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| Waldsanatorium (1911). Today's Waldhotel Davos, Buolstrasse 3, CH-7270 Davos Platz. Please click on the photo to expand it. |
DE (Deutsches Reich = Deutsche Republik = Weimarer Republik): Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag / Samuel Fischer, 1924. Zwei Bände. I Band 578 Seiten, II Band 629 Seiten. Insgesamt 1.207 Seiten.
Finnish translation (the first Finnish edition): Taikavuori 1–2. Porvoo: WSOY, 1957. Translator: Kai Kaila. 361+370 = 731 pages.
Read at Sovintola, Kesälahti, 15 Aug 2025.
Coordinates of the novel:
Location: Davos, Switzerland.
Timeline: 1907–1914.
Centenary of The Magic Mountain (2024).
150th anniversary of Thomas Mann (2025).
I read The Magic Mountain for the first time, alerted by the anniversaries of the novel and its author, but most importantly, the most electrifying reading experience of the end of last year: Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel (2024).
Frank focuses on 31 novels. His table of contents is not a "best of the best" list but a sampling of a special category that Frank calls "the twentieth-century novel". An epilogue on "the 21th century novel" focuses on Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. A prologue harks back to the 19th century to discuss Notes from Underground (1864) by F. M. Dostoevsky. From it, Frank tracks a lineage to Kafka, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Musil... and The Magic Mountain.
Nothing might seem in greater contrast to the miserable den of Dostoevsky's Underground Man than the Berghof Forest Sanatorium, an elite institution high up on the Swiss Alps. But Edwin Frank detects a link between Dostoevsky's troublesome nameless protagonist and Hans Castorp, Mann's unheroic hero, "life's problem child".
A further topical link to The Magic Mountain is what is for me the book of the year, Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People (2025). One of its anthology pieces is a chapter devoted to the Facebook team's visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As a man of the cinema I am fascinated by Mann's preoccupation with time. It is explicit from the first page to the last. Mann reminds us that time is called Lethe, the stream of oblivion, and like in ancient myth, it flows around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld.
In Chapter Seven, "A Walk by the Sea" (the English title is "By the Ocean of Time"), Mann discusses time as a fundament of narrative and music, two kinds of time: the actual time of the presentation and the imagined time of the story. They can be identical, or the storyteller can use foreshortening and temporal perspective, with eternity as the limit.
Hans spends seven years on the mountain. The first days seem to last long, but after a few weeks, time starts to flash by. Hans loses his sense of time and even his own age. On a ski trek, caught in a blizzard, Hans finds shelter and believes he has fought the elements around the clock. In fact it has only been fifteen minutes.
Mann was aware of Einstein's theory of relativity and Bergson's concepts of the subjective duration of the mind and the objective time of the chronometer. Mann was also fascinated by Schopenhauer's thoughts about the sustained now, nunc stans, Plato's ideas of time and eternity, and time as a moving image of eternity (Chapters Five and Seven).
The Magic Mountain is not a historical novel, but it has been created in full awareness of its historical turning-point. It takes place during la Belle Époque and ends in what was then called the Great War. It is about what Hermann Broch and Christopher Clark have called "the sleepwalkers".
During his seven years on the Alps, Hans, who is not an intellectual, has time to pursue many interests. While fighting tuberculosis, he studies books on anatomy, physiology and biology (Chapter Five) and reflects on the mystery of life.
Large language models and generative pre-trained transformer chat robots are key topics of our time. "Artificial intelligence" is an irresistible marketing slogan once again. Record fortunes are made.
I have been reading this year about attempts to create digital models of the simplest living beings such as caenorhabditis elegans ("The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack", Wired, March 2025). It is not certain that the task will ever be accomplished.
For Hans Castorp, a parallel epiphany is provided by the protoplasm. He is fascinated to realize that prerequisites for consciousness seem inherent in life - organic matter - itself, in its most primitive stage, even before the formation of a nervous system. He proceeds further to reflect on the distinction of the material and the immaterial. What is energy? What is electricity?
