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When I accepted a friend's invitation to think about Heinz Kohut's attitudes toward Thomas Mann, I began with memories of my own relationship with the great European writer. My reading and rereading of Mann have spanned all the years of my adulthood—with many temporal discontinuities and vicissitudes of cultural and historical contexts. As a result, my evaluation of Mann has changed enormously during this time. Indeed, it occurs to me that as time and history have created dramatic shifts in my responses to Mann, so, too, tumultuous history and the experience of exile may also have created changes in the meanings the author had for Kohut.
Let me begin with an odd story. The first time I read The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1995), I was a sophomore at Berkeley. I especially remember reading the novel because of unusual circumstances that surrounded the exam on the book. The exam took place in Dwinnell Hall, a small lecture auditorium on campus, and I can recall furiously scribbling answers—I always
scribbled furiously then—scribble, scribble about ideas and conditions and tensions in pre-World War I Europe. Right in the middle of my scribbling, the exam was interrupted by workers bringing in television sets. It turned out that the TVs were for an important speech to be delivered by our then president, John Kennedy. This was the speech in which Kennedy faced off with Nikita Khruschev over missiles in Cuba, and many of us Berkeley undergraduates thought the world was about to explode. The old European intellectual conflicts and culture wars in Mann's book suddenly seemed pretty beside the point.
In the past weeks, while I was rereading The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1995), new catastrophic events have occurred. During this time, we have all learned that Chicken Little was right after all—economically speaking, the sky is falling. Are there any lessons in all of this? One possible lesson is that I may be a jinx, and for the good of civilization, I vow never to read the