Photographs by Justin Chung

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity. During his first day on set, although he had only two lines, he asked Mike Judge, one of the show’s creators, whether his character should speak with a Mandarin accent or a Cantonese one. Judge was stumped. “I just said, ‘Oh, well, which one’s more natural to you?’ ” Judge told me. Yang, who’d grown up in Hong Kong, worried that a Cantonese accent was too generic; American viewers might recognize it from Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movies. Because Mandarin is more standard for official and professional contexts, it can sound more formal, and Yang thought this made sense for an ambitious immigrant like Jian-Yang. Judge told me that he now doesn’t remember which accent Yang chose; “I was just glad he was paying that much attention,” he said.

The show’s writers expanded Yang’s role, and he eventually became a series regular, reshaping his character into a sly villain whose befuddled exterior disguises an inner ruthlessness. To deepen his performance, Yang developed a mantra, which he would say to himself in Mandarin before every take: “Wŏ bù zhī dào,” or “I don’t know.” He drew this mantra from his own experience dealing with his parents. “Even when I know something, and they’re like, ‘Why is Netflix not working?,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ ” He grinned at me conspiratorially. “Because I just don’t care to fix it.” That’s how Jian-Yang operates too, Yang said: “I think Jian-Yang knows; he just doesn’t really give a shit.”

And yet, for many viewers, none of this character work mattered. As Silicon Valley grew in popularity, Jian-Yang became the subject of scorn for some Asian viewers and critics, who called out the show’s writers for peddling a caricature of an Asian immigrant with heavily accented, error-prone English. In 2017, a Wired review called him an example of “toxic Asian stereotypes.”

Yang found these reactions exhausting. “It’s like, wow, this is such a big deal for me, and I’m becoming, back in those days, one of the few Asians on TV,” he told me. “But you’re all going to hate on me?” He felt a familiar anguish. The only roles offered to him were goofy sidekicks and background parts, but even when he tried to make characters like Jian-Yang as rounded and complicated as possible, he felt he couldn’t win. “I didn’t understand the beef against Asian accents,” he said. He gets why Asian Americans are sensitive to such portrayals, given Hollywood’s long history of stereotyping, but some of the criticism, he said, felt “a little overblown and a little dumb.” “There’s a constant foreigner bit,” he explained, referring to the industry’s tendency to exoticize Asian characters. “But I was a foreigner.”

Despite the controversy around the character, Jian-Yang ultimately launched Yang’s career. In 2018, the year before Silicon Valley ended its run, he appeared in the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, a box-office hit now considered a watershed moment for Asian cultural representation. This November, Yang is starring in Hulu’s Interior Chinatown, which feels like a different kind of milestone. Adapted from Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel of the same name, the series tells the story of Willis Wu, a background actor on a generic police procedural set in an unnamed city’s Chinatown. For Yang, the role is more than a chance to be a leading man; it also uncannily mirrors his own life. Willis is stuck in small, clichéd parts, juggling Hollywood’s biases and his own ambition, trying to figure out who exactly he wants to be.

Top: Yang as Bernard in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Bottom: As Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (2019). (© Warner Bros. Pictures / Everett Collection; Ali Paige Goldstein / © HBO / Everett Collection)

When Yang first emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, at age 13, the move left him dazed. He was one of a handful of Chinese kids at his school, and he barely spoke English. “I was like, ‘Guys, you’re speaking way too fast; I can’t,’ ” he told me. After two years, his mother got a job in Shanghai and left the family behind to return to China, where she stayed for the next decade. Without her, Yang became even more adrift.

His father, meanwhile, embraced their new American life. He celebrated their arrival by buying a Pontiac Grand Am. “He thought it was so fucking cool because we always had, like, Honda Accords, in Hong Kong,” Yang told me. “Then he was like”—Yang launched into an impression of his dad, puffing out his chest, his voice going gravelly—“ ‘American six cylinder, baby! This is great!’ ”

Yang worked hard to assimilate to his new surroundings. In Hong Kong, he’d played competitive Ping-Pong and watched kung fu shows on TV. In Los Angeles, he became interested in basketball and football. He fell in love with American television—Bobby Lee on Mad TV, Ken Jeong on Live in Hollywood. He got into hip-hop and tried to build his identity around music, but still felt like he was faking it. “I wasn’t trying to not be Asian,” he said. “I was just trying to be either funnier or catch a football or something so I could fit in.”

