Literature "The Magic Mountain": A novel of the century turns 100
"The Magic Mountain" is internationally the best-known work by Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann. The novel has influenced generations of younger authors - and is a literary monument to Davos.
20.11.2024, 10:01
SDA
In the coming months, the tour of the former Schatzalp sanatorium in Davos will take you on a guided tour. In the luxurious Art Nouveau building, wealthy people once cured their tuberculosis there - or died of it. Those who book the tour of today's hotel follow in the footsteps of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and his novel "The Magic Mountain".
Exactly 100 years have passed since the novel was published on November 20, 1924. Thomas Mann wrote his "Magic Mountain" in Munich, where he lived at the time. But he found the inspiration for it in Davos, where his wife Katia spent a spa stay in 1912 and he got to know the world of the sanatoriums there.
Worldwide readership
Since then, the novel has become a global success, even the novel of the century, with fans all over the world. To this day, it is Thomas Mann's most widely read work internationally.
The contemporary novel, set before the First World War, tells the story of the young engineer Hans Castorp, who travels from Hamburg to the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1907 to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is suffering from tuberculosis, in a luxury sanatorium near Davos. Castopr wants to stay for three weeks. In the end, he stays for seven years "with them up here", as he says himself.
Two intellectuals want to educate the young man: the Italian humanist and freemason Lodovico Settembrini and his ideological counterpart, the arch-reactionary Jesuit Leo Naphta. Hans spends a night of love with the mysterious Russian woman Clawdia Chauchat. He witnesses the death of his cousin Joachim and other sick residents of the house. In a snowstorm, he has a near-death experience and hallucinates; it is only with difficulty that he finds his way back to the sanatorium.
Wrapped in woollen blankets, the mountain dwellers spend their days lying on the balconies between five meals a day in the dining room with its seven tables. Time passes, days turn into months, months into years, until in 1914 "The Thunderclap" sounds, the outbreak of the First World War. Everyone goes their own way, Hans Castorp's trail is lost on the battlefields of Flanders.
A timeless contemporary novel
What makes the novel "The Magic Mountain" timeless is its motifs: illness and death, eroticism, personality, the nature of time, the spiritual foundations of Europe, the conflict between open society and its enemies.
Incidentally, "The Magic Mountain" is a contemporary novel in two respects. On the one hand, as an epochal novel, it offers a panorama of a pre-war society in decline. On the other hand, it is a novel about the individual experience of time.
In the intermediate realm of the Berghof, Castorp and Co. lose their sense of time. The narrative structure of the novel also plays with the time factor, with the plot accelerating the further you read. While the first half of the almost thousand pages only deals with the seven months since Castorp's arrival, the second half covers a good six years.
Thomas Mann took his time with the book. He began in 1913 and actually only wanted to write a novella as a light-hearted counterpart to "Death in Venice". He interrupted work after the start of the war and only resumed in 1919.
Even after his inspiring visit to Davos, Switzerland was to remain important to Thomas Mann. In the wake of Hitler's rise to power, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1933, where he lived in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich until 1938. He then went to the USA, where he was granted citizenship, and finally returned to Lake Zurich in 1952, to Kilchberg. He died in Zurich in 1955 at the age of 80.
The next anniversary is already waiting
Although "The Magic Mountain" was published in two thick volumes in 1924, it was a quick success. Four years later, it had already reached its 100th edition. "The Magic Mountain" established the author's worldwide fame. However, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 for his novel "Buddenbrocks". "The Magic Mountain" also helped the setting of Davos to achieve international fame.
The novel has influenced generations of writers far beyond the German-speaking world. For example, Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, who provided a feminist response to "The Magic Mountain" with her novel "Empusion" (2023).
Next year marks another anniversary for the German writer. He was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck in northern Germany, making it the 150th anniversary of his birth. In Davos, too, the celebrations and series of events dedicated to Thomas Mann will continue into the following year to pay tribute to the writer.
https://www.davos.ch/zauberberg
