Thomas Mann`s The Magic Mountain

In the decade before the Great War a young man visits his tubercular cousin at a sanatorium in the Swizz Alps for a planned stay of 3 weeks and ends up staying 7 years.

Fact 1: Inspiration for The Magic Mountain came to Thomas Mann when visiting his wife in a sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland. Like the hero of his novel, Mann himself was diagnosed as tubercular by one of the doctors and advised to stay on as a patient. If I had followed his advice, Mann wrote years later in the afterword to the novel, who knows, I might still be there! I wrote The Magic Mountain instead.

Fact 2: Intended as short and comic reworking of Mann s novella Death in Venice, work on The Magic Mountain began in 1912, was interrupted by the Great War, and wasn t completed until 1924 by which time it ran to over 900 pages and incorporated Mann s post-War views on civilization and society.

Fact 3: There is a tradition of enchanted mountains in German folklore and literature which Mann drew on when fashioning his own. In Goethe`s Faust the titular hero is led up the Brocken by Mephistophles in order to partake in the Witches Sabbath& in Wagner`s Tannh user the Venusberg (Venus Mountain) is a place of dire temptation& and in Wilhelm Hauff s 1826 fairy tale, Der Zwerg Nase (Dwarf Nose), a boy is turned into a dwarf and imprisoned inside a mountain where seven years pass as if they were seven days.

An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graubunden.

So begins The Magic Mountain: Thomas Mann s 900 page meditation on life, love and death, set in the rarefied confines of a sanatorium for tuberculosis during the years immediately prior to the Great War. The ordinary young man making the journey to the International Sanatorium Berghof is Hans Castorp the unassuming hero of the novel. Hans is taking a 3 week break from his profession as shipping engineer in order to visit his consumptive cousin Joachim. But as the train bears Hans through the Swiz Alps, wending its way ever-upwards through ravines and gullies and past magnificent vistas of ineffable, phantasmagoric Alpine peaks , Hans becomes dizzy at the idea that such commonplace things as hardwood forests and songbirds now lie far below him. He has not even arrived at his destination and already the mountain s magic is going to work on his senses& he is journeying both figuratively and literally into realms far beyond his ken:

Two days of travel separate this young man (and young he is, with few firm roots in life) from his everyday world, especially from what he called his duties, interests, worries, and prospects Space, as it rolls and tumbles away between him and his native soil, proves to have powers normally ascribed to time Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink& and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

Although Hans has difficulty acclimatising to the clear alien air of Berghof (he develops a nervous tremor& his cheeks are permanently flushed& his favourite cigar has an unpleasant leathery taste), he finds it much easier to adapt to the milieu of strictly regimented leisure. Life on the mountain is one of horizontal rest-cures on one s balcony& of prescribed walks in the well-kept gardens or into the scenic valley with its pines, brooks and waterfalls& of snowcapped peaks and feverish flirtations. And when Hans himself is diagnosed with having a moist spot on the lungs and advised to stay a little longer than his allotted 3 weeks, he only-too-happily complies.

For the International Sanatorium Berghof, with its modern facilities and its cosmopolitan clientele, is nothing less than a self-sufficient microcosm of pre-War bourgeois Europe. And young Hans, with his impeccable manners and mail-order cigars, is a perfect petit bourgeois. But, lest we forget the title of the novel and its mythological antecedents, the sanatorium is also a hermetically sealed world of sickness and death. Over a mile above sea level and so far removed from the day to day concerns the flatlands (the inhabitants derogatory term for home) that even the very notion of the day-to-day is rendered obsolete. Here time exists on the grand scale (the month is considered the smallest unit) so that time itself becomes slippery: snow is eternal and the seasons cease to exist in any ordered fashion. And this the sense of timelessness and isolation, and the chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans`s illness is genuine, gives the novel a wonderfully uncanny feel. The setting may be ostensibly that of the Swiz Alps, but The Magic Mountain is a novel of other-worldly strangeness par excellence (the oft-repeated phrase we don t feel the cold up here chimes forebodingly throughout ).

A critical and commercial success upon publication, The Magic Mountain is now rightly considered a classic of Twentieth Century literature. Part-Bildungsroman, part-allegory, it also is a tender and witty eulogy for a way of life that was about to be swept away by the Great War and arguably Mann s masterpiece.