Yang began creating what he now calls a “locker” in his mind, where he hid his former self away so he could “make space in my brain to remember American stuff.” He compartmentalized so successfully that he’s had “a weird memory lapse” about his pre-California childhood in Hong Kong.

When Yang arrived at UC San Diego in 2005, the school’s student body was 37 percent Asian, a higher percentage than any other ethnic group. After years of trying to fit in with his Los Angeles classmates, he found it disorienting to suddenly be one among many. “I’m like, I actually want to stand out,” he said. “I don’t want to be grouped in with all of the Asians.” He grew his hair long and started skateboarding and smoking weed, anything to avoid seeming like a stereotype. But he also worried about disappointing his parents, both of whom had practical jobs—his father was a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, and his mother worked in retail—so he pursued an economics degree and interned at a financial-consulting firm.

Then, one summer night before his last year of college, he paid $5 on a whim to do five minutes of stand-up at an open-mic night in North Hollywood. Onstage, he found that joking about his identity somehow alleviated the strain of feeling like an outsider. “They didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t ‘Jimmy’; I was just the next comedian up, this guy who looks Asian,” he said. “They didn’t come to see me, so it’s almost like I have to address, like, ‘Hey, yeah, I know I’m Asian. This is my experience.’ ”

Yang was more than willing to lean into stereotypes. His early stand-up included an impression of an Asian guy trying to hit on a girl: “Let me holler at you! Come back; I’ll do your nails for you,” he’d say in an exaggerated accent. In another bit, he joked about the lack of Asians on The Maury Povich Show. “You never see some dude walking down the steps of shame and being like, ‘Look, Maury, look. I got small eye; he got big eye. That not my baby, Maury.’ ”

Yang had a relaxed, good-natured stage presence. But these bits were, as he put it, “hacky Asian stuff.” He was happy to confirm audiences’ biases if it made them laugh. Around that time, he started using the handle @FunnyAsianDude for his social-media accounts.

To make a living, he worked as a used-car salesman during the day and as a strip-club DJ at night. The latter “combined the salesmanship I learned in the used-car lot with the microphone skills I’d learned doing stand-up,” he told Conan O’Brien years later. Yang turned down an offer for a cushy finance job, against his father’s wishes, in favor of pursuing open-mic nights. He also began auditioning for TV shows and movies, going out for pretty much any casting call that would have him, as he wrote in his 2018 memoir: “Loud Japanese host,” “Weird Korean Jogger guy,” “Video Game addict.”

“You don’t want to be in a box, but at the same time, when you’re first starting, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, I’m an Asian actor. Call me if you need an Asian actor,’ ” he said. Even after landing his guest role on Silicon Valley, he put his earnings into a used car he could drive for Uber, to make a little more cash.

Then, months after he finished filming the first season, in 2014, HBO offered him a contract to be a series regular. When he got the call, he was killing time on the trolley that rolls through the Grove, an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles. He rode the trolley back and forth in disbelief, feeling like “the gate’s opened,” like he was finally a “real player now in this industry.” He called his dad, who said, in Yang’s words: “Oh, okay, so you have an employment contract with HBO, which is a company. Good. Thank God.”

In person, Yang is warm and easygoing, with an approachable air. One afternoon this summer, we met for lunch at a Thai restaurant in L.A. As soon as he sat down, a woman leaned over and stopped him mid-sentence. “Are you the famous guy?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. She laughed and held up her phone for a selfie anyway.

Yang could have taken offense that the woman seemed to view him as just a vaguely familiar face; he wouldn’t have been the first Asian actor to be confused with another one. (In his 2020 comedy special on Amazon Prime, Good Deal, he joked about fans who approach him, looking anxious. Are you sure that’s not Ken Jeong? he imagines them wondering.) But when I brought up the incident the next time we met, over dim sum in Monterey Park, he laughed, unbothered. He’s accustomed to this particular kind of fame, to being “that guy I’ve seen before.” It’s a long way from where he started.

