Satirist Heinz Strunk has written a sequel to a twentieth century masterpiece. "The Magic Mountain 2," has offended Thomas Mann purists.
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00:00There's quite a buzz at the Thomas Mann conference.
00:04The Magic Mountain Part 2 is about to be published.
00:07The author is not Thomas Mann.
00:10Writer and satirist Heinz Stronk is the bold pretender.
00:13The audience is skeptical.
00:16It was clear to me from the get-go that certain humorless circles would suspect I was fouling
00:21the German nest, desecrating a literary relic by simply hanging a 2 on it.
00:29But that's the joke.
00:33Heinz Stronk is no stranger to provocation.
00:36In the 1990s, as Studio Braun, he startled people with telephone pranks, fooled them
00:41with a documentary about his band Fractus, and landed in the bestseller list 20 years
00:46ago with his novel Fleisch ist mein Gemüse, Meat is my Vegetables.
00:51And now, The Magic Mountain 2.
00:54I had the idea from the outset that the title and the cover would be in the typeface of
00:59the Arnold Schwarzenegger action hit Terminator 2 in order to underline the audacity and scare
01:06the small-minded even more.
01:11Is it all just provocation, or does it reflect some of the magnificence of the original?
01:17156 original passages from Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain are woven into the new work,
01:24and the cast of characters from the sanatorium return, in modified form.
01:28Hans Kastorp is now a start-up millionaire having a psychological crisis.
01:33In the original, Kastorp is lost in the turmoil of the First World War, and Mayona's Heidbrink
01:40is also lost.
01:42But I won't tell you how.
01:45Today, tuberculosis is cured with antibiotics, so Heinz Strunk has his patients suffer from
01:51burnout, the new mass disease.
01:54Despite the willingness to provoke, Heinz Strunk is aware of his responsibility as Thomas
01:59Mann's successor.
02:00If there were any risk of getting myself into trouble, then I'd rather not.
02:08Before I make a fool of myself, no.
02:12If you have the audacity to call the book the Magic Mountain 2, then it has to be more
02:17than just a comedy, a tired joke.
02:21You have to do it justice.
02:25But his work doesn't do justice to the length of the original.
02:28The Magic Mountain 2 has a mere 288 pages, but Strunk hopes that this will help his readers
02:34persevere to the end.