The Mountain and the Mic: Reading the Past, Re-Mixing the Present

Join us for an event exploring the enduring influence of Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and fierce anti-fascist advocate and celebrating two contemporary artists' new perspectives on Mann's legacy.

The program will begin with a reading from Morten Høi Jensen's The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. In this biography of Mann’s great novel, Høi Jensen chronicles Mann's compelling journey from a nonpolitical figure to a fervent humanist and defender of democracy as war and the rise of fascism swept across Germany.

Following the reading will be a performance of "An Appeal to Reason," an original soundpiece by Grammy-nominated artist Kokayi that premiered as part of the Thomas Mann 150 Celebration and Hirshhorn Museum's SoundScene festival. This work powerfully places Mann's own words and anti-fascist message in our present moment.

Then the artists will engage in a conversation that sheds new perspectives on the timeless lessons they've taken from Mann, the contemporary relevance of his works, and their views on the role artists can play in shaping democracy.

This evening will celebrate new perspectives on one of Germany’s best-known and internationally most widely-read and how his timeless lessons about resistance still resonate today.

A brief wine reception will follow the program.

About the artists:

Morten Hoi Jensen is the author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press, 2025) and A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (Yale University Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, and Commonweal, among other publications. He currently work as the European Liaison for Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics.

KOKAYI is a GRAMMY-nominated musician, improvisational vocalist, producer, author, speaker, and multidisciplinary fine artist. A Guggenheim Fellow for Music Composition—the first emcee to receive the honor—he is also a Halcyon Arts and Nicholson Arts Fellow, and a TEDxWDC presenter. He appears on over 60 recordings spanning jazz, hip hop, rock, and R&B, and is the author of You Are Ketchup: and Other Fly Music Tales (Globe Pequot)

KOKAYI has taught and facilitated workshops on vocal improvisation and creativity at institutions worldwide, is a longtime collaborator and Board member with OneBeat, and has served as a U.S. State Department music emissary. As Chief Ideator and co-curator of BeatsnBeans, he explores the intersections of creativity, coffee culture, and reimagined creative spaces. A committed advocate for DC’s indigenous music, KOKAYI served in multiple leadership roles within the Recording Academy, including Chapter President and National Trustee, where he helped establish go-go as an official genre within the Regional Roots category.

The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos

Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) welcomed the outbreak of the First World War. He viewed it as a spiritual necessity, a chance to reassert German cultural dominance over Western ideas of democracy and enlightenment. Then, in 1924, he published The Magic Mountain, a massive novel that culminates in the slaughter of war and foreshadows the Nazi terror to come. One of the central achievements of modernism, The Magic Mountain bears testimony to its author’s dramatic political reorientation as a defender of democracy.

This poignant book is a biography of Mann’s great novel—its evolution from a short story into a two-volume masterpiece and one of the bestselling novels of the Weimar era. Deftly weaving together elements of biography, history, and literary criticism, Morten Høi Jensen reveals how writing The Magic Mountain against a backdrop of world war, revolution, hyperinflation, and rising right-wing terror moved Mann to embrace the democratic and humanistic ideas he once scorned.

One hundred years after The Magic Mountain was first published, at a time when democratic ideas are again under threat, Jensen reveals the universality and timeliness of Mann’s great novel—its still-resonant debates over democracy and tyranny, time and place, illness and death.

Artist Statement, Kokayi:

I am a multidisciplinary artist based in DC who interprets and crafts narratives using analog and digital technologies—photography, sound, film, performance, and whatever else I can get my hands on. My work reclaims the detritus systemically inherited by people of the African Diaspora, transforming it into participatory experiences that perpetuate the intangible cultural heritage of Black Americans. Through manipulated materials and stories rooted in Black, African, and American life and folklore, I create cultural touchpoints that explore identity and belonging. True to Black cultural traditions, I remix the discarded and overlooked to craft new narratives—redefining ideas of masculinity, alterity, divination, and death, and contributing to an evolving Black folklore.