Harbinger of the Future: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain

Status
Not open for further replies.

BRS

Puritan Board Freshman
Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels. -Thomas Mann, The Making of The Magic Mountain.

Much of the fiction that loomed large in my intellectual development I read from ages 15-25. One of the most important authors was Thomas Mann (1875-1955), author of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doktor Faustus, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. Mann’s trademark ironic and omnipresent story-teller serves as the lens through which we experience Castorp’s journey to the Berghof, a tuberculosis sanitarium located high in the Swiss Alps. Castorp travels to the Berghof to visit his cousin Joachim, but ends up staying for seven years.

Recently I learned that a new audio version of The Magic Mountain had been released. I was eager to acquire the new audio book and visit the Berghof once more. The book is read by David Rintoul, who gives a marvelous reading of John Woods’ translation (I had read the Lowe-Porter translation years ago).

Mann began work on The Magic Mountain in 1912, but the finished work – well beyond the scope Mann had first envisioned – was published in 1924. Lowe-Porter translated the work into English (published 1927). The Woods translation appeared in 1996. The book features Mann’s linguistic fecundity and irony, his marvelous descriptive passages, his over-the-top virtuoso writing, and his understanding of the human condition.

The Magic Mountain is a parable of Europe before the Great War and a prophecy of the future, especially the anti-rational terror of Naphta. The metaphor of illness – sometimes real and sometimes feigned – describes a Europe fundamentally ill. Even those that are healthy, like the feckless hero Hans Castorp, pretend to be ill. The madness and ill temper that ends in a duel – as Hans Castorp realizes, for no real reason at all – symbolizes a war whose genesis is still murky. Respected historians have given most blame for the outbreak of war to nearly all the major combatants: Austria, Germany, Russia, Britain, Serbia – but in any case a kind of madness led to this suicidal war, the beginning of the end of traditional European existence, to the point now where old-line Europeans have a below replacement-level birth rate.

Hans Castorp is a dreamy, passive and lazy hero, and he finds it easy to forego return to the “flatlands” and to remain ill. In some sense the story is a bildungsroman narrating the seminal events in Hans Castorp’s ascent to mature adulthood, but is nevertheless an ironic bildungsroman, narrating a time of magic and irresponsibility, a wallowing in a species of luxury that may enlighten (or obscure) but is certainly irresponsible. Herr Settembrini, the rationalist encyclopedia-writer, deplores Castorp’s tendency toward (feigned) illness and encourages “my good engineer” to climb out of himself and take his true place on the docks in Hamburg as a marine engineer. Settembrini’s strictures are of little moment; Castorp remains one of “life’s problem children” and only awakes from the magic spell with the thunderclap of world war.

Modern feigned illness (and its history – it is hardly a new phenomenon) is well described by Thomas Szasz in Pyschiatry: The Science of Lies as well as numerous other books. It is not necessary to accept the entirety of Szasz’s arguments to realize that malingering is a real, and, since the late 19th century, growing, reality. Szasz writes that

Roughly between 1850 and 1880, malingering became transformed into hysteria, and psychiatry – increasingly distinct from neurology – became a popular belief system, a medical-secular religion. Terms such as imposturing, malingering, and self-caused disease fell into disrepute and were abandoned, and the terminology of hysteria and other counterfeit maladies was incorporated into the vocabulary of medicine. Modern psychiatry – with its Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of nonexisting diseases and their coercive cures – is a monument to quackery on a scale undreamed of in the annals of medicine. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, 2008. Chapter 1: Malingering
Hans Castorp is a malingerer, almost the opposite of his cousin Joachim, whose disease is real. The mingling of the truly ill with malingerers is one of the fault lines in society. Malingering is an escape from responsibility, a renunciation of life – and Mann sees malingering as a feature of the modern world, at least in those parts of the modern world wealthy enough to indulge in the practice. The medical community, as Szasz notes, is complicit in “shading the line” between true illness and malingering. Told by Director Behrens that he is free to leave, Hans knows that he won’t leave and won’t be made to leave.

