Why Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' resonates 100 years later

The rooms are comfortable, the view is magnificent, the food delicious. Wrapped in wool blankets, the well-heeled guests of a sanatorium spend their days resting on the balconies.

Welcome to the Berghof, a remote luxury medical center in the Swiss Alps where tuberculosis patients hope to be cured by the fresh air.

This is the setting that Thomas Mann chose for his influential 1924 novel, "The Magic Mountain."

The story begins in 1907. Hans Castorp, the son of a Hamburg merchant and aspiring engineer, travels to the Berghof to visit his sick cousin. He actually only wants to stay for three weeks, but it ends up being seven years.

The strange thing is that Hans Castorp himself is actually healthy.

"But he is literally absorbed by the sanatorium life," explains literary critic Kai Sina. "The patients, their philosophical debates and their customs, the strict health routines, luxurious meals and compulsive temperature checks: He becomes part of this world."

An era of radical upheaval

The completely isolated sanatorium is a microcosm that reveals the crisis of a changing society.

The turn of the 20th century is an era of radical upheaval. Industrialization has fundamentally changed life; religious certainties are increasingly being questioned by science; nationalist and socialist movements are equally on the rise.

The disorientation caused by the loss of traditional values leads to social tensions — which can also be felt among the Berghof's illustrious patients. "It was in the air," as the novel states.

Hans Wisskirchen, president of the Thomas Mann Society, describes this sense more precisely: "You feel an enormous unease, a fear of the future," he tells DW. "The staff are insulted, people fight, the craziest ideas emerge, people literally go crazy."

The 'great irritation' — then and today

If it weren't for its archaic language, you might think that the novel was written by a contemporary author, rather than a century ago by Thomas Mann.

The novel is set in an era of "great irritation," a "tipping point," as Thomas Mann expert Caren Heuer describes it.

Heuer, who is the director of the Buddenbrookhaus in Lübeck, the former home of Thomas Mann's family and now a museum dedicated to the writer and his brother Heinrich, feels that we are currently experiencing a similar phase of irritation and that it can be felt everywhere. 

"You just need to switch on any talk show on a Sunday evening," says Heuer. "You'll see that people interrupt each other, don't listen to each other, but rather throw around opinions."

Thomas Mann's protagonist Hans Castorp also encounters radical advocates of opposing ideologies who argue bitterly.

Humanist Lodovico Settembrini, who believes in progress and liberal values, clashes with the arch-reactionary Jesuit Leo Naphta, who views a totalitarian regime as the best option for society. Both men vie for Castorp's favors; he is torn between their ideas.

In the end, a pistol duel ensues between the two rivals, in which Settembrini deliberately fires his shot into the air and not at his opponent. Naphta, in turn, cannot bear the humiliation and shoots himself in anger. And thus a wave of violence begins.

From war enthusiast to advocate of democracy

When Thomas Mann wrote "The Magic Mountain," he had his own political transformation in mind.

He put the first lines on paper in 1913 and finished the work 12 years later — interrupted by the First World War. When he began the book, he was a committed supporter of war, Kai Sina tells DW: "Thomas Mann was carried away by the war euphoria that was driving many intellectuals, artists and writers at the time."

But "in 1918, when the war was lost, he felt completely disoriented," adds the Thomas Mann expert. From then on, he would became one of Germany's most eloquent opponents of fascism.

"What impresses me most about Thomas Mann," says Sina, "is his courage to revise his views, his honest and sincere willingness to repeatedly question his own ideas. And 'The Magic Mountain' depicts exactly that."

The tensions and dangers that would lead to the downfall of the Weimar Republic — Germany's first attempt at a real parliamentary democracy — and ultimately see the Nazis seizing power, are all present in the novel.

In 1933, Thomas Mann left Germany, first moving his family to Switzerland; then, from 1938 to 1952, to the US before returning to Switzerland. He campaigned for tolerance and human dignity until he died in 1955.

An 'accidental' novel

Mann originally envisioned the book as a humorous short story, a light counterpart to his novella "Death in Venice."

He chose the sanatorium setting after his wife Katia spent three weeks in one for tuberculosis treatment in 1912.

The end result would become one of the greatest novels of the century, spanning nearly a thousand pages.

"The Magic Mountain" is not just about ideologies but about death. After all, many of the sanatorium's visitors end up leaving in a coffin as there were no antibiotics at the time.

But balancing the omnipresence of death, the lust for life and love play a central role in the novel.

Hans Castorp is obsessed with the mysterious Russian Clawdia Chauchat, another patient who grants him a single night of love. She reminds the protagonist of a male friend from his youth.

Literary critic Kai Sina sees this as an allusion to Thomas Mann's own repressed homosexual yearnings: "The question of what a man is, what a woman is, what is masculine, what is feminine, and what is perceived as attractive or erotic — it's all muddled here," he says.

The Nobel Prize laureate Mann and his wife Katia had six children and were married for 50 years — thus any desire he may have had for men could only be lived out in secret, if at all, and in his writing.

A 'world festival of death'

Hans Castorp may have hoped for further favors from the beautiful Russian, but when the First World War breaks out, the patients flee the Berghof. Castorp joins a volunteer regiment; his trail is lost on the battlefield.

At the end of "The Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann asks: "Will love one day rise from this world festival of death?"

The novel has been translated into 27 languages.

For Isabel Gracia Adabel, who has translated "The Magic Mountain" into Spanish, the novel has lost nothing of its relevance: "A century has passed and we are still the same, resolving conflicts with wars."

Still, she adds: "It's about very serious things, but the book itself is an enjoyable experience. And you don't need three doctorates to enjoy Thomas Mann, because his writing is full of irony and humor."

This article was originally written in German.