Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann met just once, for afternoon tea, but the encounter had long-lasting consequences. The recent discovery of an unpublished short story by Sontag, “At Thomas Mann’s,” sheds new light on their conversation.
The meeting took place on 28 December 1949. She was a starry-eyed sixteen-year-old admirer of Mann’s The Magic Mountain; he was a grand old man of letters, seventy-four years old, whose exile from Nazi Germany had brought him to live not far from her outside Los Angeles. Sontag visited him with two fellow students, one of whom, Gene Marum, was a fluent German speaker with a connection to the Mann family.
Thirty-eight years later Sontag published an account of the meeting, “Pilgrimage,” in the New Yorker. But a recently discovered short story, which she wrote shortly after the visit, adds a whole new dimension to the encounter. Put together, the two pieces illuminate Sontag’s emergence as a writer inspired by Mann and The Magic Mountain. She “had really lived on that magic mountain,” she writes in the short story. She took flight from it.
To follow her arc, it is best to start with “Pilgrimage.” Here, Sontag looks back on her dull and unhappy childhood, her intellectual stirrings, and then the afternoon tea with Mann. The story was based in reality, but Sontag avoided presenting it as fully factual. She published it in the New Yorker’s fiction section, though later described it as a memoir.
In fact Sontag takes a significant liberty with the facts in “Pilgrimage.” She sets the visit two years earlier than it actually occurred — in December 1947 rather than 1949. This makes her fourteen, not sixteen going on seventeen.
This was neither a mistake nor a failure of memory. It was an act of poetic licence to capture what Sontag wished to impart. We know from her diaries that she was fourteen when she read The Magic Mountain in the English translation by Helen Lowe-Porter. The annotations Sontag made on her copy of the novel, retained in her papers, show she read it with great insight and understanding.
Indeed, it was a life-shaping experience. Straight away she read the 650-page novel through again, the second time aloud to immerse herself. She acquired a French–English dictionary to read the central love scene between the main character, Hans Castorp, and Claudia Chauchat, largely conducted in the French Lowe-Porter retains in her translation. Beginning her lifelong engagement with the language, Sontag wrote her translations on her copy of the novel.
The Magic Mountain was a “transforming book,” she wrote in her diary at the time. “No book has been more important in my life,” she affirmed more than fifty years later — in 2003, the year before she died — in her lecture “Literature is Freedom.”
By making herself fourteen in “Pilgrimage” Sontag captures the role The Magic Mountain played at that stage of her life. She is on the cusp of new horizons. At one moment during the afternoon tea she places herself on the same level as her idol.
I said how much I loved The Magic Mountain. He said it was a very European book, that it portrayed the conflicts at the heart of European civilisation.
I said I understood that.
Mann, too, is on a cusp in “Pilgrimage,” although in the other direction. His life work is almost complete. He has finished Doctor Faustus, his book about the collapse of German culture under Hitler. His last years are upon him. It is hard to imagine the polite afternoon tea doing justice to the momentous transitions the young Sontag and the aged Mann are going through.
On the surface the occasion is a disappointment. In the first sentence Sontag tell us the “colour of shame” surrounded the meeting. As the afternoon unfolds her impatience grows at its inadequacy, especially Mann’s ponderous utterances. “We were neither of us at our best,” she writes. That seemed to sum up an underwhelming encounter.
Yet there is an uplift at the end of “Pilgrimage.” The final paragraph poignantly mixes the memory of shame with a sense of something greater in their lives and culminates in an attestation to the young Susan’s god:
I never told anyone of the meeting. Over the years I have kept it a secret, as if it were something shameful. As if it happened between two other people, two phantoms, two provisional beings on their way elsewhere: an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile who lived in a house in Pacific Palisades.
What does the recently discovered short story “At Thomas Mann’s” add to our understanding of this encounter? The story was included by Tilmann Lahme in Thomas Mann: Ein Leben (2025), which builds on the archival research of Kai Sina in Susan Sontag und Thomas Mann, published earlier in 2025. Lahme provides a copy of the original typed English story uncovered in Sontag’s archive and a translation for his German readers. A belated publication of the story for the English-speaking world cannot be far away.
