, antisemitism, brutality, torture, murder, gay sexual orientation, inappropriate attraction to children, and incest-adjacent themes.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Munich, 1922”
Thomas’s oldest children, Erika and Klaus, seem more boisterous and theatrical to him than their younger siblings, yet quite serious about politics. Their best friends are the clever and good-looking Ricki Hallgarten and Pamela Wedekind, the daughter of a playwright. While Erika takes her Abitur (high school exam), Klaus drops out of school, insisting that he’s an artist and doesn’t need a diploma. In time, the two move to Berlin. Klaus writes stories and essays, and Erika pursues an acting career. Their personal life is the subject of much speculation in Germany. While Klaus gets engaged to Pamela, rumors hold that Erika and Pamela are lovers. Likewise, when Erika marries famous actor Gustaf Gründgens, many say that Klaus and Gründgens are in love.
Thomas experiences several losses in his birth family: Julia passes away in Polling, and Thomas’s sister Lula dies by suicide. Amid the upheavals in his large family, Thomas finishes The Magic Mountain. He likes his use of time in the novel, slowing down or expanding events to reveal the characters’ inner lives. Though he’s unsure about the reception of the long novel, Katia tells him the book shows that he’s a serious writer and “[w]ill be read by every German who cares about books” (156). As Katia predicted, The Magic Mountain is well-received. Soon, the Nobel Committee in Switzerland is considering Thomas for a prize.
With so much going on, Thomas pays little attention to the political developments in Germany, even though Klaus and Erika constantly talk about Adolf Hitler, and Heinrich prophesies Hitler’s inevitable and disastrous rise. Thomas thinks Hitler and the Nazi party are yet another brand of extreme rebels who are bound to fade in time, a hunch that the Nazi party’s poor showing in the 1924 elections seems to confirm. Hitler’s views about Germany’s superiority have an opposite effect on Thomas. Since he likewise once believed in the “specialness of the German soul” (162), he realizes that he must examine his heritage more critically.
In 1929, Thomas receives the Nobel Prize. Overnight, he becomes a symbol of Germany’s liberal spirit, his victory proving that Germany is intellectual and artistic. Even though Thomas’s acceptance speeches after receiving the prize are apolitical, he senses that his very presence is a counterpoint to Nazi politics. In 1930, when the Nazis receive 6.5 million votes, Thomas continues to hope, against the odds, that the Nazi party’s surge in popularity will subside as quickly as it arose.
A few months later, Thomas delivers a lecture called “An Appeal to Reason” in Berlin, asking the audience to stay true to the German values of liberty, equality, and education. However, when Thomas calls Nazism a “[c]olossus with clay feet” (169), people in the audience heckle him, hurling insults. The organizers pass Thomas a note, asking him to end his speech quickly. He, Katia, and the children must leave via a secret staircase. Thomas now knows that he can never speak against the Nazis in Germany without consequences. He and Katia become guarded about expressing their opinions.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Lugano, 1933”
Thomas and Katia are vacationing in Arosa, Switzerland, when the Reichstag building (home of the German parliament) is set afire. Blaming the fire on a group of communists, the Nazis use it as a pretext for mass arrests. Thomas wants to return to Munich to ensure that their house isn’t ransacked, but Erika and Klaus tell their parents to stay away for a while. Katia rents a house for the family in Lugano, and she and Thomas are joined by Monika, Elisabeth, Michael, and Erika. Golo stays on in Munich, while Klaus travels around Europe, campaigning against the Nazi party.
Katia and Thomas worry, not just for Golo but also for Katia’s parents, whose Jewish heritage places them in danger. While Erika and Klaus want Thomas to publicly condemn the Nazis, Thomas considers the consequences that his political stance may generate for his in-laws. Further, Thomas fears that the Nazi party may ban his books, which would mean a tremendous financial loss for his publisher, Gottfried Bermann.
Another reason Thomas doesn’t yet speak out against the Nazis is that his diaries, containing intimate confessions about his attraction to men and boys, are still in Munich. Thomas shudders to think how they may be used against him if the Nazi party seizes them. Thomas is particularly worried about his confession that he felt attracted to his son Klaus when he was a teen. Another account that Thomas would hate for anyone to read describes his encounter with 17-year-old Klaus Heur, the son of a famous art professor. Befriended by Monika and Elisabeth, Klaus was invited to stay with the Manns in Munich one summer. Klaus Heur and Thomas developed a mutual attraction, and Klaus visited Thomas’s study every afternoon to listen to him discuss his writing. Katia likely noticed their connection because after a few days, she discreetly suggested to Klaus Heur that it was time for him to leave Munich. He said goodbye to Thomas with a kiss.
Thomas directs Golo to find his diaries and mail them to Lugano before Golo leaves Munich for good. When Golo arrives but the diaries don’t, Thomas suspects that the Nazis found them. Finally, a friend in Munich learns that the suitcase containing them is still languishing at the post office because of an error, and mails it to Lugano. Thomas receives his diaries a few weeks later, feeling incredibly lucky.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Küsnacht, 1934”
News from Germany gets more dire. Thomas knows that he must soon make a public stand against the Nazis but is again checked by fear that his books will be banned in Germany. When Switzerland refuses to grant him and Katia citizenship, the Manns move to Sanary in the south of France, the refuge of many German artists, including Ernst Toller and playwright Bertolt Brecht.
In Sanary, Thomas notices that artists love to talk about politics, growing most impassioned when discussing the plight of a particular cohort. Thomas avoids these artists as he fears that their company will make him perennially indignant. One day, Toller approaches Thomas to request that he use his influence to arrange a release for Eric Muhsam, whom the Nazis have captured. Thomas politely explains that he has no power to influence the Nazi party. However, later that night, Thomas wonders if he had genuine reasons for refusing to act or if he simply didn’t want to make things worse for himself. Thomas finds no answer to the question.