Since Yang began his career, in the early 2010s, opportunities for Asian actors have exploded—a surge that Yang attributes largely to the success of Crazy Rich Asians. In that movie, a young Chinese American woman goes to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s family, and is thrown into the high-flying milieu of Asia’s ultra-wealthy. As the playboy Bernard, Yang found a desperate streak beneath his character’s bravado. When the film became a global hit in 2018, it was hailed as proof that Asian-led projects could find commercial success in Hollywood. In 2020, the Korean movie Parasite swept the Oscars; in 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once, led by Yang’s Crazy Rich Asians co-star Michelle Yeoh, did the same. A study published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that the percentage of Asian characters with speaking parts in the top-grossing films each year climbed from roughly 3 percent in 2007 to nearly 16 percent in 2022. Asians were the only minority group to see such a big increase in that period.

At the same time, more Asian writers and directors were getting the opportunity to create their own work, which gave rise to a range of Asian characters who are delightfully eccentric but also specific and human. Now there are far fewer roles like the Jian-Yang of early Silicon Valley, and more roles like, say, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s deranged, obsessive duo in Beef, the Emmy-winning drama about a road-rage incident that escalates into a murderous feud. As Jeong, who also appeared in Crazy Rich Asians and has become a close friend of Yang’s, put it to me: “There’s more diversity in our diversity now.”

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

This doesn’t mean that choosing roles was suddenly easy for actors like Yang. Not long after Crazy Rich Asians, he got sent a script for a movie about William Hung, who’d become an early viral sensation after an awkward 2004 American Idol audition during which he gyrated and sang Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” off-key. The writer wanted Yang to play Hung. It was a starring role in a potentially splashy biopic—but Yang turned it down. In June 2020, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he told Rogan that the script made him want to “fucking vomit”; Hung, he said, had “set us back 10 years.” In response, Hung posted a video addressed to Rogan and Yang. “I understand where you might be coming from, because you’re not the only person who believes that I portray Asian stereotypes,” Hung said. But, he added, “I believe everyone has a right to try something new without being judged or ridiculed.”

When I brought up his comments about Hung, Yang grimaced. His objection to the project, he told me, was not about Hung himself but rather about the way the script missed an opportunity to examine why he’d become famous and how his notoriety had affected the perception of Asian Americans, especially Asian men. “People made fun of him,” Yang said. “He was the butt of the joke, and every one of us was called ‘William Hung’ in high school for a couple years.” To Yang, the way American Idol portrayed Hung—how the show “threw him out there, and how America ganged up and laughed at him—that should be the story we’re telling.” Many Asian performers still find it hard to shake the fear that they’ll be turned into a punch line the way Hung was. “In hindsight,” Yang said of those 2020 comments, “I think that was my own frustration, my own insecurity.”

For Asian actors living through this cultural sea change, career choices can seem freighted with a new sense of responsibility and, occasionally, feelings of guilt. I spoke with Jeong about what is arguably his most well-known role, the Chinese gangster Mr. Chow in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. To Jeong, Mr. Chow was “puncturing the stereotype, because there are not a lot of stereotypes where, you know, an Asian man jumps out naked on Bradley Cooper’s shoulder and beats him up.” Still, some things about Mr. Chow now seem to give him pause, including his exaggerated accent. “I haven’t done an accent on live TV since,” he told me. “And there’s a reason for that.”

When I mentioned this to Yang, he shrugged and sighed. “Yeah, yeah, and that’s his battle,” he said. As much as Yang admires Jeong, his own view of what makes for “good” representation seems somewhat different. He doesn’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with an Asian character who has a thick accent, and he doesn’t think breaking down stereotypes requires playing a kind of character audiences have never seen before. He’d be interested in a role that seemed like an Asian cliché—say, a mathematician—if it surprised him. “Is there some more interesting angle about the man?” he said. “Or is it just super one-dimensional: ‘Here’s an Asian guy good at math’?” The question he asks himself about each character now is simple: “Is it human?”

Yang’s stand-up comedy has evolved, too. He still riffs on being Asian, but his material is more precise, and more personal. In his 2023 special for Amazon Prime, Guess How Much?, he jokes about the frugality of his mother, with whom he’s grown close again after their long separation. (She loves a bargain; he says her catchphrase is “Guess how much?”) He still plays with stereotypes, but now he has a knack for turning them on their head: Joking about the global rise of K-pop, he says, “I had a 15-year-old white kid come up to me, trying to explain the different members of BTS … I’m like, ‘Dude. They look the same to me.’ ”

Last year, Yang changed his Instagram handle from @FunnyAsianDude to just @jimmyoyang. “If I log on every day on Instagram, I see ‘Funny Asian Dude,’ I’m saying that to myself over and over again: I’m only the funny Asian,” he told me. “But I think I’m more than that. And I could be more.”