In his new biography of the writer, Lahme, an expert on the Mann family, brings unprecedented clarity and directness to the treatment of Mann’s homosexuality. He traces how it profoundly shaped Mann’s life, causing him enormous anguish as he grew to maturity in a milieu that considered it a degeneracy to be cured. Lahme takes issue with critics and editors who have downplayed Mann’s sexuality and installed a consensus view of an author with no more than homosexual tendencies and fantasies that flash in and out of his work.
In contrast to the conventional picture, “ein anderer Thomas Mann” — “another” or “different” Thomas Mann — emerges in Lahme’s biography. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung credited the biographer with having discovered “a whole new writer.”
Lahme analyses how homosexuality is woven into the fabric of Mann’s work, how he “gives his homosexuality literary form.” A germane example is Mann’s famous use of a pencil to symbolise sexual desire in The Magic Mountain. Here Mann draws on his adolescent memory of borrowing a pencil at school from a fellow student, Williram (Willri) Timpe, to whom he was attracted.
Mann’s “passion” for Willri, as the writer later noted in his diary, found its way into The Magic Mountain in the figure of Pribislav Hippe, to whom Hans Castorp is attracted at school and from whom he borrows a special pencil in a silver cylindrical casing with a retractable red writing tip. The twenty-three-year-old Hans vividly remembers the schoolboy scene when he sees a resemblance to Pribislav Hippe’s in Claudia Chauchat and falls in love with her. In the love scene in French he initiates an intimate dialogue by borrowing her pencil. Returning it, he makes his way into her bedroom.
Through this highly wrought symbolism, Mann transforms his same sex-attraction into the central love scene in The Magic Mountain, producing a heterosexual passion “which exhibits same-sex characteristics,” as Lahme writes.
This plays a fascinating role in “At Thomas Mann’s.” In the year leading up to the afternoon tea, Sontag had awakened to her own same-sex feelings, at first recorded hesitantly in her diary but soon flowing into a love affair with Harriet Sohmers. “Now everything is beginning,” she wrote. She explored the gay scene in San Francisco while commencing university studies in Los Angeles. Then she moved to the University of Chicago and had sexual adventures with boyfriends and girlfriends.
In a recent article revisiting the afternoon tea for the New Yorker, Alex Ross tracked down the ninety-five-year-old Merrill Rodin, the third of the students and the last surviving attendee at the afternoon tea. Rodin confirmed the sexual experimentation that was going on. He remembered that, among other things, the trio had engaged in an orgy. “This happened around the same time as the visit to Mann,” he remembered, and added, “That Mann himself had written stories on gay themes added to the piquancy of the encounter.”
So Sontag came to Thomas Mann’s house as a university student, home on Christmas break, with a year of sexual experimentation behind her. She also came with a theory.
In “At Thomas Mann’s” she weaves a story of having taken an intensive class on The Magic Mountain and having developed a “revolutionary critical evaluation of Mann’s work.” The lecturer gives her theory short shrift, but her friend, Harry in the story, tells her not to be dissuaded. He suggests that they go to ask the author himself. This plants the seed that “I would dare to ask Thomas Mann whether my interpretation of his great novel was correct.”
In the story she is called “Miss Sontag,” is dressed in a suit and is altogether more grownup and businesslike than the fourteen-year-old in “Pilgrimage.” She has prepped Harry by reading The Magic Mountain aloud with him.
What was her interpretation? What revolutionary critical evaluation had she arrived at between reading the novel aged fourteen and meeting Mann aged nearly seventeen?
