History & Criticism
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The Magic Mountain
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
Editorial Reviews
"All the characters in Thomas Mann's masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods's version . . . Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor." –New York Times Book Review
"[Woods's translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann's] ironically elegant prose." –Washington Post Book World
"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing." –from the new Introduction by A. S. Byatt
"[Woods's translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann's] ironically elegant prose." –Washington Post Book World
"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing." –from the new Introduction by A. S. Byatt
Readers Top Reviews
Dodie Hunt
This book was on my grandson’s wish list and he couldn’t wait to start reading it.
Edward McNallyElizab
From the reviews I was led to believe this was the newer (and purportedly better) Woods translation. It is not. I bought this book to replace an older English version of the novel I already had (Lowe-Porter), but which had a dated translation. Now instead I have the same thing but much larger and heavier to wield.
L. Nery
Are we, as in late 2016, living in a magic mountain, from whose stupor and vague uneasiness we will be called out to destroy? Is that moist spot in Hans Castorp's lungs, that kept him up the mountain for seven years, also inside our own lungs, delaying the resolution of things? Will we soon have to come down the slopes to wage war against each other? Is there ever a resolution anyway? I read this book more than 20 years ago, as a teenager. Then, I read about a personal story, perhaps symbolic regarding the customs and ideas of Europeans of that time. I identified with the main character and his uneventful life, broken from its rhythm not of his own choice. I cried in the last page. Now I read this through an entire new lens, which might be superseded by another in 20 years' time. But what I perceive is the human conflict in the slow, predictable and boring life of the sanatorium, occupied by ill people from all over the world. The tension rises between a few, while the majority is slow to grasp the intensity and the fervor behind the ideas. It is one of the most exasperating books on earth, some chapters you just want to end, and you think of giving up altogether - but then something happens, you keep going. Nothing fundamental has changed (isn't it true of most lives?), but there is just enough to keep the interest. The passage of time is the leitmotif, and it matters for the reader and narrator, but not to our hero, whose nails and hair grows, and that's how he notices time. You, as a reader, know that you are reading the masterpiece of a literary genius, and some paragraphs are indeed "literary". But most are just there because the narration, like the passing of time, does not recoil from the ordinariness that consists most of human life. The unremarkable can be staggering in its constancy and ability to involve your whole being. You pay close attention to Hans Castorp's life and think: is he wasting it? What is the purpose after all, why did he love, why was he a friend, why anything if it all comes to...?
M.D. Kuehn
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann [1924], English translated from the German by John E. Woods, 1995. Thomas Mann's classic is among the top five to ten of my list of favorite novels, one, like Gravity's Rainbow or Mickelsson's Ghosts, that I will reread every few years or so. As with any "classic" novel, it works on numerous levels, is grand in scope, philosophical in depth, populated with memorable characters. It is a novel that makes you think. It teaches. The novel takes place in the years before World War I. Hans Castorp, the protagonist, travels from his home in Hamburg, to vist his cousin, Joachim, who is recuperating from tuberculosis at the sanitorium Berghof in the Swiss mountains. He plans to spend a few weeks with his cousin before assuming his new engineering apprenticeship in Germany. What transpires over the following 700+ pages is a look at life, and death, in this isolated community of international patients representing all philosophical and political viewpoints. Mann uses the sanatorium as a microcosm of a terminally ill Europe as it approaches the Great War. Hans Castorp is the naive, non-political engineer who is pulled and cajoled by anarchists to socialists, to monarchists. And there is intrigue. There are detailed medical descriptions concerning the life and care at a turn of the century sanatorium, much of it gleaned from Mann's own stay at such a facility when his wife was recuperating from tuberculosis. For me, Mann created an alien world, yet so interesting that I didn't want to leave it. There are great discussions on the concept of time, and how time for the patients, confined to the mountain and to their daily regime, seems compressed: six months are like a few weeks to them. There is too much within the pages of this book to do it any justice. There have been entire books written about The Magic Mountain, and many essays
Miles Prauer
