2023-12-20 14:06:52
Time is a central theme in Thomas Mann’s global success “The Magic Mountain”. Now a hundred years have passed since it hit bookstores. It is far from outdated.
Berlin.
A book too thick to read? Thousands of pages of text and the paperback edition alone weighs more than half a kilo – that’s how it comes from, “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. Some readers have run out of breath while climbing into the literary high mountains. But if you get caught up in reading, the journey through time to the snow-blown world of the Swiss mountains, to the luxury sanatorium “Berghof” with its eccentric residents, will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Whether in the German original or under titles such as “The Magic Mountain”, “La montaña mágica” or “La montagna incantata”, the period novel has a worldwide fan base. It is now a hundred years since it was published in 1924. So 2024 is all about the anniversary. In Lübeck, where the author was born in 1875, the Buddenbrookhaus is launching a large anniversary program in January with a lecture series, concerts, film and discussion events. Mann’s publishing house S. Fischer is planning a special issue of the “Neue Rundschau” in the fall in which contemporary authors will comment on the novel. And the “Magic Mountain” is also on the program at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades in distant California, where the 1929 Nobel Prize winner lived in exile for ten years. It is a contemporary novel that takes place 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: The newly qualified engineer Hans Castorp travels from Hamburg to the Swiss Alps for three weeks in the summer to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemßen, who is suffering from tuberculosis, in the sanatorium near Davos. But the morbid charm of the institution run by Hofrat Behrens enchants him and he stays there. In the end, three weeks turn into seven years, which he spends “with those up here.”
Two intellectuals want 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 Clawdia Chauchat, which is only hinted at in the novel. He witnesses how his cousin Joachim and other residents of the house die of consumption. Things become dangerous for him when he gets lost in a snowstorm, begins to have hallucinations and has difficulty finding his way back to the Berghof.
Wrapped in woolen blankets, the mountain residents spend their days relaxing on the balconies between five meals a day in the strictly hierarchically structured dining room with its seven tables. Time passes, days turn into months, months turn into years, until “The Clap of Thunder” sounds in 1914, 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.
Lots of timeless motifs
A long time ago, you might say. But apart from the fact that the “Magic Mountain” is a reading pleasure with its magnificent descriptions of the landscape, the striking characters, the great dialogues and Thomas Mann’s fine irony, it contains many timeless motifs: illness and death, eroticism, personality, the nature of time intellectual foundations of Europe, the conflict between the open society and its enemies. In Thomas Mann, it is the Enlightenment optimist Settembrini and Naphta, who sympathizes with both fascism and communism, who engage in endless disputes – and in the end duel. Today it is fundamentalisms of various kinds that threaten freedom of expression and freedom of art.
The “Magic Mountain” is a contemporary novel in two respects. On the one hand, as a period novel it offers a panorama of the declining pre-war society. On the other hand, it is a novel about the individual experience of time. In the strange intermediate realm of the Berghof, Castorp and Co. lose track of time. The narrative structure of the novel also plays with the time factor; the action accelerates 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 a lot of time with the book. He started in July 1913, actually just wanting to write a novella as a cheerful counterpart to “Death in Venice” after he got to know the Swiss sanatorium world during a spa stay for his wife Katia. After the start of the war, he interrupted his work and wrote right-leaning essays such as “Thoughts in War” and “Considerations of an Apolitical Person”. It wasn’t until 1919 that he continued writing “Magic Mountain,” which hit bookstores in November 1924.
Shaped by generations of writers
During this time, Thomas Mann transformed from a monarchist who cheered the war in 1914 to a convinced defender of the Weimar Republic. With his radio broadcasts “German Listeners!” From his American exile he later became Adolf Hitler’s opponent.
The worldwide edition of “The Magic Mountain” is not known, but there are translations in 27 languages, including five in English and three in Portuguese. He has influenced generations of writers. “No other book was as important in my life as “The Magic Mountain,” said the US author Susan Sontag (1933-2004) at the award ceremony for the German book trade’s Peace Prize in 2003. The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi (55) recently told at the book fair in Guadalajara that he read the “Magic Mountain” as inspiration when he wrote his successful 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 character of the novel and thus also the debates, conflicts, love stories and deaths that take place on the enchanted mountain are of an international scope and breadth that encompasses Europe and large parts of the world,” says Wißkirchen to the German Press Agency. “In doing so, the novel creates an international space of resonance that continues to resonate today.”
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Fischer paperback, 1008 pages, 19 euros, ISBN: 978-3-596-29433-6 (dpa)
More reading comfort even when you’re on the move E-paper and news in one app Push notifications throughout the day
No thanks. Continue in this view.
#Timeless #period #years #Magic #Mountain