Abstract
The article seeks to examine Thomas Mann’s The magic mountain (1924) influence over the book Roots of Brazil (1936). We propose that Sérgio Buarque draws on Thomas Mann’s novel in making the final chapters of his essay, transposing the debates in which Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta compete for the primacy in the education of the protagonist Hans Castorp to the context of Brazilian culture. Thus, in addition to presenting the hypothesis of the novelistic origin of certain aspects of Sérgio Buarque’s narrative, we seek to demonstrate the centrality of Bildung or self-cultivation (as opposed to politics) in the book’s argument.
Keywords:
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda; Thomas Mann; German Literature; Brazilian Social Thought; Modernism