When Elisabeth and Michael, now in their late teens, find it tough to cope with the French-language instruction in school, the Manns move to Küsnacht, Switzerland. Katia arranges English lessons for Elisabeth, Michael, and herself. Before the Manns leave Sanary, Heinrich visits them. Now divorced from Mimi, he has a younger girlfriend named Nelly. Katia immediately dislikes Nelly’s loud, boisterous manner. Heinrich worries about Mimi, who is Jewish and is still in Prague with their daughter, Goschi. Meanwhile, Erika, whose German passport is about to expire, reaches out to the queer writer Christopher Isherwood for a marriage of convenience. Isherwood refers her instead to British poet W. H. Auden, who marries Erika to help her obtain British citizenship.
The issue of Thomas’s political reticence comes to a head in Küsnacht, when Klaus lists Thomas as a future contributor to the radical magazine Die Sammlung, which Klaus edits from Amsterdam. Thomas is incensed to see his name in the magazine, especially since Klaus didn’t seek his permission. Thomas tells his children that he’ll denounce Hitler when he pleases.
In 1935, Thomas, along with Albert Einstein, receives an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. Katia and Thomas visit the US to receive the honor. Thomas receives an invitation to meet President Roosevelt at the White House. Agnes Meyer, the German wife of the owner of The Washington Post, tells Thomas that the Roosevelts like him and that their favor may come in handy for him.
His reception in the US makes Thomas conscious again of his public role as a German writer. He finally decides to make a public stance against Hitler, publishing a statement denouncing Hitler’s regime. However, Thomas isn’t happy with his words, feeling they were too cautious. He decides to craft a stronger statement, filled with all the ornate expressions and exalted vocabulary for which readers criticize him. Thomas knows the statement comes late, yet writing it fills him with relief.
After the publication of the second statement, Thomas is flooded with happy phone calls from Heinrich, Erika, and Klaus. A few days after the second statement is published, a friend of Ernst Toller visits Thomas, telling him how Erich Muhsam—to whose widow Thomas sent money—died: The Nazis tortured Muhsam, breaking his teeth and branding a swastika on his forehead before forcing him to dig his own grave, and then hanged him in the prison’s latrines. Disturbed, Thomas asks the man his reasons for sharing the distressing account. The man tells Thomas he should know that Muhsam’s fate is being shared by Jewish people and dissidents every day throughout Germany. The brutality will soon spread to other European nations. No one is safe anymore, including Thomas.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The theme of Identity Amid Displacement takes center stage in this section, as Thomas’s displacement from Germany supplants his displacement from Lübeck. Accompanying the physical displacement is the loss of his idea of Germany, a loss he experiences when his audience turns against him at the Beethovensaal. Thomas wrongly assumed that his well-read audience would appreciate his civilized views. His assumption that a reading, artistic audience is more civilized suggests class biases. As a counterpoint to these notions, the text offers several examples of prominent German writers and intellectuals who harbored Nazi sympathies, such as writer Ernst Bertram and Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner. Additionally, many Nazi party members, including Adolf Hitler, were classical music lovers. Thomas’s assumption that a love of music and literature makes one a decent human being is repeatedly shattered in the novel, suggesting that he must revise his views.
Thomas’s distance from the idea of a perfect Germany occurs in tandem with the rise of Hitler. As in the case of Heinrich and Klaus, the positions of other individuals help Thomas clarify his stance. As Nazi ideology takes the notion of German superiority into dangerous territory, Thomas realizes the flaw in his position before World War I: that he fails to critically examine his heritage. Thus, the novel reveals that Thomas is an introspective character, capable of change.
These chapters develop Erika, Klaus, and the older Mann children as full-blown characters, sowing plot points that emerge in the last third of the novel. While Klaus and Erika are similar in their iconoclastic, radical outlook, a major point of difference is that Erika takes her high-school exam, while Klaus leaves school altogether. This suggests that Klaus’s idealism and privilege distance him from practical reality in a manner that may prove detrimental to him. Golo is quieter and more efficient than his older siblings but has a keen political consciousness. Thomas notes that Golo maintains newspaper cuttings of the Nazi party’s rise and shows him the incendiary writings from the Illustrierter Beobachter (the Illustrated Observer), a pictorial propaganda magazine brought out by the Nazi party.
Thomas’s diaries, which Golo helps recover, are an important symbol in the novel, representing the complex interplay between a writer’s raw material and its finished version. For Thomas, the brutally honest diaries are a record of his innermost life and help power his novels. Thomas must observe and note even the most transgressive thought and feeling, as he transmutes it into his writing. However, if this record became public, it could ruin Thomas’s reputation. He’s mortified that the account of his intense feelings for Klaus Heur might expose him as an impostor, his respectability a cover to disguise his “base sexual desires” (180). As Thomas agonizes over the diaries, he wishes for a moment that he hadn’t kept such a meticulous record of his feelings for men. In the very next second, however, he realizes that this is impossible. Recording the feelings and encounters was the only way to make them real.
Thomas’s worry about the discovery of the diaries thematically illustrates The Complex Relationship Between Sexuality, Self, and Family. Thomas feels a symmetry between the raw truth of the private diaries, the slant depiction of that truth in his writing, and his public persona as a happily married father of six children. He doesn’t want anything to upset this balance. Despite the erotic passion he experiences through shared gazes and gestures with other men, he thinks of men like Ernst Betram as “homosexual” (this term, now pejorative, was commonly used in Thomas’s time) and therefore different from Thomas. While Thomas’s views now seem conflicted or repressed, another interpretation is that Thomas consciously maintains boundaries between his private and public selves, believing that these boundaries and hidden truths give his writing its power.
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