Recommendations of the Editorial team
When Thomas Mann traveled to Los Angeles in February 1938 to give his lecture “The Coming Victory of Democracy” in the Shrine Auditorium, he resided at the Beverly Hills Hotel am Sunset Boulevard, which could be seen almost 40 years later on the cover of the Eagles album “Hotel California”.
The fact that the motif was an allusion to “Lotte in Weimar”, the novel about genius cult and Celebrity Culture, where the man wrote at the time, can be doubted, but the magician has definitely left traces in pop culture.
The protagonist of Christian Krachten “Faserland” (1995), for example, searches in vain for Mann’s grave, Anthony Soprano Jr. reads in a “sopranos” episode “Death in Venice”, although with a view to the gradual decline of his family “Buddenbrooks” would have been more fitting.
Thomas Mann as a role model
However, the novel about the Lübeck merchanteing has a short appearance in Noah Baumbach’s patchwork family saga “The Meyerowitz Stories”. The staging of the sensitive body in Mann’s texts, the transfiguration of illness and melancholy can be found in the work of many artists: inside from Roxy Music to Perfume Genius.
Since Luchino Visconti’s evaporation of “Death in Venice” (1971) has become the Polish young Tadzio, who has become the fateful obsession for the writer Gustav von Aschenbach in Mann’s novella. Rufus Wainwright set him a monument in his song “Gray Gardens” (2001). Morrissey slipped into the role of the dying Aschenbach and explained: “I just want to see the boy happy” (2006).
Finally, “The Magic Mountain” seemed to experience a pop Renaissance: Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead sang 2004: “I Must Stay on Magic Mountain”, Father John Misty explained in 2017: “I’m growing old on Magic Mountain”, and Michelle Zauner gave the Hans Castorp: “On the new Japanese-Breakfast album:” Subsides/ i’ll Return to the Fatlands/ A New Man, A New Man. “