Heinz Strunk’s Thomas Mann adaptation “Zauberberg 2”

Neun Jahre lang öffnete Heinz Strunk, Autor, Musiker, Schauspieler, vor allem aber Verzweiflungslakoniker erster Kajüte, für das Magazin „Titanic“ seine tagebuchartige „Intimschatulle“. In Folge 52 aus dem Jahr 2019 findet er Gefallen an einem Fundstück aus den Tagebüchern Richard Burtons: „Gerahmte Tarantel geschenkt bekommen. Da wir zweifellos sehr viele schöne Dinge besäßen, sei etwas Hässliches vielleicht eine nette Abwechslung.“

Gerahmte Tarantel, das ist eigentlich eine ziemlich passende Genrebezeichnung für den neuesten Strunk-Coup „Zauberberg 2“, ein Buch, das erst kitzelig in intime Regionen krabbelt (Kichern, Schämen, Ertapptfühlen) und dann höllisch zusticht (für Arachnophile: zubeißt). Wobei natürlich, wie Strunk weiß, das Hässliche an Burtons Geschenk gar nicht die Tarantel war, sondern der Rahmen, oder genauer: die Rahmung.

Man muss auch hier mit der Rahmung beginnen. Zum Hundertsten eines Jahrhundertbuchs eine Gegenwartsadaption desselben vorzulegen, beileibe nicht die erste (eine äußerlich ähnliche von Timon Karl Kaleyta ist kürzlich erst erschienen), das ist eine so verschnarchte Idee, dass sie Literaturagenten oder klammen Verlagen einfallen mag, aber doch nicht dem Autor von „Der goldene Handschuh“ oder „Es ist immer so schön mit dir“, verstörend unerwarteten Büchern, die Maßstäbe setzten in der Schuld-und-Scham-Zumutung.

Der an sich schon plumpe Titel „Zauberberg 2“ ist auch noch unsinnig, denn es handelt sich nicht um eine Fortsetzung, sondern um den ganzen Berg – als Hügel – noch einmal: vom Aufsuchen des Sanatoriums (natürlich bei Schnee) über das Hängenbleiben in dieser durchorganisierten, utopischen Gegenwelt (für Reiche) bis zum Entschwinden: „Lebewohl (. . .) des Lebens treuherziges Sorgenkind! Deine Geschichte ist aus.“

Erstens aber behauptet Strunk, die Idee schon vor Jahren gehabt und von einem Jubiläum nichts geahnt zu haben, und zweitens hat er oft genug gezeigt, wie sehr ihn Thomas Manns Poetologie fasziniert, zuletzt erst in „Ein Sommer in Niendorf“, einer originellen „Tod in Venedig“-Anverwandlung. Außerdem gibt es doch auch einige Unterschiede. So liegt die in einem Schloss untergebrachte Nobel-Heilanstalt nicht in den weltpolitisch neutralen Schweizer Bergen, sondern nahe der polnischen Grenze am Stettiner Haff. Und Jonas Heidbrink ist kein Schiffsbauingenieur wie Hans Castorp, sondern ein Programmierer, dessen Start-up für viel Geld geschluckt wurde (irgendwas mit „Low Code“; es interessiert den Erzähler so wenig, dass es bloß angedeutet wird). Er kommt auch nicht als Besucher eines Verwandten, der sich erst dann in die Idee ergibt, selbst krank zu sein, sondern als depressiver Härtefall. Mit Mitte dreißig geplagt von Schlaflosigkeit, Lebenspanik, Hoffnungslosigkeit und Minderwertigkeitsgefühlen („ich bin nichts“) ist die Kur seine letzte Chance.

Although this exposition is somewhat similar to that of Kaleyta’s “Healing,” the novels diverge greatly. While Kaleyta relies on many sometimes surreal plot twists (and stumbles along the way), Strunk sticks entirely to his poetology of inwardness. Psychologically, this is even more radical than the original, where, despite the central position of the main character, there is still an outside: relationships between the other characters, concepts that stand on their own. This was expressed not least in Mann’s Olympic narrative perspective. Here everything is related to the character Jonas Heidbrink, told in the third person, but extremely close: the readers know what he knows; they reject what he rejects. And that’s almost everything at the beginning. Only gradually does the patient open up to treatment methods that were initially reflexively rejected.

