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Germany approves nearly $1bn in arms exports to Israel (thecradle.co)
submitted 4 days ago by supersquirrel@lemmy.ca to c/europe@feddit.org
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[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So is Mein Kampf not fascist because it predates 1933 too?

Get out of here with this lazy shit, Naptha is clearly a fascist in all but name in The Magic Mountain.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you claiming The Magic Mountain is a reaction to Mein Kampf, a book that had not been published by then?

Naptha is clearly a fascist in all but name

Now, this is actually an argument engaging with the material.
It’s been ages since I read the book, can you remind me what Naphtha says and does and how the book critically engages with that.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you claiming The Magic Mountain is a reaction to Mein Kampf, a book that had not been published by then?

....no?

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So, did Mann know what Adolf would write in his book or what the Nazis would do in the 30s and 40s?
Did he know what Mussolini would get up to in the next decades?

No? Then he couldn’t have reacted to that. So none of that can be relevant to what he had written in 1924.

Now, it’s not unheard of that authors can see the proverbial writing on the wall and anticipate future events to some degree. But to argue that you would also have to actually point to his writing and draw parallels. You can’t just point at later events as proof for what is in the book.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Now, it’s not unheard of that authors can see the proverbial writing on the wall and anticipate future events to some degree. But to argue that you would also have to actually point to his writing and draw parallels. You can’t just point at later events as proof for what is in the book.

Have you actually read any literary analysis of The Magic Mountain... or like... just read the damn book? Were you not paying attention to the conversations with Naptha and how Hans Castorp changes in his disposition towards them over the course of the novel as WW1 ripens on the limb...? Go read the book again, I will not waste my time handing you things just so you can throw them at the wall like a baby.

Your desire to bifurcate periods of time and development of ideologies into artificial divisions is childish.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

As I said it's been a long time, so let's see what we find for analysis on Naphta:

Naphta is termed a "revolutionary" and "socialist", but Settembrini sees Naphta's fantasies as emanating from an anti-humanitarian reactionary revolution [...]
The association here between Naphta's advocacy of terrorism and two extremely conservative movements – Prussian militarism and Jesuitism – is a huge political shift for the novel.

Yes, revolution and militarism, well known concepts at the time, unlike fascism.
Almost like references to the forces that embattled the Weimar Republic at the time, the socialists who wanted to join the world revolution and the military who wanted to re-start the war they claimed to have lost only because of the cowardly politicians.
Funny how that fits together when you consider the actual time it was written instead of the 30s or the cold war.

Ah, and here is a review that explicitly covers authoritarian nationalism:

he wrote and delivered his speech, On the German Republic.
In it, he publicly embraced the postwar Weimar Republic and the principles of its democracy, distancing himself from the types of authoritarian nationalism [...]
By the time he finished writing, the work had been transformed from a satirical novella into a sweeping Bildungsroman, focused on moral education and psychological development. It was now also an allegory of European civilisation teetering on the abyss – a “world festival of death”, as Mann puts it in the novel’s final sentence. [...]
Specifically, the phrase is a reference to World War I. More broadly – and just as powerfully – it reflects the sense of postwar disillusionment and social malaise that shaped the novel.

Authoritarian nationalism is certainly also an element of fascism but not exclusive to it.
It has been prominent in the German Empire before WWI and indeed this review draws the direct link to the war, which is something that Mann knows about and can react to unlike the rise of fascism which happens later.

Your desire to bifurcate periods of time and development of ideologies into artificial divisions is childish.

Sorry, I live in a world of linear time where later events and ideas cannot influence the past.

What i find more childish is your stubborn insistence on a point that you simultaneously refuse to prove.
It's funny how you claim to be handing me things when all you've done is quote unrelated third hand accounts of Mann's life and nothing from the book. Not even a literary analysis that supports your claim.
All while completely ignoring that I've repeatedly shown you ways how you could make your case.

I agree that this was big waste of time, lets agree to not do it again.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I agree that this was big waste of time, lets agree to not do it again.

lol ok, you don't grasp basic things about how art works, about how art is always in conversation with the context it arose from given the author's life experiences and yet you are committed to this futile argument.

The Magic Mountain is one of the world's great antifascist novels.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

and the author's experiences

You have to be joking.
I have constantly pointed out that Mann had not yet experienced fascism. That would happen later.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

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/