Brief comments on other major elements of The Magic Mountain:

Time. Part of the charm of malingering (or enforced idleness due to illness) is the luxurious sense of time that accompanies the endless days, months, and years that effortlessly flow by – doing nothing in particular. With few exceptions, the busy life in the “flatlands” is universally depreciated by the residents of the Berghof. With time to reflect, Hans Castorp can consider time in its various elements: the flow of time, the nature of time, our existence within the flow – at once mysterious and yet the most real element of our lives.

Sex. At the Berghof, relations between the sexes exhibit a surreal character. The unreality is partly because of the irresponsibility of the situation (and an often juvenile sexual mentality), and partly a function of real illness. Neither Hans Castorp nor his cousin Joachim engage in a healthy relationship with the opposite sex, but for different reasons. Joachim is actually sick and therefore unable to form such relationships (no doubt partly because of his honorable character). Hans Castorp’s general malingering attitude induces a passivity that bows to Mynheer Peiter Peeperkorn upon Clavdia Chauchat’s return as Peeperkorn’s traveling companion. The passivity that infects Hans Castorp in general also affects him in this area. The fact that the memento he requests from Clavdia Chauchat is an x-ray has a tinge of the macabre, almost as if he confuses life and death. Hans Castorp is willing for Director Behrens’ picture of Clavdia Chauchat or the x-ray totem to represent the actual woman almost as an icon represents a saint. He is unwilling or unable to pursue his love in vigorous fashion in the flesh, something that neither Clavdia Chauchat nor Mynheer Peeperkorn understand. Another sign of the dubious sexuality of the Berghof is Dr. Krakowski’s lectures on love – highly tinged with Freudian and Jungian elements, and viewing love and sex almost as elements of worship. Mann is satirizing the elite view of sexuality current in Europe at the time, and shows it as part of the general decline of European society.

Music. Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, and it soothes Hans Castorp and all the residents of the Berghof. Castorp is especially drawn to the state-of-the-art gramophone purchased by the Berghof and becomes its keeper and chief acolyte. Yet even here Castorp’s relationship to music tends toward the sentimental and the lazy. As a forerunner of music as mass consumption, the gramophone enables Castorp to consume high culture without the experience of a live concert or the effort of personal music-making. Machine-made music is another sign of modernity – both an invaluable boon and a curse. Music as communal and amateur undertaking is now a specialist concern. The world described by Catherine Drinker Bowen in Friends and Fiddlers – a world teeming with amateur music-making – has been replaced by a realm of recorded music performed by specialists.

Castorp’s special music is Der Lindenbaum, Schubert’s famous song from the song cycle Der Winterreise. The pathos and promised rest of the linden tree – and the implication of death – particularly appeals to Castorp.

Occult. A wave of occult activity swept Europe in the years before World War I, and the Berghof is no different. Any sort of orthodox Christianity makes hardly an appearance in the microcosm of The Magic Mountain, but a rogue sort of spirituality, materially abetted by Dr. Krakowski, the resident “doctor of the mind,” who earlier gave a series of lectures on love, infects the Berghof. In the vacuum of settled belief, European civilization is shown as willing to believe anything or nothing. Hans Castorp becomes drawn into the occult circle, but cannot quite go “the last mile.”

Terror. The Magic Mountain is a political book. Mann describes two fundamental political and social attitudes: the Enlightenment viewpoint, emphasizing rationality and science, represented by the Italian Settembrini. Settembrini believes in progress, in the march of humanity toward a better future under its own efforts. He is, significantly, a contributor to an encyclopedia, one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. His intellectual opponent is Naphta, the radical Jesuit who hates bourgeois Western society in the manner of Marx, Lenin and Stalin – or Dostoevsky’s Stavrogan and Verkovensky (The Demons). In the course of their brilliant debates, Naphta rails against the bourgeois democratic certainty of Settembrini, finally proclaiming that the only way forward is Terror – a complete and utter destruction of Western society, remade on authoritarian and irrational lines. Though Naphta occasionally references the spirit and religious categories, his violent dogma is more akin to secular radicalism. Like Stalin, a former seminarian, his religion has been discarded. Significantly, during their duel, Settembrini shoots ineffectually (if honorably) into the air, and Naphta turns terror on himself by committing suicide.