In Interior Chinatown, Willis lives in a crowded apartment complex and works as a waiter at a restaurant called the Golden Palace while dreaming of becoming a “Kung Fu Guy.” What Willis doesn’t fully understand is that he’s actually a background actor—otherwise known as a “Generic Asian Man”—in a procedural called Black & White, which is occasionally set in the Golden Palace. (The show within the show stars a Black male detective and a white female detective, who flirt and banter with unrelenting cop-show swagger.) Over time, Willis becomes entangled in the plot of Black & White, landing bigger and bigger roles, and gradually realizing that he’s been trapped inside a Hollywood stereotype all along.

The first episode opens with Willis witnessing an incident related to a crime that Black & White’s detectives are investigating. He starts to notice the strangeness of his circumstances and, with the help of a new-to-town cop, he searches for his long-lost brother, a Kung Fu Guy who may know more about what’s going on.

Yang as Willis in Interior Chinatown (2024) (Mike Taing / Disney)

Charles Yu’s novel is structured like a screenplay, with stage directions full of character descriptions and lyrical digressions. Yu, who is also an executive producer, told me that he wrote the book in part to untangle his anxieties about the way cultural depictions of Asian people have influenced his perception of himself. “Like, Is this face lovable? ” he said. “Do we deserve to be characters, let alone main characters?” He wanted the mechanics of Willis’s world to reflect Hollywood’s narrow logic about race.

The novel is so high-concept that adapting it for the screen was a gamble for Hulu. But the series cleverly uses the tools of television to render the layered realities of the book. The lights in the Golden Palace darken to indicate when Black & White is filming and Willis has entered that world. When Willis goes from being Interior Chinatown’s star to Black & White’s Generic Asian Man, the show challenges the audience to find him again, somewhere in the background of its shots.

And the book’s central metaphor has been made usefully concrete. On the day I visited the set of Interior Chinatown, Yang was filming a scene, invented for the show, that required him to repeatedly run into a pair of doors. The doors lead to the police precinct, the setting for Black & White’s highest-stakes subplots, where Generic Asian Men like Willis are not allowed. Willis is largely a dramatic role, but there are moments of physical comedy, and Yang was clearly having fun with this one. He improvised different takes: He tailgated a group of people, trying to sneak in behind them—blocked. He sidled up to the doors as if he could trick the inanimate wooden panels into staying ajar—blocked again. He took a running start, falling right before he reached the threshold.

When Yang first read the script for Interior Chinatown, he thought of all the ways in which he’d lived Willis Wu’s life. He’d looked for jobs as a background actor by calling Central Casting, the same agency that employs Willis; he’d even worked at a restaurant called Chop Suey in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. But Yang also thought that Interior Chinatown, with its self-awareness and depth, was a new kind of story.

He found a shirt that he’d worn in his 20s, when he still worked as a waiter, and smeared it with chili oil. He put on the scuffed-up Goodwill boots he’d worn back then, too. Then, in a hotel room, he auditioned for Willis over Zoom. In the scene Yang read, the reality-bending mechanics of Black & White are absent. Instead, Willis has a difficult conversation with his father, reluctantly admitting that he feels unmoored in life, and asking for advice, only to get stern replies.

At first, Yang had trouble evoking Willis’s emotions, and worried that he was forcing his tears. Then the episode’s director, Taika Waititi, stepped in. Waititi urged Yang to think about how Willis’s real motivation is to leave the conversation, but he stays out of some helpless instinct: to oblige his father, maybe, or because he’s holding on to the hope that he’ll hear what he wants to hear—that his father understands Willis’s angst. The note evoked a memory for Yang; as a teenager, he’d struggled to communicate his feelings to his father, because when he did, he found it hard to bottle those feelings back up again. “When I was younger,” he told me, “and I’d ask my dad about my mother—like, ‘Why did she move to Shanghai?’—I couldn’t help but start uncontrollably sobbing.”

Yang realized that Willis’s dynamic with his father was one he knew well: the push and pull between wanting to say everything and holding back, the emotional gulf that can stretch between an immigrant father and his more assimilated son. “I don’t know anyone who embodies better a bunch of the feelings and anxieties, and insecurities, that are part of why I wrote the book,” Yu told me of Yang.

