Mann after 1922 is often called a 'republican by reason' who reluctantly supported the Weimar Republic as an inevitable development, while he personally would have preferred the monarchy to have been preserved. In this paper, however, I will show that Mann made efforts for several years to restructure the whole complex of his ideal world in order to establish emotional foundations for the newly-born republic. Firstly, I will look at how the experience of the Russian and German revolutions defined Mann's attempt as a quest for an original German political culture, which would be distinct from those of France and Russia, focusing on his double image of Russia (Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's). Then I will argue that in The Magic Mountain the main protagonist, Hans Castorp, finds his own intellectual position between west (Settembrini) and east (Dostoevsky's Russia represented by Chauchat and Tolstoy's Russia represented by Naphta). Lastly, I will argue that the position Hans Castorp gained enabled Mann both to become an advocate of the republic on emotional grounds and to invent a new relationship between the state and individual minds.