A three-week sanatorium visit stretches to seven years in Thomas Mann's great novel
Hans Castorp climbs to a Swiss clinic to see his sick cousin for three weeks and does not come down for seven years. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain spends almost half its length on the first seven months, making the reader feel how time dissolves when every day looks the same.
Mann got the idea in 1912, when his wife was being treated for suspected tuberculosis at Dr. Friedrich Jessen's Waldsanatorium in Davos. Her letters described the daily routine, and a three-week visit that May and June introduced him to the doctors and patients; that stay fed the opening chapter, Arrival. He first imagined a short, comic companion piece to Death in Venice.
The First World War derailed the plan. Mann initially backed the German Empire and wrote patriotic essays, then in 1918 published Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man against anti-war intellectuals, including his brother Heinrich. After the defeat he changed course. From 1919 he recast the book to confront the war honestly and wrote in quarrels between characters drawn from his rivalry with Heinrich. His politics moved from opposing the Weimar Republic to supporting it, and S. Fischer Verlag published Der Zauberberg in November 1924.
The story begins in 1904. Castorp, an orphaned Hamburg merchant's son about to start work in shipbuilding, visits his cousin Joachim Ziemssen at the Berghof. A slight fever becomes, in the eyes of director Hofrat Behrens, a case of tuberculosis, and Castorp stays. He falls for Claudia Chauchat and is tutored in rival worldviews by Lodovico Settembrini, an Italian humanist, and Leo Naphta, a Jesuit drawn to communist totalitarianism. Their debates, which owe much to Nietzsche, set Enlightenment ideas against each other.
Scholars read the book both as a Bildungsroman and as a parody of one: Castorp is lured away from practical life, yet only that detour lets him think. Instead of maturing into a settled citizen, he ends as one of millions of conscripts heading for the front, his survival doubtful. Writing in The Atlantic in January 1953, Mann said his hero learned that a higher kind of health has to pass through sickness and death. Characters also argue about whether novelty shortens time or monotony drags it out, echoing Henri Bergson's ideas on lived duration.
Source: The Magic Mountain
