Intro
At the end there is a time stamp that looks as unspectacular as all endings look that one had previously imagined as more dramatic: Friday, January 9, 2026, 1:27 p.m. – “Completion including layout”. That is the kind of ending that suits a work which has spent so long dealing with transitions, thresholds, calendar boundaries and the “out of order” in an almost cynically fitting way: no explosion, no apotheosis, no fireworks – but a quiet click in a file, a final formatting, a last line that no longer moves.
But the title of this report claims something that is more than statistics, and that therefore has to be spoken before it is forgotten: 6 days, 18h and 50min. That is not the pretty exaggeration of a legend, but the actual duration between the moment when the “man-machine” started up and the moment when it came to a halt. The starting point was Friday, January 2, 2026, 6:37 p.m. From there to Friday, January 9, 2026, 6:37 p.m. would have been exactly seven days. But the end did not fall at 6:37, but at 1:27 – thus 5 hours and 10 minutes earlier. Seven days minus 5:10, and the writing week shrinks to what is stated in the title: 6 days, 18 hours and 50 minutes.
This number, esteemed reader, dear reader, is not an athletic record to pin to one’s chest. It is the measure of a state. It is Tonio-creation in calendar form: a brief span of time in which I do not write “now and then”, but in which writing becomes a way of life, a cure, a form of self-organization, an attempt to create through speed an order that otherwise does not arise. The fact that the novel itself deals with bestforming, rituals, metrics and logbooks is more than a choice of subject here; it is a mirroring. The text is created in a mode of production that resembles the text: time is not experienced, it is measured; the end is not redemption, but proof that form has been found.
And yet this stamp – 1:27 p.m. – is not mere administration. It is a motif. It is the modern variant of the “ending” that Thomas Mann sometimes grants his great machine: not as peace, but as evidence that something could be closed. And because “Kaleidokosmos: Zauberberg, Sonnenalp and bestforming in Venice” never wanted to be just a novel, but at the same time self-observation, stylistic experiment, declaration of affection and – yes – a politely disguised self-exposure, the span of 6 days, 18 hours and 50 minutes becomes the pivot of a report that is more than a production note. It becomes the trace of an inner process.
Esteemed reader, dear reader, this is the decisive premise of this “making of”: It does not only describe how a text came into being. It describes why it had to come into being in this way – in this density, in this brevity, in this almost impertinent week – in order to relieve, order, stir me up and – in the best case – integrate me in a certain way.
Before Part 1 –
I recommend the “Sonnenalp” (and “the recommendation is the gentlest form of command”)
Esteemed reader, dear reader (here you may take this form of address literally for once),
I recommend to you – I recommend to you – the Sonnenalp.
And I do not mean this as a hotel review, not as a travel guide, not as what people today call a “tip”, but as a recommendation in the old sense: as the handing over of a place that does more than one is allowed to expect from a place. For the Sonnenalp is for me not only a building, not only an address, not only a place where one arrives and departs again. It has become a second home to me, a “room on the inside” that I enter as soon as I walk through its doors.
That is something one can hardly describe without becoming kitschy. One then tries it with things: with light falling on wood; with scents that are so unobtrusive that only in retrospect do they feel like a hand; with the sound of footsteps on a floor that does not sound like a street, but like interior. One tries it with sightlines: the chandelier in the hall like a black sun; the library above it, as if thinking itself were housed one floor higher; the music room as a claim that culture is not just decor. And one tries it, if one is honest, with a sentence.
“Recommendation” is a tricky word in this. It sounds friendly, but it has an edge. It pretends to be non-binding and is yet a form of influence. Whoever recommends takes the right to interfere in the decisions of others – with a smile that considers itself harmless. That is why it is good to remember at this point one of my own sentences, which I later put into my novel’s mouth: the recommendation is the gentlest form of command.
For that is exactly how the Sonnenalp works as well. Not as compulsion, not as drill, not as hard rule, but as a system of gentle commands: It recommends rest. It recommends order. It recommends not taking the noise of the valley below seriously for a while. It recommends taking oneself seriously – not in a vain way, but in a cautious one. And it recommends that one may linger here without having to apologize.
What I am actually recommending to you – to you – is not “a weekend”. It is an experience of lingering that has become rare in my world: a peace that does not have to be earned and that does not immediately tip back into a task. And that is precisely why this recommendation is ambivalent. For whoever finds a place that calms them will be tempted to use it. And whoever writes uses places.
So I recommend the Sonnenalp in a second, more dangerous sense as well: as a workshop. As a stage. As the kind of second home that makes it possible in the first place to look at the first home – one’s own inner restlessness – without immediately drowning in it. When I say I recommend the Sonnenalp, I am also saying: Here I found the calm I needed in order to write a work that had to take that calm away from the text.
