“Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame”: so begins Susan Sontag’s story “Pilgrimage,” which appeared in this magazine in 1987. The meeting is with the exiled German novelist Thomas Mann, at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The year, Sontag says, is 1947; she is fourteen. Her favorite novel is “The Magic Mountain,” Mann’s panorama of Europe at twilight, which mirrors her own life in uncanny ways, notably her experience of being treated for asthma at a sanatorium in Arizona. With her friend Merrill, a fellow-enthusiast of everything modern and profound, Sontag has formed...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
