“Mann versus man,” by Anna Ballan

“Mann versus man,” by Anna Ballan

“I can only imagine,” wrote Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem after reading The Magic Mountain, “what an internal change must have taken place in the author while he was writing.” That wonder drives Morten Høi Jensen’s The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain,” a lavish work of historical analysis that doubles as a kind of psychological thriller. Mann’s magnum opus is not just a novel, Jensen suggests, but…