The Magic Mountain (4 page)

HOLLINGDALE R.J.,
Thomas Mann. A Critical Study.
Rupert Hart-Davies and Bucknell University Press, 1971. The author, a Nietzsche scholar and translator, is especially worth reading on Mann’s debts to the philosopher.

JOHNSON, DANIEL, Introduction to Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice and Other Stories
, Everyman’s Library, 1991. Background to Mann’s most celebrated story.

MANN, GOLO,
Reminiscences and Reflections: Growing Up in Germany.
Faber & Faber and Norton, 1990. Chilling, unsparing account of Thomas Mann as a father by his historian son.

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH,
The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals
, tr. Francis Golffing, Anchor Books, 1956.

PASCAL, ROY,
From Naturalism to Expressionism. German Literature and Society 1880-1918
, Weidenfeld, 1973. Fine on background to the young Mann.

PRATER, DONALD,
Thomas Mann: A Life
, Oxford University Press, 1995. The best of the recent crop of biographies, placing Mann in his literary, social and political context.

REED, T. J.,
Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition
, Oxford University Press, 1974. Careful scholarship by the author of a critical edition of
Death in Venice.

REICH-RANICKI, MARCEL,
Thomas Mann and His Family
, Fontana Press, 1989. Provocative essays on Thomas, Heinrich, Klaus, Katja, Erika and Golo Mann by Germany’s most influential literary critic, based in part on personal acquaintance.

FRIEDRICH SCHILLER,
‘Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ and ‘On the Sublime’: Two Essays
, tr. Julius A. Elias, Ungar Publishing Co., 1966.
Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung
, ed. William F. Mainland, Basil Blackwell. 1951.

SONTHEIMER, KURT,
Thomas Mann und die Deutschen
, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1965. A lively German apologia for Mann the political contortionist.

STERN, J. P.,
Hitler. The Führer and the People
, Fontana and University of California Press, 1975;
A Study of Nietzsche
, Cambridge University Press, 1979. Opposite poles of Mann’s cosmos.

STERN, J. P.,
Thomas Mann
, Columbia University Press, 1967.

SWALE, MARTIN,
Thomas Mann
, Heinemann Educational Books, 1980.

TAYLOR, RONALD,
Literature and Society in Germany, 1918–1945
, Harvester and Barnes and Noble, 1980. Reliable work on the period of Mann’s triumph and exile.

WYSLING, HANS (ed.),
Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949
, University of California Press, 1998. Riveting chronicle of fraternal rivalry.

The story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here—not for his sake (for the reader will come to know him as a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man), but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us to be very much worth telling (although in Hans Castorp’s favor it should be noted that it is
his
story, and that not every story happens to everybody)—is a story that took place long ago, and is, so to speak, covered with the patina of history and must necessarily be told with verbs whose tense is that of the deepest past.

Nor is that detrimental to our story, indeed it may well work to its advantage; for stories, as histories, must be past, and the further past, one might say, the better for them as stories and for the storyteller, that conjurer who murmurs in past tenses. But the problem with our story, as also with many people nowadays and, indeed, not the least with those who tell stories, is this: it is much older than its years, its datedness is not to be measured in days, nor the burden of age weighing upon it to be counted by orbits around the sun; in a word, it does not actually owe its pastness to
time
—an assertion that is itself intended as a passing reference, an allusion, to the problematic and uniquely double nature of that mysterious element.

But let us not intentionally obscure a clear state of affairs: the extraordinary pastness of our story results from its having taken place
before
a certain turning point, on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and consciousness. It takes place, or, to avoid any present tense whatever, it took place back then, long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose beginning so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased. It took place before the war, then, though not long before. But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the “before”? And it may well be that our story, by its very nature, has a few other things in common with fairy tales, too.

We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail—for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling? Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.

And so this storyteller will not be finished telling our Hans’s story in only a moment or two. The seven days in one week will not suffice, nor will seven months. It will be best for him if he is not all too clear about the number of earthly days that will pass as the tale weaves its web about him. For God’s sake, surely it cannot be as long as seven years!

And with that, we begin.

An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graubünden. It was the height of summer, and he planned to stay for three weeks.

It is a long trip, however, from Hamburg to those elevations—too long, really, for so short a visit. The journey leads through many a landscape, uphill and down, descends from the high plain of southern Germany to the shores of Swabia’s sea, and proceeds by boat across its skipping waves, passing over abysses once thought unfathomable.

From there the path, which until now has followed grand, direct routes, turns choppy. There are stopovers and formalities. At Rorschach, a town in Swiss territory, you reboard a train that takes you only as far as Landquart, a small station in the Alps, where you must change trains again. After standing for a while in the wind, gazing at a rather uncharming landscape, you climb aboard a narrow-gauge train, and the moment the small, but uncommonly sturdy engine pulls out, the real adventure begins, a steep and dogged ascent that will never end, it seems. The station at Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude; but now your route takes you on a wild ride up into real mountains, along tracks that squeeze their way between walls of rock.

Hans Castorp—that is the young man’s name—found himself alone in a small compartment upholstered in gray; with him he had an alligator valise, a present from his uncle and foster father—Consul Tienappel, since we are naming names here—a rolled-up plaid blanket, and his winter coat, swinging on its hook. The window was open beside him, but the afternoon was turning cooler and cooler, and, being the coddled scion of the family, he turned up the silk-lined collar of his fashionably loose summer overcoat. On the seat beside him lay a paperbound book entitled
Ocean Steamships
, which he had perused from time to time earlier on his trip, but which now lay neglected, the cover dirtied by soot drifting in with the steam of the heavily puffing locomotive.

