ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to sketch a range of ideas characteristic of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. It has a decisive influence upon Nietzsche's thought – especially concerning the relationship between the famous notions of Will-to-Power and the Eternal Return. In turn, these Nietzschean ideas are found illuminating for a consideration of the problem of metamorphosis in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. In Mann's brief foreword to the novel, it is made clear that this is a work about radical transitions. It concerns a near past, which has 'an exaggerated pastness' because of the transformative chaos of the Great War, 'in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely left off beginning'. In a series of papers in the late 1860s, they developed the idea of the unstable system – an idea which has resurfaced again recently in the guise of chaos theory.
