Timeless period novel - 100 years of "The Magic Mountain"

Literature - Timeless period novel - 100 years of "The Magic Mountain"

A book too thick to read? A thousand pages of text and the paperback edition alone weighs more than half a kilo - that's how it comes across, "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann. Many a reader has run out of steam on the ascent into the literary high mountains. But those who are gripped by the pull of reading will never be able to forget the journey back in time to the snow-covered world of the Swiss mountains, to the luxury sanatorium "Berghof" with its eccentric inhabitants, for the rest of their lives.

Whether in the original German or under titles such as "The Magic Mountain", "La montaña mágica" or "La montagna incantata", the epic novel has a worldwide fan base. It is now one hundred years since it was published in 1924. So 2024 will mark the anniversary. In Lübeck, where the author was born in 1875, the Buddenbrookhaus is launching a major anniversary program in January with a lecture series, concerts, films and discussions. Mann's publisher S. Fischer is planning a special issue of "Neue Rundschau" in the fall, in which contemporary authors will comment on the novel. And "Magic Mountain" will also be on the program at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades in faraway California, where the 1929 Nobel Prize winner lived in exile for ten years. It is a contemporary novel set before the First World War, but still has a lot to say to us today.

Three weeks of vacation turn into seven years

What is it about? The year is 1907: Hans Castorp, a newly qualified engineer, travels from Hamburg to the Swiss Alps for three weeks in the summer to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemßen, who has tuberculosis, in a sanatorium near Davos. But he is enchanted by the morbid charm of the institution run by Hofrat Behrens and stays there. In the end, three weeks turn into seven years, which he spends "up here with them".

Two intellectuals try to influence the young man: the Italian humanist and freemason Lodovico Settembrini and his ideological opponent, the arch-reactionary Jesuit Leo Naphta. Hans spends a night of love with the mysterious Russian woman Clawdia Chauchat, which is only hinted at in the novel. He witnesses how his cousin Joachim and other inhabitants of the house die of consumption. Things become dangerous for him when he gets lost in a snowstorm, begins to hallucinate and has difficulty finding his way back to the Berghof.

Wrapped in woollen blankets, the mountain dwellers spend their days lying on the balconies between five meals a day in the strictly organized dining room with its seven tables. Time passes, days turn into months, months into years, until in 1914 "The Thunderclap" resounds, marking the outbreak of the First World War. The illustrious circle of the world encapsulated in the snow dissolves, everyone goes their own way, Hans Castorp's trail is lost on the battlefields of Flanders.

Many timeless motifs

A long time ago, you might say. But apart from the fact that "The Magic Mountain" is a pleasure to read with its grandiose descriptions of landscapes, striking characters, great dialogues and Thomas Mann's subtle irony, it contains many timeless motifs: illness and death, eroticism, personality, the nature of time, the spiritual foundations of Europe, the conflict between open society and its enemies. In Thomas Mann's work, it is the Enlightenment optimist Settembrini and Naphta, who sympathizes equally with fascism and communism, who engage in endless disputes - and end up fighting a duel. Today, fundamentalisms of various kinds threaten freedom of opinion and artistic freedom.

Incidentally, "The Magic Mountain" is a contemporary novel in two respects. On the one hand, as an epochal novel, it offers a panorama of a pre-war society in decline. On the other hand, it is a novel about the individual experience of time. In the strange in-between realm of the Berghof, Castorp and Co. lose their sense of time. The narrative structure of the novel also plays with the time factor, with the plot accelerating the further you get. While the first half of the text - i.e. 500 pages - only deals with the seven months since Castorp's arrival, the second half condenses into six years.

Incidentally, Thomas Mann took his time with the book. He started in July 1913, actually only wanting to write a novella as a light-hearted counterpart to "Death in Venice", after he had become acquainted with the Swiss sanatorium world during a stay at a health resort with his wife Katia. After the start of the war, he interrupted his work and wrote right-wing essays such as "Thoughts in War" and "Reflections of an Unpolitical Man". It was not until 1919 that he continued writing "The Magic Mountain", which hit the bookstores in November 1924.

Influencing generations of writers

During this time, Thomas Mann changed from a monarchist who cheered on the war in 1914 to a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic. With his radio broadcasts "Deutsche Hörer!" from his American exile, he later became Adolf Hitler's opponent.

The worldwide circulation of "The Magic Mountain" is not known, but there are translations into 27 languages, including five in English and three in Portuguese alone. It has influenced generations of writers. "No other book has been as important in my life as The Magic Mountain", said the US author Susan Sontag (1933-2004) at the award ceremony for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2003. The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi (55) recently said at the book fair in Guadalajara that he read The Magic Mountain as inspiration when he was writing his novel "The Klingsor Paradox" (2001), which was also successful in German.

For the President of the German Thomas Mann Society, Hans Wißkirchen, the international success came as no surprise. "The novel's characters and thus also the debates, conflicts, love stories and deaths that take place on the enchanted mountain are of an international breadth and scope that encompasses Europe and large parts of the world," Wißkirchen told the German Press Agency. "In this way, however, the novel creates an international resonance that echoes to this day."

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Fischer Taschenbuch, 1008 pages, 19 euros, ISBN: 978-3-596-29433-6