33 pages • 1-hour read
The Magic Mountain
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Themes
The Malleability of Time
In the Forward, the narrator informs us that The Magic Mountain “is not to be measured in days, nor the burden of age weighing upon it to be counted by orbits around the sun; in a word, it does not actually owe its pastness to time...” (xi). The subject of time and its malleability is at the forefront of the author’s (and of Hans’s) mind. Time can go by very slowly, as on Hans’s first day in the sanatorium (which takes up Parts One through Three), or it can rush past in years, as in the final chapter. Time becomes precious to those with a lust for and purpose in life, with each lost minute becoming a small tragedy, or it can be mercilessly annihilated in bulk by those who have become bored with their lives. Such is the power of the perceiving mind that time bends to its will, just as it bends around gravitational pull (as Einstein established in his Theory of Relativity, published in 1916).
If the mind can passively perform these tricks with time, what might a thinking novelist do, working at the best of his ability? This was an incidental question to writers before the rise of Modernist literary aesthetic, when the novel was an indifferent vehicle for “beautiful feelings,” as Hans puts it early on. Mann, by contrast, distorts the form of his novel to express the its content. In this way, Part Two jumps back into 23 years of Hans’s history, while in part three a whole subchapter is devoted to a night of restless and thought-plagued sleep. The Magic Mountain’s structure is variable and unreliable, like the mountain climate.
This observation of time serves a purpose; it marks death and holds it at bay.
The Fetishization of Illness
Hans says that he sees something inherently noble in the suffering of the ill, to which Settembrini replies with a dire warning: “‘Illness is… a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself’” (97). As with many things, Settembrini speaks with a bathos that invites mockery, but his dramatic outburst holds a kernel of truth.
The International Sanatorium Berghof is a monument to the diagnoses and treatment of illness. The remove at which the organization performs this function allows for no other ideas to enter, and so the word of Director Behrens is absolute. He has little to say about the rigors of being a doctor, but he dotes on his medical implements. He also ascribes an esprit de corps to his patients, which turns them from patients into industrious professionals. He notes the talent some have for illness and chides Joachim for his “desertion of duty” when he wants to return to the flatlands and become a soldier (410). It is an attitude the residents of the sanatorium happily mimic, doing their best to ignore the death toll of their “professional” peers.
The Soul of the German Middle Class
Hans has a facility with schematics and for using technical apparatus, such as gramophones and thermometers. When choosing a career, he laughs at the very notion of suffering an artist’s life, despite his ability as an illustrator. The idea that he should feel fulfilled by any of these things does not cross his mind. “Actually, I only really feel healthy when I am doing nothing at all,” admits Hans (58). To fill this nothing, Hans plays at higher ideas exactly as if they were equivalent to nothing. There is not an idea about art or politics or spirituality that he cannot debase through a prosaic or self-interested reading. After one of Settembrini’s particularly impassioned lectures about illness and the human soul, a delighted Hans notes that “‘...his mouth is so round and appetizing—listening to him always reminds me of fresh hot buns’” (99).
As a cultural conservative influenced by German thinkers such as Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche, Mann finds much to satire in the ideological trends of his day, from Marxism to neo-classicism to anarchism, but the primary object of the book is to satirize the bourgeoisie, whose self-interest, lack of empathy, and instrumentation of basic human feeling is portrayed as an annihilating scourge. It is the illness which aggravates and informs all other illnesses. After all, there are few representatives of the working class presented at these heights, other than the people working in the kitchen. Everyone in the sanatorium pays their weekly bill without needing to work; work is done by someone else, somewhere else, far away.
In the novel’s final chapter, superstition and petty squabbling hold sway among the residents. Outside the sanatorium, within a larger western world overtaken by nationalism, capitalism, and dehumanization the result is a war of catastrophic scale. The reader may be inclined to agree with the irascible Naphta when he says that the bourgeoisie “doesn’t know what it wants” and that what starts as a “brawl over a few scraps of bread will soon eclipse all previous wars” (377).
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