Besides books, interests in Davos include moving images. Pre-cinema motion picture machines are available. In Chapter Five we enter the cinema itself at the Davos-Platz Bioscope Theatre. Mann gives a merciless account of an early cinema show of attractions and actualities. "Hands rested powerless in front of the emptiness". "Distances were abolished and time reversed. The past was transformed into a present that jerked and bumped aimlessly, wrapped in music" (my rough re-translation).
Photography is among the passions, even including Lumière's colour technology, and there is an anthology piece in Chapter Seven that I think Susan Sontag included in On Photography*. The Magic Mountain was her favourite novel. As a teenager, on Dec 28, 1949, Sontag paid a visit to Mann at Pacific Palisades. On 14 Dec 1987 she wrote a memoir, "Pilgrimage", about it for The New Yorker.
Painting has not been forgotten. Memorable pages are dedicated to a portrait of Clavdia Chauchat, painted by the Hofrat Behrens, the director of the sanatorium. Behrens is an amateur, but he has accomplished a fascinating likeness of Chauchat's skin. The painting's ghostly reversal is Clavdia's X-ray image. This "interior portrait" becomes a treasure for Hans.
The weakness of The Magic Mountain is the female presence. The female protagonist, Clavdia Chauchat, is enchanting but her presentation is disappointingly shallow. The X-ray photograph is the only access to her "interior life". Even the name is in the lineage of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels (Chaud Chat = Hot Pussy). A case of an unrequited love. But Clavdia is the one who gives Hans the pencil.
As always in Mann, music reigns supreme. With a high quality gramophone, the inhabitants can access the best music and the best performers. Schubert's "Der Lindenbaum" is the song that Hans keeps singing when we lose track of him in the trenches of the World War.
While Hans is no intellectual, he gets increasingly drawn into the company of ones. The main debates take place between the humanist Settembrini and the extremist Naphta. They disagree on everything but their debates are fascinating. This is a real treasure until the final tragic passages.
Something happens in the finale, a degradation that even takes the form of spiritism, which Mann does not reject as a hoax. Hans is deeply disturbed to meet the spirit of his dear deceased cousin Joachim Ziemssen.
Naphta's father has been murdered by an antisemitic mob, but otherwise anti-Jewishness has been lying dormant. Now the rabid antisemite Wiedemann attacks a Jewish patient called Sonnenschein. The general atmosphere described by Mann reminds me of today's situation of hate speech and the "enshittification" of the internet. Here we return to Sarah Wynn-Williams magisterial Careless People and its epic account of the corruption of Facebook. Over-reacting to Settembrini, Naphta insists on a duel, with fatal results.
Georg Lukacs has been evoked as a model for Naphta, even by Mann, who was puzzled that his admirer Lukacs did not recognize this. But nobody who knows Lukacs can recognize him here. Mann's account of the degradation of the spirit that leads to the catastrophic war is not incompatible with Lukacs's vision of the destruction of reason, although they would have disagreed in every detail.
The Magic Mountain is a great novel of the classical school (in contrast to contemporary experimental masterpieces by Woolf, Kafka, Joyce and Proust), but it is thoroughly modern in its subjects and insights.
Without having read the German original, I feel that Kai Kaila's Finnish translation is true to Mann. I loved reading the novel in two volumes. Newer editions are invariably in single volumes. Finland was a Germanophilic country from Martin Luther till 1944 and an Americanophilic country from 1945 till January 2025. Kai Kaila, one of our best translators, excelled both with Thomas Mann and William Faulkner.
...
* Susan Sontag discusses The Magic Mountain on p. 163 of On Photography. She writes about Hofrat Behrens's two portraits of Clavdia Chauchat. Illness as metaphor already.
** 11 Oct 2025: Martin Wolf highlights The Magic Mountain as prophetic for today
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-ai-with-martin-wolf?utm_source=substack&publication_id=277517&post_id=175710071&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=53kmgh&triedRedirect=true
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