Why The Magic Mountain is still relevant a century later

Davos these days is synonymous with the gathering of global elites at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. They convene to dwell on hobbyhorses ranging from the “fourth Industrial revolution” to lab-grown meat and plot our ambitious global health and education programmes. It is a lofty gathering, but also one haunted by the 21st-century spectres of autocracies and conflicts that undermine its motto of “improving the state of the world”.

A hundred years ago, the same Alpine town was the setting for a literary masterpiece, whose echoes feel conspicuous today. In November 1924, the German novelist Thomas Mann published his lengthy, time-flexing story, The Magic Mountain. A century can feel very long in literature, yet this novel, of all of Mann’s prodigious output, speaks to us with a clarity that feels as modern as it is rooted in his own turbulent world.

It was penned before and after the great war and is suffused with a sense of encroaching conflict that feels newly relevant as the battlefields of Ukraine and war of attrition by Russia resemble the bloody grind of the first world war and divisions multiply within Europe on how far to confront or appease the aggressor.

The echoes travel, however, beyond war and peace: The Magic Mountain features a cast of characters, uneasy with the modernity in which they live and torn between noisy ideologies, who meet in the liminal world of the Berghof tuberculosis sanatorium.

In Mann’s Bildungsroman, Hans Castorp, a Hamburg engineer and “simple-minded though pleasing young man”, ends up spending seven years in the sanatorium after a chance, questionable diagnosis of TB propensity. There, he lands in a panopticon of the temperaments, philosophies and arguments that reflect bourgeois intellectual life in the early 20th century in the clashing wake of Hegel, Marx, Weber and Freud.

The novel is also a mischievous comedy of manners, with a host of crafty European national stereotypes and interactions — from the intellectual to the carnal. On the latter score, Mann’s daring treatment of sexuality weathers the century strikingly well.

He channels his own bisexuality when Hans, drawn to the eastern temptress Madame Chauchat, is stirred by memories of a schoolboy crush on another Slavic temptation, his male classmate in Hamburg, Pribislav Hippe, who attracted Hans with his narrow eyes and seductive pull of “eastern” decadence. He finds this intoxication again in Chauchat, with her “Asiatic slackness”. Critics have understandably had a field day.

What started for Mann as a piquant reflection on the thought and style differences of Europe, carnal ambiguities and the lure of the death wish, which featured in his early work Death in Venice and — decades later — his valedictory Doctor Faustus, evolved when he took his wife Katia to Davos for a bronchitis cure in 1912.

In the snowbound retreat, favoured for its dry, bracing air, he conceived the idea of a story bringing together different nationalities and temperaments. However, the intended plot darkened as war loomed.

It is in that vein that the echoes now feel sharpest. The repudiation of rationalism and rise of seductive extremism, contesting an Enlightenment model of what we would now call liberal democracy, feature in many forms in the novel from lengthy debates, to the clash of values in seances, suicides and even an absurd and fatal duel.

Making characters, who are in essence porte-paroles for world views, feel as alive and real in their flaws and passions as they do, shows the novelist’s skill at both sending up his own controlled Hanseatic disposition and caricaturing others. Mann’s seriousness and rationality is wonderfully embodied by the preachy Italian professor, Lodovico Settembrini, Hans’s educator. It is a portrayal we can easily recognise today in the rules-based mentality of Eurocrats or think-tank bosses.

But agreement and conciliation prove elusive — then as now. Settembrini feuds with his flamboyant housemate, Leo Naphta, who sees progress in humanity embracing more fundamentalist roots. Jordan Peterson, the prolific Canadian provocateur, might audition for a new incarnation, but so too might proto-Marxist diehards (hello, Jeremy Corbyn) with their insistence on authority crushing individual preferences.

High on the Magic Mountain, social order is suspended, time becomes elastic and characters steeped in playful nominative determinism intermingle. The ebullient disrupter who has an odd erotic charge, monopolises attention, never finishes a sentence and leaves destruction behind is Mynheer Peeperkorn (“His Lordship the Peppercorn”). Boris Johnson might offer a plausible stand-in.

And Mann’s characterisation of his native country certainly feels on point: here via Mme Chauchat, both flirting with and trolling Hans as a template of Germany’s complacent view of its own virtues: “A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet — behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!”

But this is a fine net of humour, cast across a chasm of darkness emerging below the mountain. Mann saw how inexorably societies can tip from stability to political confusion — and towards war — because they cannot agree on what they are defending.

Towards the novel’s end, we leave Castorp, after his “cure”, stumbling through the trenches, his Europe in the throes of destruction: “Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life’s delicate child! . . . and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor.” A century on, the cast of The Magic Mountain, we realise as their ghosts fade from the page, is all of us.

Anne McElvoy is author of ‘The Saddled Cow: East Germany’s Life and Legacy’

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