Mann shows both Settembrini and Naphta as typical modern intellectuals – men of words – whose arguments, on some issues, circle such that the other eventually takes his opponent’s argument and vice versa. Mann views both with irony – both are examples of intellectualism without a foundation – or perhaps a rotten foundation. But words have consequences. Settembrini’s implicit rejection of any life of faith (humanity as its own God) and Naphta’s preaching of Terror as political principle will bear evil fruit in future decades – even unto the present.

Snow. The climax of the book is Castorp’s vision experienced during a snowstorm. He sees beautiful people in a lovely Greek setting, exuding happiness and joy far from winter snow. In prose wonderfully evocative of human well-being, an ideal society, both beautiful and happy, presents itself to Castorp. The scene shifts to a temple – and suddenly Castorp sees an old woman within sacrificing a child. Civilization is both beauty and evil, the evil sometimes resident in the most holy place. Civilization truly has a “heart of darkness.”

War. The fog and folly of the Magic Mountain is dissipated in the crisis of war. Irrational anger sweeps through the Berghof on the eve of World War I, especially hatred of Jews. The liberal social order of the past has exhausted itself. A diseased Europe stumbles toward war and terror. War changes everything. Castorp is finally catapulted from the Berghof, both his fate and the fate of Western civilization unknown.

Mann’s book is one of the 20th century’s most prescient and profound books. It chronicles a civilization in decline, with an unknown future. The Berghof is a microcosm of Europe, and startlingly absent is any notion of Christendom and/or Christian faith. Such realities have passed away, and of are so little moment that they no longer influence European life. This is the civilization we have inherited – and the way toward redemption – if the West is to be redeemed and not to descend into Babylonian captivity – will be a return to faith in Jesus Christ.
 
I tried reading The Magic Mountain (the Lowe-Porter translation) many years ago, but I got bored with it and dropped it. I may have been in my early 20s then and not really ready for a novel like that.

Perhaps I'll pick it up again one of these days.
 
Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels. -Thomas Mann, The Making of The Magic Mountain.

Much of the fiction that loomed large in my intellectual development I read from ages 15-25. One of the most important authors was Thomas Mann (1875-1955), author of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doktor Faustus, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. Mann’s trademark ironic and omnipresent story-teller serves as the lens through which we experience Castorp’s journey to the Berghof, a tuberculosis sanitarium located high in the Swiss Alps. Castorp travels to the Berghof to visit his cousin Joachim, but ends up staying for seven years.

Recently I learned that a new audio version of The Magic Mountain had been released. I was eager to acquire the new audio book and visit the Berghof once more. The book is read by David Rintoul, who gives a marvelous reading of John Woods’ translation (I had read the Lowe-Porter translation years ago).

Mann began work on The Magic Mountain in 1912, but the finished work – well beyond the scope Mann had first envisioned – was published in 1924. Lowe-Porter translated the work into English (published 1927). The Woods translation appeared in 1996. The book features Mann’s linguistic fecundity and irony, his marvelous descriptive passages, his over-the-top virtuoso writing, and his understanding of the human condition.

The Magic Mountain is a parable of Europe before the Great War and a prophecy of the future, especially the anti-rational terror of Naphta. The metaphor of illness – sometimes real and sometimes feigned – describes a Europe fundamentally ill. Even those that are healthy, like the feckless hero Hans Castorp, pretend to be ill. The madness and ill temper that ends in a duel – as Hans Castorp realizes, for no real reason at all – symbolizes a war whose genesis is still murky. Respected historians have given most blame for the outbreak of war to nearly all the major combatants: Austria, Germany, Russia, Britain, Serbia – but in any case a kind of madness led to this suicidal war, the beginning of the end of traditional European existence, to the point now where old-line Europeans have a below replacement-level birth rate.