The search for references to the original can be left to literary scholars, even if some are obvious. So Heidbrink quickly sits down in the sanatorium’s restaurant, just like in the “Zauberberg”. Clinic manager Rodenberg is less cynical than Hofrat Behrens, but still has a similarly demigod-like position. “The therapist,” Strunk once jokes, “listens to the unbeatably meaningless name of Svenja Behrens.” Heidbrink’s intellectual sparring partner Bernhard Zeissner (Heidbrink always only answers in his head) is a communicative ex-gallerist who is distantly similar to the humanist Lodovico Settembrini is similar, at least when it comes to his health, which is insignificant but pompous compared to the spirit.

Of course, he speaks up about the attraction of death, which is more reminiscent of the totalitarian metaphysician Leo Naphta. A second friend of Heidbrink’s, the vulgar Klaus, a coughing, farting ruin of a human being (with a “post-war horror biography”), turns out to be a true nihilist: “There is no God.” He, too, is part Naphta, part Settembrini; Heidbrink always the learned one. The old man demonstrates the decay: “At Klausen’s age, the decomposition progresses much faster, and soon all that’s left of him is shit.”

The quality of the novel must be proven beyond all typological exegesis. And the perfectly pointed novel convinces with flying colors. The way Heidbrink sarcastically comments on the day-to-day life of the clinic, all the music, photo, conversation, writing, dance and movement therapy sessions, is hilarious. How a group of well-off self-payers (823 euros per day) miserably rattles and clacks with Orffian preschool instruments in order to find their way back into the self, no one can describe that as wonderfully evil as Heinz Strunk.

However, the therapies are not denounced. Rather, self-contempt and contempt for others fuel each other in the protagonist and result in an often striking, although only mental, verbal attack against everyone and anyone, for example the “pear eater” who attacks a piece of fruit “cracking, bursting, cracking”, “the most repulsive idea , who has ever attended Heidbrink”: “It sounds as if he is eating rubble, an excavator biting its way through a quarry. Where did he get the pear anyway? Fruit is only served at breakfast? Probably smuggled in, the pig.”

The highlight is that the author’s berserker humor comes close to Thomas Mann’s merciless comedy in “The Magic Mountain”. What is even greater art is how this rejection reveals itself as a protective attitude, how the true dimension of the hero’s desperation appears behind the comedy. The fact that the hero’s apparent recovery is nothing more than a weaning from the world is only noticeable in small details and finally in the complete decentering, as the encroaching economic reality (the money is running out, not Heidbrink, but the clinic) leads to expulsion from the quasi-paradise leads. So from the noisy limbo you have to go back into the depraved world, into the hall of mirrors of your own nothingness – or immediately beyond it, up or down. This book becomes increasingly dark, page by page.

“Real patients are much more depressing than film or TV patients,” it says at one point. The crucial word is “real,” because Strunk’s characters are authentic, present, and disgustingly physical in every second. Heidbrink, the lost one, is not a figment of his imagination, not an Ecce-homo devotional image, but a suffering contemporary made of meat and vegetables.

The tarantula, that is simply life itself, means: death with its well-known sting. The despair doesn’t make itself bigger than it is, it just comes into view – sniffling and strangely. “Out there there is only loneliness and the deadly cold of space”: When there is no “inside” to counteract this – both friends are lost – the only thing left is freezing to death.

Then, unfortunately, the frame returns. The penultimate chapter, “Kirgisenräume”, Heidbrink’s Walpurgis Night Dream, briefly questions the authenticity, as it is an assembly composed almost entirely of “Zauberberg” quotations. Why? Is this supposed to show that the magician could also be as heartily funny and radical in his access to the soul as Strunk? Was that necessary? Even the famous gray women haunt the dream, eating the innocent child: Mann’s allegory of amoral nature. Which is probably still amoral. The collage looks like a finger exercise from a writing seminar. In terms of content, this does not lead to any deeper insight. So the heartily philosophical, doom-laden sentences assigned to Zeissen’s ramblings are sometimes taken from Hofrat Behrens’ remarks, and then again indiscriminately from the speeches of his opponents Settembrini and Naphta: a wild eclecticism. The break in style is also noticeable.

Luckily, the strong, authentic finale on the Szczecin Lagoon follows. Where Hans Castorp is released into the downfall of Europe, Heidbrink chooses the downfall in Europe. The path from misanthropic loneliness via the illusion of community to eternal loneliness is traced in this book so meticulously and sensitively that it almost represents a danger. The drain in Heidbrink’s room needs to be cleaned once. The expert uses a magic potion: “Inferno is the name of the stuff.” A complete success: “Radically etches away everything organic.” Strunk’s book asks the dark question: But what if people are not the pipe, but the plug?

Heinz Strunk: “Magic Mountain 2”. Novel. Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2024. 288 pages, hardcover, €25.