The Magic MountainBy Thomas Mann (1924)
YOUNG HANS Castorp, orphaned by his parents and then by his grandfather, and about to make his way in the world, first sets out from Hamburg to a Swiss mountain village to visit his cousin Joachim, an aspiring soldier who is recuperating at the Sanatorium Berghof.
Hans, the consummate civilian, reckons a three-week vacation should prove restful preparation for his new job as an engineer in a shipyard. He is of steady, burgher stock, a cautious, innocent lad of 23. Those three weeks become seven years. Thomas Mann’s calmly epic study of the mystery of time also considers life and death and love, all within the setting of a somewhat eccentric sanatorium inhabited by an international cross-section of patients acting more like guests.
For all the philosophy, irony, the preoccupation with timelessness and extraordinary, lengthy, often adversarial debates about faith and humanism – largely conducted between the angry, fatalistic Naphta, a Jesuit who had been born Jewish, and Settembrini, a Freemason with literary tendencies – this is a strongly historical tale of transition. It is also a European novel of ideas marked by the influence of Goethe, Mann’s favourite writer. The writings of Nietzsche prevail.
Hans is the ideal central character; mild, ordinary, oblivious to the personal and intellectual odyssey he is about to begin. Most importantly, he is not an artist. Mann, who began the novel in 1912 following the completion of Death in Venice, appeared to have begun with a loose plan.
Mann was confident, famous by then due to the success of his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), which would later be banned by Hitler and publicly burnt – as were all his books.
Published in 1924 between the two hells, The Magic Mountainis many things, including a burlesque human comedy, and a towering example of a traditional German literary genre, the Bildungsroman. It is also a heartfelt response to the political upheaval facing Europe. Deliberately set earlier than Mann's immediate period, his intentions are nevertheless clear – it is the story of the collapse of a civilisation, the end of an epoch. The disease killing the patients is a metaphor for the insanity of the first World War, the war that would follow and the twin menaces of fascism and communism.
In the opening sections Mann presents Hans as the healthy, detached visitor who quickly feels unwell. The symbolism is established; Hans has exchanged Prussian order for chaotic thought. He has also left the flatlands and has entered the uplands, a mountain haven.
For all its zaniness, it is here that he discovers self-knowledge and has encounters which are philosophical, political, intellectual, sexual and ultimately, moral. Memories return as troubling dreams begin to stimulate his consciousness. One of the patients, Clavdia, an intriguingly awkward Russian woman, irritates Hans because she habitually slams the glass door. He falls in love. His devotion to her means that when she leaves the sanatorium, he decides to stay because she will return.
Even before his planned three-week visit is over, Hans is found to be ill. The months pass. His love for Clavdia consolidates his attachment to the sanatorium. An X-ray causes him to reflect: “For the first time in his life he understood that he would die.”
In another outstanding set piece, Hans, the unlikely athlete, goes skiing and is caught in a vicious snowstorm. All the while his former complacency is yielding to curiosity and a new interest in knowledge. Joachim goes off to war but soon returns to die. Naphta and Settembrini not only battle for the soul of Hans – they represent the conflict between liberal reason and totalitarianism. Hans Castorp goes to war. We last see him singing Schubert's The Linden Treeas he stumbles in mud.
Thomas Mann made the transition from late 19th century writer to Modernist.
The Magic Mountain, balanced between humour and horror, rooted in its own world and beyond that world, is an ambivalent tragic comedy; it remains a book of its time as well as being a defining text for our time, all time. Literature would have to wait until 1955 and William Gaddis's The Recognitionssfor a masterwork as rich in ideas.