If Yang’s relationship with his father was once more strained, lately that has changed. Richard Ouyang has been so encouraged by his son’s success that he recently started auditioning for roles himself. Ouyang told me that Yang now gives him professional advice: “Jimmy always asks me to be more serious about acting and take some classes,” Ouyang wrote by email. “Yet I think I am too old to learn any new tricks and prefer to be a Nepo Daddy!” In May, father and son did an ad for Toyota together, with Ouyang dryly complaining about his son’s driving skills as they navigate a snowy wilderness. “It was so cute—he was so stoked,” Yang said of his father. “He posted it all over his Chinese social media.”

Yang has also reconnected with the younger self he’d placed inside that mental locker back in 2000. His childhood comes rushing back at certain moments: when he smells stuffed fish cakes like the ones he used to eat with his mother at the shop near their Hong Kong apartment; when he’s speaking Cantonese; and, sometimes, when he performs. Playing Willis helped him rediscover, he said, “stuff that I’ve taken for granted, that I’ve forgotten”—the memories of who he was before.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Against Type.”

Just after college, I went to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village school in West Africa. To help relieve the loneliness, I packed a shortwave radio, a Sony Walkman, and, among other books, a paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s very long novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as I set foot in Togo, something began to change. My pulse kept racing; my mouth went dry and prickly; dizzy spells came on. I developed a dread of the hot silence of the midday hours, and an awareness of each moment of time as a vehicle for mental pain. It might have helped if I’d known that my weekly antimalarial medicine could have disturbing effects, especially on dreams (mine were frighteningly vivid), or if someone had mentioned the words anxiety and depression to me. At 22, I was a psychological innocent. Without the comfort of a diagnosis, I experienced these changes as a terrifying void of meaning in the universe. I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.

I might have lost my mind if not for The Magic Mountain. By luck or fate, the novel—which was published 100 years ago, in November 1924—seemed to tell a story a little like mine, set not in the West African rainforest but in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, a 23-year-old German engineer, leaves the “flatlands” for a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim, a tuberculosis patient who is taking the cure in one of the high-altitude sanatoriums that flourished in Europe before the First World War. Hans Castorp (Mann’s detached and amused, yet sympathetic, narrator always refers to the protagonist by his full name) is “a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man,” a slightly comical young bourgeois.

Arriving on the mountain, he immediately loses his bearings. In the thin air, his face goes hot and his body cold; his heart pounds, and his favorite cigar tastes like cardboard. His sense of time becomes warped. Many of the patients spend years “up here.” No one speaks or thinks in terms of days. “ ‘Home in three weeks,’ that’s a notion from down below,” his ailing cousin warns. Hans Castorp’s companions at the sanatorium’s five lavish daily meals are a cosmopolitan and macabre gallery of mostly young people who fill the endless hours gossiping, flirting, quarreling, philosophizing, and waiting to recover or die. The proximity of death is unsettling; it’s also funny (when the roads are blocked by snow, corpses are sent flying down the mountain on bobsleds) and strangely alluring.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the Making of The Magic Mountain]

When Hans Castorp catches a cold, the sanatorium’s director examines him and finds a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.

The director’s assistant, trained in psychoanalysis, explains in one of his biweekly lectures that sickness is “merely transformed love,” the body’s response to repressed desire. Fever is the mark of eros; the decay of a diseased body signifies life itself. Mann had ventured onto this terrain before. In his novella Death in Venice (1912), the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach, infatuated with a Polish boy at his hotel, stays in the plague-ridden city while other visitors flee. Hans Castorp stays too, obsessed with his own temperature chart, and with the entrancing Clavdia Chauchat, a young tubercular Russian with “Kirghiz eyes,” bad posture, and a habit of letting the dining-room door slam behind her. Almost half the novel goes by before Hans Castorp—who has by now been on the mountain for seven months—talks with Clavdia, just as she’s about to depart. On the night before she leaves, he makes one of the most bizarre declarations of love in literature: “Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down—oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!” Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism. Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years. Reading this dense yet miraculously seductive book becomes an experience like Hans Castorp’s interlude on the mountain. As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s. That was asking too much of even great literature; afraid of my own suicidal thoughts, I went home before the end of my two years. But on a few particularly dark nights, The Magic Mountain probably saved my life.

I recently returned to The Magic Mountain, without the intense identification of the first time (you have to be young for a book to inspire that), but with a larger sense that, a century later, Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist. What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.” In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?

