The early 20th century: under the false glimmer of what we know as the Belle Epoque, Europe was racing unstoppably toward its destruction. The setting? A gigantic theater in Bayreuth. The play? Twilight of the Gods, a Wagnerian production, but on a continental scale. However, unbeknownst to them, they were witnessing more the end of a way of being—of course, the limited bourgeois “being”—than the twilight of the warrior gods of Valhalla. Forged in their own internal battles, only a few European minds were capable of sensing the pulse of the tragedy that was already upon them.
Among these privileged spirits, Thomas Mann, with his rare combination of classical culture and decadence as a youthful attitude towards life, and his careful and early reading of Nietzsche, was the one who most lucidly saw the lines of the coming explosion on the horizon. It is this cultural combination, also explored in his previous work, that the novelist describes in a somewhat Manichean way.
There are two ways, he says, of approaching reality: “naive, objective, healthy, and classical” on the one hand, and “sentimental, subjective, pathological, and romantic” on the other. Mann’s literary work—and even his own personal history—can be seen from the perspective of the second vision within the first, which does not mean that in his maturity his hand trembled when he wrote: “there is no heroism other than that of weakness.”
The result of this painstaking and objective observation of European reality, and of his own difficult-to-control impulses—both his own and those of his family, taken as a bourgeois model—was the writing of The Magic Mountain between 1914 and 1924. And since every text is also a fabric of other texts, both one’s own and those of others, a more fruitful reading of the novel could be accompanied by other writings of his from the period, such as Considerations of an Unpolitical Man (1915-1918) and his essay Goethe and Tolstoy (1922). And, in another circle, in an outer circle: Sigmund Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) and the various volumes of The Decline of the West (1923) by Oswald Spengler.
It was at the end of writing Considerations that Mann “coincidentally” came across a short story among the papers in his library, the result of a stay at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. He had gone to this elite health institution in 1913 to accompany his wife Katja, who was suffering from a mild lung disease at the time.
Thus, The Magic Mountain (Zauberberg), whose name also recalls the esoteric Mozart of his opera The Magic Flute (Zauberflöt), was conceived at almost two thousand meters above sea level in a Swiss sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. It was also two thousand meters above European common sense, which was preoccupied with war and nationalism. Thus, what would have been just another project among many for any novelist became, in Mann’s pen and narrative talent, what some critics and scholars of European literature have seen as the greatest narrative work of the 20th century.
Told in fluid language, far removed from the linguistic and formal inventions of the avant-garde, The Magic Mountain is nevertheless a highly complex novel, not only because of its precise numerical and cabalistic architecture, but also because of the dark background and complex web of its various plot lines, related to the dualistic and Gnostic impulse that inhabits the ancient romantic themes seen through the philosophical tandem that was the thinking of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: illness and health, chaos and death, love and redemption; and the subversive and vital regenerative moment provided by the celebration of Carnival, where opposites exchange their respective places.
With an Olympian, Apollonian smile, the novelist takes us to the edge of an abyss and there, with pity, pauses: how do illness and death confront each other within the human being, and who ultimately wins? The terrible and painful nature of all visceral love turned into a necessary drive for self-annihilation; the cult of an androgynous, ambivalent, and always cursed beauty; the passions and words that fight each other relentlessly; the liberalism of Ludovico Settembrini and the totalitarianism of Leon Naphta as signs of the times; war, the destruction of the biological and social fabric. In short, and as an internal horizon within the plot: the individual destiny of the mythical hero, the young engineer Hans Castorp, between debauchery and bourgeois sanity.
Everything is intertwined and unraveled in different temporal and spatial coordinates, far removed from our everyday reality, as it takes place two thousand meters above “the plain.” And, of course, we are in the presence of the traditional “novel of formation” (in the German style), with great philosophical speeches; disquisitions that employ the entire scientific arsenal of the time; reflections and dialogues by characters constantly engaged in confronting their theses and counter-theses in order to win the soul of the young and “insignificant” bourgeois Hans Castorp, who will mature throughout the pages of the novel. The physical ascent to the sanatorium, as well as the continuous learning, confirms the text as a “coming-of-age novel.” The tone of the discussions, which always seem to be telling us something ultimately veiled, the symbolic, spiritual, and numerical allusions, as well as the final descent of the “spoiled child of his time,” the young Castorp in need of a rebirth, make it a novel with mythical and even esoteric overtones. Hans and Tanhausser, Claudia and Venus, all surrounded by the mountain as the axis of the world, seem to be interchangeable names and characters.
If anything, today, a hundred years after the publication of The Magic Mountain, humanity is living in a more difficult situation with unpredictable consequences. We have just suffered a global respiratory infection—in some ways similar to Koch’s bacillus, which destroys lung tissue—an infection that, beyond the biological, seems to have irreversibly eroded the social fabric. The consequences? The change of some of the essential rules of the social and political game to which we were accustomed. Moreover, it is not only Europe that is threatened by a war of great proportions; it is now all of humanity that seems doomed to a new destruction—material, psychological, and ecological—already visible on the horizon.
To add to the confusion, the humanist and liberal Settembrini and the Jesuit and totalitarian Naphta, key characters in the novel, have swapped roles and masks in this grim theatrical farce we call the contemporary world. Beneath these grimaces and disguises that hide the void, it is no longer possible to know with certainty who is laughing or crying, who is threatening or begging, who is alive or dead. That is perhaps why one of the few dignified gestures we might have left from a bygone era is similar to that of the young engineer Hans Castorp when, on Carnival night, in a lyrical and amorous rapture toward the inner biology and trembling flesh of Claudia Chawchat, he ends up saying: “… and let me die with my lips pressed against yours.”
Image: Death and the Gravedigger (1895), by Carlos Schwabe.
