Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is mostly unrushed. There are hundreds of pages of meticulously described life in the high mountain sun of the Berghof Sanitarium. Chapters with detailed arguments and painterly descriptions of nature. Chapters with long asides, all but complete short stories. Mann eases readers into the routines of the Sanatorium’s patients: daily rest cures, check-ups from purple-faced Dr. Behrens, trips down to Dorf—the little town below the institution. You become so involved in the petty wars and secret alliances—“who’s sitting at the bad Russian table.” The dailiness of the characters’ lives melds with your own: the arrival of the first Gramophone makes you as excited as the rest of the patients!
The reader also matures alongside the protagonist Hans Castorp. Hans’ seven years feel like all our collective adolescences… Mann allocates time for Hans and readers to think through philosophical debates and important first decisions of adulthood. We linger over conversations between characters, noting every gesture, shift-in-tone, and inflection… As refugees from the “flat-lands,” the patients have distanced themselves from the normal world’s harried ways of being and thinking. They live outside the flat-lands’ habits and natural-born nationalism, setting their own pace, following their own musings.
Suddenly, however, it’s 1914. Europe is at war. The book puts a rush on you, just as all its characters must race to catch their trains home. Flat-lands reach up into the clouds and force the inhabitants to come down to scorched earth. Hans leaves the land of high culture and heads for the trenches. A genteel young bourgeois—who’s polite, pleasant, articulate (and no athlete)—he’s a classic “civilian” as he’s termed by the other institutionalists on the Mountain. But even though Hans is the opposite of a martial type, he patriotically rushes to join the German army. The war changes everything for everybody. It ushers in new rhythms of experience: in the trenches, time goes infinitely slowly as soldiers crouch for cover. Thousands die over inches of territory. Outside the battlefield, though, distances shrink as trains and modern transportation speed up troop deployments across countries and continents. The war marks the world’s entry into a new time space. Mann devotes much of Magic Mountain to defining the old parameters of European life, and Hans’ path leads him and us to carefully differentiate between flat-land time and “mountain” time. But the book ends in a future where the old oppositions are anachronisms.
When I read The Magic Mountain, I was living through a time that was not unlike the European cataclysm: caught between Covid, Kenosha, and the 2020 election. It was hard to stay up or think very far forward about what was to come. I finished Magic Mountain in the wee hours after the final night of the Republican Convention. It was odd to have the wise voice of Mann’s narrator in my head after hearing GOP speakers fear-monger about Black Lives Matter and Trump himself tell a story about how the West was won that erased Native Americans from history. The ugliness of all that had been hard to process. But The Magic Mountain’s last passage helped. It seemed to take in the plague (Trump and Covid) without giving in…
Out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the… evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?