Two days of travel separate this young man (and young he is, with few firm roots in life) from his everyday world, especially from what he called his duties, interests, worries, and prospects—separate him far more than he had dreamed possible as he rode to the station in a hansom cab. Space, as it rolls and tumbles away between him and his native soil, proves to have powers normally ascribed only to time; from hour to hour, space brings about changes very like those time produces, yet surpassing them in certain ways. Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state—indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

And Hans Castorp experienced much the same thing. He had not planned to take this trip particularly seriously, to become deeply involved in it. His intention had been, rather, to put it behind him quickly, simply because that was how things had to be, to return quite the same person he had been at departure, and to pick up his life again where he had been forced to leave it lying for the moment. Only yesterday he had been totally caught up in his normal train of thought, preoccupied with what had just occurred, his exams, and with what was about to occur, his joining the firm of Tunder and Wilms (dockyards, machine works, and boilers), and looking well beyond these next three weeks with as much impatience as his nature allowed. But now it seemed to him that present circumstances demanded his full attention and that it was inappropriate to shrug them off. Being lifted like this into regions whose air he had never breathed before and whose sparse and meager conditions were, as he well knew, both unfamiliar and peculiar—it all began to excite him, to fill him with a certain anxiety. Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing. Hovering between home and the unknown ahead, he asked himself how he would do up there. Was it unwise and unhealthy, perhaps, for him, born only a few feet above sea level and accustomed to breathing that air, to be suddenly transported to such extreme regions without spending at least a few days someplace in between? He wished he had already reached his goal, because once you were up there, he thought, you lived just as people did everywhere, instead of having the climb constantly remind you of how unsuitable these precincts were. He looked out—the train was winding through a narrow pass; you could see the forward cars and the laboring engine, emitting great straggling tatters of brown, green, and black smoke. Water roared in the deep ravine on his right; dark pines on his left struggled up between boulders toward a stony gray sky. There were pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight returned, vast chasms were revealed, with a few villages far below. These views closed again, too, and were followed by new passes with patches of snow left in clefts and crevices. The train pulled into dingy little stations and backed out again on the same set of tracks, confusing your sense of direction until you no longer knew whether you were heading north or south. Magnificent vistas opened onto regions toward which they were slowly climbing, a world of ineffable, phantasmagoric Alpine peaks, soon lost again to awestruck eyes as the tracks took another curve. Hans Castorp thought about how he had left hardwood forests far below him, and songbirds, too, he presumed; and the idea that such things could cease, the sense of a world made poorer without them, brought on a slight attack of dizziness and nausea, and he covered his eyes with his hand for a second or two. This passed. He realized that their climb was coming to an end, that they had taken the crest. The train was now rolling more comfortably along the level floor of a valley.

It was almost eight o’clock, but still daylight. A lake appeared in the distant landscape; its surface was gray and from its shores black pine forests climbed the surrounding slopes, grew thinner toward the top, and gave way at last to bare, fog-enshrouded rock. They stopped at a little station, Davos-Dorf, as Hans Castorp learned when someone outside shouted the name—he would be at journey’s end shortly. And suddenly, right beside him, he heard his cousin Joachim Ziemssen saying in an easygoing Hamburg voice, “Hello there. This is where you get off.” And when he looked out, there on the platform below his window stood Joachim, wearing a brown ulster but no hat of any sort, and looking healthier than ever. He laughed and said again, “Come on, get off, don’t be shy!”

“But I’m not there yet,” Hans Castorp said, dumbfounded, keeping his seat.

“Sure you are. This is Davos-Dorf. The sanatorium’s closer from here. I’ve got a carriage. Hand me your things.”

And with a laugh that betrayed his confusion and excitement at having arrived and seeing his cousin again, Hans Castorp lifted out his valise and winter coat, his plaid blanket roll plus cane and umbrella, and finally
Ocean Steamships.
Then he ran along the narrow corridor and jumped down onto the platform for a proper and more or less personal greeting, though this was done without any exuberance, as is fitting between people who are cool and reserved by custom. Strangely enough, they had always avoided calling one another by their first names, purely out of fear of showing too much warmth of emotion. And since they could not very well address one another by their last names, they confined themselves to the use of familiar pronouns—now a deeply rooted habit between the two cousins.

They quickly shook hands with some embarrassment—young Ziemssen never losing his military bearing—watched all the while by a man in livery with a braided cap, who then approached and asked Hans Castorp for his baggage ticket; this was the concierge of the International Sanatorium Berghof, and he proved quite willing to fetch the guest’s large trunk from the station at Davos-Platz while the gentlemen themselves drove on ahead to dinner. The man had an obvious limp, and so the first thing that Hans Castorp asked Joachim Ziemssen was, “Is he a war veteran? Is that why he limps so badly?”

“Right! A war veteran,” Joachim replied, somewhat sarcastically. “He’s got it in the knee—or had it, that is, now that he’s had his kneecap removed.”

Hans Castorp mulled this over as rapidly as possible. “Oh, I see,” he said, lifting his head and hastily looking back as they walked on. “But you’re not going to try to tell me that you still have anything like that, are you? You look as if you’ve already received your commission and were just home from maneuvers.” And he gave his cousin a sidelong glance.

Joachim was taller than he, with broader shoulders, the picture of youthful vigor, a man made for a uniform. He was very dark-haired, a type not all that uncommon in his blond hometown, and his naturally dark complexion was now tanned almost bronze. With his large black eyes and dark little moustache above full, finely chiseled lips, he would have been downright handsome, if his ears had not stood out so badly. For most of his life, they had been his one great sorrow, his only care. Now he had other worries. “You will be coming back down with me, won’t you?” Hans Castorp went on. “I really see nothing standing in your way.”