The story doesn’t state it explicitly but we can adduce it with confidence. Essentially Susan Sontag had discovered in 1949 the other Thomas Mann whose biography Tilmann Lahme will write much later. Awake to the world of Mann’s writing and her own sexuality, Sontag had come to an understanding of Mann’s homosexuality, his struggles with it and how he gave it literary form. She had grasped that The Magic Mountain is full of images and allusions reflecting Mann’s own conflicts, as well as being about the conflicts at the heart of European civilisation.
The story expresses this in a Mann-like manner. Towards the end, the focus shifts from tea and conversation to Miss Sontag’s preoccupation with the cigarette Mann had offered her. She had begun to smoke it but then is determined to preserve it as a souvenir. She even considers burning herself to put it out. The problem of the cigarette takes over the story.
Sontag is playing here with the pencil symbol in The Magic Mountain. The literary interplay is brilliant. Miss Sontag is as ardent about the cigarette as Hans Castorp is about Claudia Chauchat’s pencil. She manages to hold onto it and afterwards takes it home and keeps it among her diaries. There it takes its place amid her deepest secrets and revelations. Thus, Miss Sontag is added to the cast of characters handing around the symbolic pencil in Mann’s universe.
Sontag later makes another ingenious allusion to the symbol, but first we must finish with “At Thomas Mann’s.” After dealing with the cigarette, Sontag makes a further move reminiscent of Mann, who was famous for casting an ironic light over things. Despite its central role in the visit, Miss Sontag says she doesn’t remember what “my great reinterpretation of The Magic Mountain was.” We can perceive that the author’s tongue is firmly in her cheek. It is no surprise Sontag herself became famous for irony.
“At Thomas Mann’s” is a revelatory story. Writing about testing her interpretation of The Magic Mountain, Sontag tests and experiments with literary techniques and allusions of her own. She establishes herself as a writer at a time of great experimentation in her life. She finds her literary footholds and takes flight from Mann and The Magic Mountain. She writes that she had been “borne up” by the novel. She had come to grips with its compelling world of ideas, sex and death. And having taken the symbolic writing pencil from Thomas Mann, she has started to write. Kai Sina’s Susan Sontag und Thomas Mann traces how profoundly Sontag built and expanded on Mann’s work in her later novels.
What further allusion to the cigarette symbol does Sontag make? Alongside literature, Sontag loved photography; her On Photography (1977) is one of the great works on the subject. When “Pilgrimage” was published, it was accompanied by a photograph of Thomas Mann by Elliot Erwitt, which can be seen alongside the article on the New Yorker’s website. Whether Sontag chose the photograph herself or approved its choice is unknown, but it bears her stamp. This image of Mann reclining in a chair, smoking, fits with the scene in “Pilgrimage” when Sontag meets him — “He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair.” But the resonance goes deeper. Mann’s cigarette is in a silver cylindrical holder, obviously with a red glowing tip. It bears an unmistakable resemblance to the pencil in The Magic Mountain.
The photograph strikes a chord with Sontag’s writing. In “At Thomas Mann’s” her youthful self had brought her interpretation of The Magic Mountain to afternoon tea and turned the pencil symbol into a cigarette. Now here was the cigarette in Thomas Mann’s hand, looking for all the world like the symbolic pencil.
By the time she published “Pilgrimage,” Sontag was fifty-four and had realised the writerly promise on display in “At Thomas Mann’s.” With the confidence to rework facts to tell bigger truths, she alters the date of the afternoon tea to tell the truth of her growing up.
In this light we can appreciate the poignancy and conclusion of “Pilgrimage.” When she writes that “We neither of us were at our best,” she isn’t only referring to the underwhelming afternoon tea. The two of them were not at their best because their best is elsewhere — in their literature, their artistic expression. This is where their real communication occurs, where their work exchanges symbols, ideas and moments of revelation. Here they meet as the other people on their way elsewhere evoked in the final paragraph of “Pilgrimage.”
That conclusion is fine, assured writing. The repetition — “two other people, two phantoms, two provisional beings” — makes us dwell on the pair of them, the aspiring writer Sontag and the grand old Mann, ethereally connected at the opposite ends of their lives. •