And with that, esteemed reader, dear reader, we are already in the middle of the irony that Thomas Mann would have liked: that a recommendation that wants to give peace ultimately becomes a command to literature. For I can recommend the Sonnenalp to you – but I cannot recommend to you what it might do to you if you are an artist, an author or the little mouse Frederick.
Part 1 –
The actual raw material: a place that calms – and therefore has to be literarily disfigured
This “making of” does not begin with plot, but with a sentence on a wall.
For what sets the novel in motion is – soberly considered – a contradiction: In the prologue the Sonnenalp is explicitly “second home”, a “room on the inside”, a place of return, of permission, of being held. Precisely for that reason, esteemed reader, dear reader (here I ask you for the second and last time to take this form of address literally), it is so dangerous as material: Whoever really knows a place, whoever is not only a guest there but a returnee, possesses it inwardly – and at the same time is possessed by it. And possession creates responsibility.
Literature, however, if it is to smell of Thomas Mann, does not create responsibility but tension: guilt, displacement, restlessness, “disagreeable” in the sense of: it is not comfortable, it stays with you.
This tension – home as reassurance, literature as disturbance – is named in workshop thinking as the core thesis: The author needs peace as a place, but he needs unrest as literature. That is why the Sonnenalp, the real, peaceful, “lingering” one, is rebuilt in the fiction into a stage of the threshold: reception desk, chandelier, rituals, programs, metrics, cube cabins, a ring that sees – and above all: a saying that no longer calms the place, but drives it.
That is the first great artistic device – and at the same time the first major biographical clue: Whoever works like this is not working on just any material. I am working on a material that calms me – and I take this calm away from it so that I can write.
Part 2 – The saying error as the larger door: How a photo invented the motto
The second artistic device is an omission – but in its emergence it is not an artistic device in the classical sense, but a process.
In the real Sonnenalp the saying in the reception hall reads: “Joy to him who comes. Peace to him who lingers. Blessing to him who goes.” Three lines, three states, a small ethics of hospitality. Arrival as joy. Staying as peace. Leaving as blessing.
In the novel, however, it is shortened and shifted: “Joy to him who comes. Joy to him who goes.”
The effect of this shortening is enormous, and it was – this is the real punchline – not at first intentional, but an error. The formula arose because a photo only allowed fragments to be recognized: enough to read “Joy to him who com…” enough to guess a middle line as “Peace to him w…” and enough to see below “…to him who…” without the decisive term. From this fragment it was quickly concluded that the repetition “Joy” must be conceptual, a symmetrical framing of coming and going.
Thus the motto wrote itself into the text – not as a conscious aesthetic decision by the author, but as an automatic, plausible conclusion from incomplete data. A System 1 moment, one might later say: quick, elegant, wrong – and precisely thereby productive.
Only afterwards did what Thomas Mann would have particularly liked happen: the subsequent attribution of meaning. As soon as the formula was in the novel, it began to work. It became leitmotif, moral knife, ironic motor. The impression arose that the omission was a deliberate “withholding” of peace: as if the author wanted to deprive his second home of the calming middle part in order to force a Mann-like unrest.
This later interpretation is not a lie – it is only temporally wrong. It does not describe the origin, but the result: For even if the omission was not planned, once it was there it was accepted, expanded, defended, mythologized. The error co-wrote – and the work later pretended it had been intentional. Exactly this chain, esteemed reader, dear reader, is Mannian irony in pure form: The work claims control where there was chance; it creates meaning by treating contingency in retrospect as necessity. Art arises not only from will, but from what eludes the will and then has to be integrated.
And now the second chance punchline is added, which comically marks modernity: that in the real saying it reads “Blessing to him who goes”. This word could hardly have remained in the novel. Not because the author considers religion “bad”, but because the novel’s world – optimization programs, tracking, resort aesthetics, secular health cult – no longer carries the vocabulary of blessing. “Blessing” sounds like church; the novel works with metrics, not sacraments. “Joy”, on the other hand, sounds like brand, like offer, like event: exactly the semantic surface in which a modern optimization resort morally disguises itself.
Thus a reading error becomes a stylistic law. A fragment becomes an ethic. A wrong repetition becomes a correct novel script.
And if one takes this chain seriously, then the saying is not just decor. It is the program that repaints the place from within: The real home says arrival – staying – leaving. The novel says arrival – leaving. Staying is not celebrated, but made into a problem. Not because the author consciously planned it that way, but because the error offered him the harder, more productive formula – and he accepted it in the logic of creation.
Here the deep, almost uncanny fit with Mann becomes apparent: The “Zauberberg” too is full of poetic liberties, date punchlines, self-commentary. And there as well it is often the seemingly accidental spot where the text shows its true necessity.
