The idea for Paweł Huelle’s new novel came from a sentence in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain which mentions that when his young hero, Hans Castorp, was preparing to enter the engineering profession as a shipwright, “he already had four semesters of studies at the Danzig polytechnic behind him”. So Huelle wrote a novel about the Danzig episode in the life of the future Berghof resident. Huelle shapes events into a pre-history of what Castorp will have to deal with at Mann’s Berghof. His novel is The Magic Mountain in embryo, or in miniature. Huelle isn’t just writing to gratify the ghost of Thomas Mann though, but also to persuade us that the Danzig episode in his hero’s life was not without significance, and that the city might, must have been the scene of an extremely significant encounter. To Consul Tienappel, the uncle who hands out advice and warnings to Hans, ‘the East’ is a black hole, the temptation of disaster. For the citizens of Danzig with whom Castorp becomes acquainted, the Poles are a faceless neighbour, regarded as hostile and dangerous. For Castorp, the embodiment of Polishness is a fascinating, beautiful stranger, Wanda Pilecka, a landowner from the east of Poland who is in Sopot for discreet encounters with her Russian lover. Huelle seems to think that just as the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, or Blake’s marriage of Heaven and Hell were fruitful and happy, the union of these two people, the German ‘naïve idealist’ and the mysterious Polish temptress could be just as fortunate. But all that remains is an unfulfilled opportunity, the knowledge that what matters most to us is always just outside our reach.
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
