A not easy, not young person travels to Niendorf in Schleswig-Holstein in the summer.

He drives for three months.

But he stays there (arguably) for the rest of his life.

This could be a summary of a contemporary “magic mountain” reduced to the essentials.

Back then, almost a hundred years ago, it read like this: “In midsummer, a simple young person traveled from Hamburg, his hometown, to Davos-Platz in Graubünden.

He went to visit for three weeks.” The end is well known.

Edo Reents

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Any serious novelist will know that you can't write a second "magic mountain" or, if you can, then only by being careful not to imitate it, by doing it in a completely different way, while retaining the basic idea, of course: a man travels.

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But why “can” one not write a second “Magic Mountain” without further ado?

It's an instinct;

too great is the danger of appearing pretentious, but then making a fool of oneself when it comes to craftsmanship.

Walter Kempowski seems to have recognized this when he had his writer alter ego Alexander Sowtschick write a novel in "Hundtage" (1988) that respected the unattainable exemplary nature of the "magic mountain": "He was not allowed to get too close to this mighty central massif .

Thorsten Becker then moved a little closer to him with his highly respectable novel Der Untertan ascends the Zauberberg, which takes a look at the entire Mann family.

But you might prefer to keep your hands off the competition with a novel that is already a parody and the final stage of the Bildungsroman, and that is so hypertrophied in terms of language and ideas.

Not much to do

Unless you are Heinz Strunk.

He dares and wins.

In order not to be misunderstood: he has little to do with Thomas Mann's narrative style.

His style is the utilization of the fact that its time is over.

That does not exclude respect, admiration;

but he is free from fear of influence.

However, he can afford his aversion to (overly) realistic, detailed or simply love-filled narratives because he cultivates them in the awareness of a certain contemporaneity or contemporaryness and has something else in store for it: a kind of economy perfected from book to book only with him to have inventory of a mental disposition that is geared towards misery and is mostly eaten up by it.

His new novel "Ein Sommer in Niendorf" was short-circuited by Richard Kämmerlings in the "Welt am Sonntag" with "Death in Venice".

That has a lot to say, especially when you consider that the "Magic Mountain" was intended as a "humoristic counterpart" to "Death in Venice" and was conceived as a novella - like the Niendorf story, which was also only a story until Strunk must have felt last summer, when his novel "It's always so nice with you" was published, that there was more to it - namely a story of decline or downfall, as Thomas Mann told it throughout his life.