I return to this novel again and again. It's a touchstone of the 20th century, one of the grand European intellectual novels that pose huge questions in terms of human beings in particular situations. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, is Mann's bourgeois Everyman, and it's wonderful haw a powerhouse intellectual like Mann can create a sympathetic but also mediocre hero who stumbles through a series of awakenings (and drowsings) on top of a mountain. But I'm making the book sound ponderous and pompous, and it's far too ironic and too seductive to be limited in that way. I came back to it because I was longing for a good long read. (Okay, not everyone's object of yearning.) The Magic Mountain is also very much of its era. It was exactly luxurious institutions like the Berghof, along with those big hotel-spas in which the rich lived as they moved indolently over the face of Europe, that became impossible after WW I. But as the Settembrini-Naphta debates make very clear, the pleasures of unearned wealth and of relative peace are more passionate than Enlightenment values can address. Given the luxury, the lassitude and the license granted by tuberculosis and its promise of an early death, sexual, aesthetic and even mystical concerns become prominent. Mann gives us a great wallow in the Dionysian and doesn't, I think, endorse the life lit by reason unequivocally, although he's more skeptical about attaching value to a moribund leisure class. Which is only to say that I'm finding The Magic Mountain unexpectedly relevant for thinking about the One Per Cent and the rest of us on the flatlands.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Introduction
In 1912 Thomas Mann's wife, Katja, stayed in Dr Friedrich Jessen's ‘Waldsanatorium' from March to September, suffering from a lung complaint. Mann himself visited her for four weeks in May and June. During that time, he said, he suffered a troublesome catarrh of the upper air passages, owing to the damp, cold atmosphere on the balcony. The consultant diagnosed a ‘moist spot' of tubercular infection, just as Dr Behrens in the novel diagnoses Hans Castorp. Mann, however, did not stay in the magic mountain, but hastened back to Flatland and Munich, where his own doctor advised him to pay no attention. There is an ironic twist to this story which would have amused the novelist - Katja, it appears was misdiagnosed, whereas Mann himself, in his post-mortem, was indeed seen to bear the marks of an earlier tubercular illness.
This is the biographical germ of the novel. Its intellectual germ is related to Mann's great novella, Death in Venice. Death in Venice was a classically constructed tragedy of the fall of a great artist and intellectual. The Magic Mountain was to be the satyr play that accompanied the tragedy - the comic and parodic tale of a jeune homme moyen sensuel, caught up in the dance of death, amongst the macabre crew of the sanatorium. Both tales represented the fate of someone out of context, on a holiday visit, encountering love, sickness and death with a peculiarly German mixture of fascination and resignation.
Work on the novella was interrupted by the First World War. Mann spent the war years writing passionately in support of the German cause. His ‘Thoughts in War', his praise of Frederick the Great as a man of action, his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, are definitions of the German genius which, he asserts, is concerned with Nature, not Mind, with Culture as opposed to Civilization, with military organization and soldierly virtues. Culture is
compatible with all kinds of horrors - oracles, magic, pederasty, human sacrifice, orgiastic cults, inquisition, witch-trials etc. - by which civilization would be repelled; for civilization is Reason, Enlightenment, moderation, manners, scepticism, disintegration - Mind (Geist).*
*T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition.
Culture is German. Civilization is predominantly French. Mann opposes Frederick the Great and Voltaire as archetypes of the opposition. Voltaire is a man of thought; Frederick, a greater hero, is a man of action. What Mann was arguing was very much what most German artists and writers were arguing - the ‘decadent' took strength from a sudden nationalist identification. There was, also, a personal battle furiously pursued through the battle of ideas. Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, was against the war, and in favour of socialism, civilization and reason. In November 1915 Heinrich Mann published an essay on Zola, praising Zola's defence of Dreyfus, praising Zola as a civilized ‘intellectual', castigating those in France (and by implication those in Germany) who compromised themselves by supporting unjust rulers and warmongers. There is a sense in which the wartime attitudes of the brothers mirror the conflict between the civilized Settembrini and the spiritual nihilist Naphta, in the novel as we read it. And in Thomas Mann's Unpolitical Reflections (published in October 1918) he makes a direct attack on his brother, in the figure of the Zivilisationsliterat, who claims that he sides with Life, Reason, Progress, and is against death and decay. He quotes the author of ‘that lyrical-political poem which has Emile Zola as its hero' as saying he himself has ‘the gift of life . . . the deepest sympathy with life'. Mann the ironist observes that ‘the problem of what ‘‘health'' is, is not a simple problem'.
In August 1915 Mann wrote to Paul Amann:
Before the war I had begun a longish tale, set in a lung-disease sanatorium - a story with basic pedagogic-political intentions, in which a young man has to come to terms with the most seductive power, death, and is led in a comic-horrid manner through the spiritual oppositions of Humanism and Romanticism, Progress and Reaction, Health and Sickness, but more for the sake of finding his way and acquiring knowledge than for the sake of making decisions.
