The arch-magus of ambivalence is being celebrated all over Germany today, most spectacularly in his home town of Lübeck, where the Lübeck Philharmonic will give a celebratory concert, the program beginning with the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin, which had a transformative effect on Mann when he first heard it in his youth. Doctor Faustus had that effect on me when I first read it at age eighteen; my own writing career stems in some way from the experience of that novel. I wrote about Mann for The New Yorker in 1996, 2016, 2020, and 2022. In the current issue of Studia Philosophica I have an essay titled "Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and the Inescapability of the Political." Alles Gute! In a certain sense.