Hans Castorp is a dreamy, passive and lazy hero, and he finds it easy to forego return to the “flatlands” and to remain ill. In some sense the story is a bildungsroman narrating the seminal events in Hans Castorp’s ascent to mature adulthood, but is nevertheless an ironic bildungsroman, narrating a time of magic and irresponsibility, a wallowing in a species of luxury that may enlighten (or obscure) but is certainly irresponsible. Herr Settembrini, the rationalist encyclopedia-writer, deplores Castorp’s tendency toward (feigned) illness and encourages “my good engineer” to climb out of himself and take his true place on the docks in Hamburg as a marine engineer. Settembrini’s strictures are of little moment; Castorp remains one of “life’s problem children” and only awakes from the magic spell with the thunderclap of world war.

Modern feigned illness (and its history – it is hardly a new phenomenon) is well described by Thomas Szasz in Pyschiatry: The Science of Lies as well as numerous other books. It is not necessary to accept the entirety of Szasz’s arguments to realize that malingering is a real, and, since the late 19th century, growing, reality. Szasz writes that


Hans Castorp is a malingerer, almost the opposite of his cousin Joachim, whose disease is real. The mingling of the truly ill with malingerers is one of the fault lines in society. Malingering is an escape from responsibility, a renunciation of life – and Mann sees malingering as a feature of the modern world, at least in those parts of the modern world wealthy enough to indulge in the practice. The medical community, as Szasz notes, is complicit in “shading the line” between true illness and malingering. Told by Director Behrens that he is free to leave, Hans knows that he won’t leave and won’t be made to leave.

Brief comments on other major elements of The Magic Mountain:

Time. Part of the charm of malingering (or enforced idleness due to illness) is the luxurious sense of time that accompanies the endless days, months, and years that effortlessly flow by – doing nothing in particular. With few exceptions, the busy life in the “flatlands” is universally depreciated by the residents of the Berghof. With time to reflect, Hans Castorp can consider time in its various elements: the flow of time, the nature of time, our existence within the flow – at once mysterious and yet the most real element of our lives.

Sex. At the Berghof, relations between the sexes exhibit a surreal character. The unreality is partly because of the irresponsibility of the situation (and an often juvenile sexual mentality), and partly a function of real illness. Neither Hans Castorp nor his cousin Joachim engage in a healthy relationship with the opposite sex, but for different reasons. Joachim is actually sick and therefore unable to form such relationships (no doubt partly because of his honorable character). Hans Castorp’s general malingering attitude induces a passivity that bows to Mynheer Peiter Peeperkorn upon Clavdia Chauchat’s return as Peeperkorn’s traveling companion. The passivity that infects Hans Castorp in general also affects him in this area. The fact that the memento he requests from Clavdia Chauchat is an x-ray has a tinge of the macabre, almost as if he confuses life and death. Hans Castorp is willing for Director Behrens’ picture of Clavdia Chauchat or the x-ray totem to represent the actual woman almost as an icon represents a saint. He is unwilling or unable to pursue his love in vigorous fashion in the flesh, something that neither Clavdia Chauchat nor Mynheer Peeperkorn understand. Another sign of the dubious sexuality of the Berghof is Dr. Krakowski’s lectures on love – highly tinged with Freudian and Jungian elements, and viewing love and sex almost as elements of worship. Mann is satirizing the elite view of sexuality current in Europe at the time, and shows it as part of the general decline of European society.

Music. Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, and it soothes Hans Castorp and all the residents of the Berghof. Castorp is especially drawn to the state-of-the-art gramophone purchased by the Berghof and becomes its keeper and chief acolyte. Yet even here Castorp’s relationship to music tends toward the sentimental and the lazy. As a forerunner of music as mass consumption, the gramophone enables Castorp to consume high culture without the experience of a live concert or the effort of personal music-making. Machine-made music is another sign of modernity – both an invaluable boon and a curse. Music as communal and amateur undertaking is now a specialist concern. The world described by Catherine Drinker Bowen in Friends and Fiddlers – a world teeming with amateur music-making – has been replaced by a realm of recorded music performed by specialists.

