For the fifth time, they performed at this venue with their proven combination of playful action and explanatory presentation, aiming to bring the audience closer to the plot and background of epoch-defining works of world literature. This time, it took place in the form of a workshop, for which Lars Neuberger had provided the music.
In “The Magic Mountain,” the young engineer Hans Castorp – “a child burdened by life” – visits his cousin, who is suffering from lung disease, at a sanatorium in Davos for three weeks, but ultimately remains for seven years, equally fascinated by the mysterious atmosphere of this hermetically sealed place as well as by the confrontation with the ideas of his fellow patients. Over almost a thousand pages, Thomas Mann unfolds a critical reflection on the intellectual and moral values of his time and examines like an X-ray the abysses of a wealthy bourgeois society stumbling towards the First World War. The young protagonist, healed, is called to arms and is unlikely to survive the inferno into which he is thrust: “Farewell, Hans Castorp, your story is over.”
Gertrud Fickinger and Jürgen Bost expressed their enthusiasm about the overwhelmingly high number of visitors. Gertrud Fickinger emphasized the relevance of this topic and referred to the demand formulated by the author not to let “death and misanthropy” dominate our thinking and governing. Jürgen Bost also thanked the two protagonists of the evening and announced further events by the ILF: an evening about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on November 27 as well as an author meeting with Dominik Bollow on December 4, who will present his much-noticed contemporary historical novel “The Whims of the Goat,” published by Conte Verlag.
