Book 37: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (100 Great Books)
Davos a hundred years ago
A century after its publication in 1924, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain stands as one of the most ambitious novels in German literature. Mann was already a famous writer when he began the book in 1912. By the time he started The Magic Mountain, he stood at the center of German cultural life, a writer whose careful prose and ironic style seemed to embody bourgeois Europe at its peak. Then came the First World War. Mann, who had at first defended the German cause in polemical essays that many later readers would find troubling, came out of the conflict a changed man. The short novella he had planned grew into a twelve-year project, swelling into a thousand-page meditation on time, illness, love, and the soul of a continent that had just destroyed itself.
The plot, despite the book’s reputation for difficulty, is straightforward. Hans Castorp, a calm and well-mannered young engineer from Hamburg, travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, a soldier recovering at the Berghof, an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium high above the town of Davos. Hans plans to stay three weeks. He stays for seven years.