Castorp’s special music is Der Lindenbaum, Schubert’s famous song from the song cycle Der Winterreise. The pathos and promised rest of the linden tree – and the implication of death – particularly appeals to Castorp.

Occult. A wave of occult activity swept Europe in the years before World War I, and the Berghof is no different. Any sort of orthodox Christianity makes hardly an appearance in the microcosm of The Magic Mountain, but a rogue sort of spirituality, materially abetted by Dr. Krakowski, the resident “doctor of the mind,” who earlier gave a series of lectures on love, infects the Berghof. In the vacuum of settled belief, European civilization is shown as willing to believe anything or nothing. Hans Castorp becomes drawn into the occult circle, but cannot quite go “the last mile.”

Terror. The Magic Mountain is a political book. Mann describes two fundamental political and social attitudes: the Enlightenment viewpoint, emphasizing rationality and science, represented by the Italian Settembrini. Settembrini believes in progress, in the march of humanity toward a better future under its own efforts. He is, significantly, a contributor to an encyclopedia, one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. His intellectual opponent is Naphta, the radical Jesuit who hates bourgeois Western society in the manner of Marx, Lenin and Stalin – or Dostoevsky’s Stavrogan and Verkovensky (The Demons). In the course of their brilliant debates, Naphta rails against the bourgeois democratic certainty of Settembrini, finally proclaiming that the only way forward is Terror – a complete and utter destruction of Western society, remade on authoritarian and irrational lines. Though Naphta occasionally references the spirit and religious categories, his violent dogma is more akin to secular radicalism. Like Stalin, a former seminarian, his religion has been discarded. Significantly, during their duel, Settembrini shoots ineffectually (if honorably) into the air, and Naphta turns terror on himself by committing suicide.

Mann shows both Settembrini and Naphta as typical modern intellectuals – men of words – whose arguments, on some issues, circle such that the other eventually takes his opponent’s argument and vice versa. Mann views both with irony – both are examples of intellectualism without a foundation – or perhaps a rotten foundation. But words have consequences. Settembrini’s implicit rejection of any life of faith (humanity as its own God) and Naphta’s preaching of Terror as political principle will bear evil fruit in future decades – even unto the present.

Snow. The climax of the book is Castorp’s vision experienced during a snowstorm. He sees beautiful people in a lovely Greek setting, exuding happiness and joy far from winter snow. In prose wonderfully evocative of human well-being, an ideal society, both beautiful and happy, presents itself to Castorp. The scene shifts to a temple – and suddenly Castorp sees an old woman within sacrificing a child. Civilization is both beauty and evil, the evil sometimes resident in the most holy place. Civilization truly has a “heart of darkness.”

War. The fog and folly of the Magic Mountain is dissipated in the crisis of war. Irrational anger sweeps through the Berghof on the eve of World War I, especially hatred of Jews. The liberal social order of the past has exhausted itself. A diseased Europe stumbles toward war and terror. War changes everything. Castorp is finally catapulted from the Berghof, both his fate and the fate of Western civilization unknown.

Mann’s book is one of the 20th century’s most prescient and profound books. It chronicles a civilization in decline, with an unknown future. The Berghof is a microcosm of Europe, and startlingly absent is any notion of Christendom and/or Christian faith. Such realities have passed away, and of are so little moment that they no longer influence European life. This is the civilization we have inherited – and the way toward redemption – if the West is to be redeemed and not to descend into Babylonian captivity – will be a return to faith in Jesus Christ.
Really enjoyed your analysis. I tried The Magic Mountain a few years ago, and got about half way through. I did not pick up on the metaphor of Old Europe. If I had, I may have persevered. But it just became too stodgy for me; I read for pleasure, and it got tiring.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top