The spirit of the whole thing is humorous-nihilistic, and on the whole the story inclines towards sympathy with death. It is called The Magic Mountain and has a touch of the dwarf Nase for whom seven years passed like seven days, and the ending, the resolution - I can see no alternative to the outbreak of war.
In March 1917 Mann wrote again to Amman about the novel, this time describing the opposed figures of a ‘disciple of work and progress, a disciple of Cardu...
In 1912 Thomas Mann's wife, Katja, stayed in Dr Friedrich Jessen's ‘Waldsanatorium' from March to September, suffering from a lung complaint. Mann himself visited her for four weeks in May and June. During that time, he said, he suffered a troublesome catarrh of the upper air passages, owing to the damp, cold atmosphere on the balcony. The consultant diagnosed a ‘moist spot' of tubercular infection, just as Dr Behrens in the novel diagnoses Hans Castorp. Mann, however, did not stay in the magic mountain, but hastened back to Flatland and Munich, where his own doctor advised him to pay no attention. There is an ironic twist to this story which would have amused the novelist - Katja, it appears was misdiagnosed, whereas Mann himself, in his post-mortem, was indeed seen to bear the marks of an earlier tubercular illness.
This is the biographical germ of the novel. Its intellectual germ is related to Mann's great novella, Death in Venice. Death in Venice was a classically constructed tragedy of the fall of a great artist and intellectual. The Magic Mountain was to be the satyr play that accompanied the tragedy - the comic and parodic tale of a jeune homme moyen sensuel, caught up in the dance of death, amongst the macabre crew of the sanatorium. Both tales represented the fate of someone out of context, on a holiday visit, encountering love, sickness and death with a peculiarly German mixture of fascination and resignation.
Work on the novella was interrupted by the First World War. Mann spent the war years writing passionately in support of the German cause. His ‘Thoughts in War', his praise of Frederick the Great as a man of action, his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, are definitions of the German genius which, he asserts, is concerned with Nature, not Mind, with Culture as opposed to Civilization, with military organization and soldierly virtues. Culture is
compatible with all kinds of horrors - oracles, magic, pederasty, human sacrifice, orgiastic cults, inquisition, witch-trials etc. - by which civilization would be repelled; for civilization is Reason, Enlightenment, moderation, manners, scepticism, disintegration - Mind (Geist).*
*T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition.
Culture is German. Civilization is predominantly French. Mann opposes Frederick the Great and Voltaire as archetypes of the opposition. Voltaire is a man of thought; Frederick, a greater hero, is a man of action. What Mann was arguing was very much what most German artists and writers were arguing - the ‘decadent' took strength from a sudden nationalist identification. There was, also, a personal battle furiously pursued through the battle of ideas. Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, was against the war, and in favour of socialism, civilization and reason. In November 1915 Heinrich Mann published an essay on Zola, praising Zola's defence of Dreyfus, praising Zola as a civilized ‘intellectual', castigating those in France (and by implication those in Germany) who compromised themselves by supporting unjust rulers and warmongers. There is a sense in which the wartime attitudes of the brothers mirror the conflict between the civilized Settembrini and the spiritual nihilist Naphta, in the novel as we read it. And in Thomas Mann's Unpolitical Reflections (published in October 1918) he makes a direct attack on his brother, in the figure of the Zivilisationsliterat, who claims that he sides with Life, Reason, Progress, and is against death and decay. He quotes the author of ‘that lyrical-political poem which has Emile Zola as its hero' as saying he himself has ‘the gift of life . . . the deepest sympathy with life'. Mann the ironist observes that ‘the problem of what ‘‘health'' is, is not a simple problem'.
In August 1915 Mann wrote to Paul Amann:
Before the war I had begun a longish tale, set in a lung-disease sanatorium - a story with basic pedagogic-political intentions, in which a young man has to come to terms with the most seductive power, death, and is led in a comic-horrid manner through the spiritual oppositions of Humanism and Romanticism, Progress and Reaction, Health and Sickness, but more for the sake of finding his way and acquiring knowledge than for the sake of making decisions.
The spirit of the whole thing is humorous-nihilistic, and on the whole the story inclines towards sympathy with death. It is called The Magic Mountain and has a touch of the dwarf Nase for whom seven years passed like seven days, and the ending, the resolution - I can see no alternative to the outbreak of war.
In March 1917 Mann wrote again to Amman about the novel, this time describing the opposed figures of a ‘disciple of work and progress, a disciple of Cardu...
