100 Years of "The Magic Mountain" with Samantha Rose Hill, Paul Holdengräber & David Kaplan

Conversation & Concert with Samantha Rose Hill, Paul Holdengräber & David Kaplan

To mark the 100th anniversary of Mann’s modernist masterpiece "The Magic Mountain," we invited audiences to a conversation on pilgrimage between author and scholar Samantha Rose Hill and curator and interviewer Paul Holdengräber. Published in Germany in 1924, the book tells the story of Hans Castorp, an ordinary young man who goes to visit his cousin Joachim in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium for three weeks and ends up staying for seven years. The novel captures the spirit of prewar Europe and the ailments of the modern world: isolation, mass epidemics, the plight of progress and industrial alienation. Mann’s ever-timely novel offers meditations on love, loss, time, what it means to become a person in the world, and what it means to face death: What does it mean to leave the world of everyday life and undertake a journey? Can Mann’s work help us to think about our world today, a world defined by a sense of displacement, longing, loneliness, and war?

Before and after the conversation, acclaimed pianist David Kaplan and students from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Andres Delgado, Alexandre Tchaykov, and Biguo Xing performed pieces by Claude Debussy and Franz Schubert on Thomas Mann’s historical piano.

This event is a collaboration between the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, and the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.

Learn more about the event: https://www.vatmh.org/en/eventreader/...

The event took place on March 26, 2024, at the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.

Video by Boris Schaarschmidt

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Participants:

Samantha Rose Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed book Hannah Arendt (2021) and the editor and translator of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2017). She is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, and the journals Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory & Event.

Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer, curator of public curiosity, and was the Founding Executive Director of Onassis Los Angeles (OLA). Prior he was Founder and Director of The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series where he interviewed and hosted over 600 events, including interviews with Patti Smith, Wes Anderson, Mike Tyson, Werner Herzog and many more. Before his tenure at the library, he was the Founder and Director of The Institute for Art & Cultures at the LACMA. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. In 2003, the French Government named him Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and then promoted him in 2012 to the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2010, The President of Austria awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.

David Kaplan, pianist, has been called “excellent and adventurous” by The New York Times, and praised by the Boston Globe for “grace and fire” at the keyboard. He has appeared as soloist with numerous orchestras, including the Britten Sinfonia and Das Sinfonie Orchester Berlin. Known for diverse and creative recital programs, he has appeared at the Ravinia Festival, Washington’s National Gallery, Strathmore, and Bargemusic. Kaplan’s New Dances of the League of David, mixing Schumann with 16 new works, was cited in the “Best Classical Music of 2015” by The New York Times.