Mann conceived of The Magic Mountain in 1912, when he was 37, after a three-week visit to a sanatorium in Davos where his wife, Katia, was a patient. “It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished,” he later wrote. He soon discovered that his story resisted the confines of a comic novella. But before he could realize its possibilities, World War I broke out, in August 1914. With Hans Castorp still in his first week at the sanatorium, Mann abandoned the manuscript as Europe plunged into unprecedented destruction. In a letter to a friend in the summer of 1915, he left a clue as to where things stood with his unfinished novel: “On the whole the story inclines towards sympathy with death.” And he now saw an ending—the war itself.

Mann published no fiction for the duration of the war. Instead, he became a very public defender of imperial Germany against its adversaries. For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief. The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values. This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.

Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view. In his wartime nonfiction writing, he mocked “civilization’s literary man,” a self-important poseur who takes sides on public issues and signs petitions. Mann was aiming at his brother Heinrich, a novelist and an essayist of nearly equal renown, whose liberal politics led him to support Germany’s enemies, France and Britain. The brothers exchanged indirect but caustic volleys in print, and their fraternal dispute became so bitter that they didn’t speak for seven years.

Before setting aside The Magic Mountain, Mann had created a version of this writer figure in a character named Lodovico Settembrini, another patient at the sanatorium, who is an irascible and hyper-articulate advocate for all things progressive: reason, liberty, virtue, health, the active life, social improvement. He declares music, the most emotionally overpowering of the arts, “politically suspect.” Mann at his most satiric has Settembrini contributing an essay to a multivolume project whose purpose is to end suffering. In short, Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”

Settembrini becomes a philosophical tutor to Hans Castorp, who listens with respectful interest but resists the liberal catechism. He responds more powerfully to the erotic allure of Clavdia Chauchat, the careless door slammer, who believes in “abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.” Yet Settembrini also has the wisdom to warn our hero against the seductions of the sanatorium, which separates young people from the society “down there,” infecting them with lassitude and rendering them incapable of ordinary life. As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.

Mann spent the war years making his case for the German soul, steeped in the “passion” of Wagner and “manliness” of Nietzsche, amid a global catastrophe that remained bloodlessly abstract to him at his desk in Munich. He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”

When Mann unpacked the four-year-old manuscript of The Magic Mountain in the spring of 1919, the novel and its creator were poised to undergo a metamorphosis. The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the making of The Magic Mountain]

Defeated Germany was in a state of revolution. In Munich, demobilized soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries, and Communist militants fought in the streets, while leaders of the new Weimar Republic were routinely assassinated. A local war veteran named Adolf Hitler began to electrify crowds in cramped halls with speeches denouncing the “traitors”—republican politicians, leftists, Jews—who had stabbed Germany in the back. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was born in Munich; Hitler’s attempted coup in November 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, took place less than two miles from the Mann house.

Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.” In April of that year, in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”

The key event of Mann’s conversion came in June, when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”

Mann the novelist had meanwhile returned to The Magic Mountain, and his work on it took a swerve in the same crucial year of 1922. His hero would have to struggle with the political battle that had beset Mann during the war. Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.

Just when you want to give up on their high-level dialectics, one of them, usually Naphta, says something that shocks you into a new way of thinking. Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism. Hans Castorp calls Naphta “a revolutionary of reaction.” At times sounding like a fanatical parody of the Mann of Reflections, Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.

It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands. The answer comes 300 pages before the novel’s end, when Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”

In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.” During his years on the mountain, he’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”

The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity. But the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings. The creation of this novel, which won Mann international fame, is “a tale of two Thomas Manns,” in the words of Morten Høi Jensen, a Danish critic whose The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” is due to be published next year. The Mann of wartime could not have written the sentence that awakens Hans Castorp from his dream.

[From the October 1944 issue: Thomas Mann’s “In My Defense”]

Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis. A Nobel Prize winner in exile, he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”

He was speaking at a moment when the dignity of man was locked up in Nazi concentration camps, liquidated in Soviet show trials, buried under piles of corpses. Yet Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud. It takes a constant effort not to accept this as normal. We might even feel, without acknowledging it to ourselves, that we deserve it: After all, we’re human, the lowest of the low.

In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts. We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.

The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time. But Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Magic Mountain Saved My Life.”