Mann’s ‘Magic Mountain’: l’amour et la mort
Morten Hoi Jensen soaked up the atmosphere at the Schatzalp Hotel in Davos, the setting of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), for seven weeks while writing his book.
I also spent a night in this magical place in 1963. Like Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp, I stretched out on a chaise longue on the open balcony, wrapped myself in a thick blanket, and gazed dreamily at the glittering stars and snow-capped mountains lit by moonlight.
Jensen’s The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale, 238p, $28) tells “the story of how Mann’s novel came to be, the historical events that slowed and interrupted its progress, and the ensuing political development of its author in the years it was finally completed.” Jensen’s book, after all the massive scholarship on Thomas Mann, is entirely familiar rather than original.
Despite this severe limitation, Jensen moves effectively between Mann’s life, the historical background, and the composition and meaning of the brilliant novel.
Jensen is perceptive about Mann’s anti-democratic Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), his most difficult and unreadable book. Mann had four children, was exempted from military service and didn’t personally suffer during the Great War. Advocating war a week after the conflict broke out, he wrote to his older brother Heinrich, who opposed it: “Shouldn’t we be grateful for the totally unexpected chance to experience such mighty things?” Jensen writes that Mann felt the “the need for a European catastrophe” and for a militaristic John the Baptist who would “prepare the way for purification and regeneration. . . . The reactionary manifesto with all the tropes of German nationalism” argued that the reason, enlightenment and democracy of Western Europe were spiritually foreign to Germany. Reflections is a “perplexing mixture of violence and melancholy . . . the work of a tortured, obsessive and intellectually unsettled mind.”
The most cataclysmic results of World War One were the breakup of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, followed years later by the rise of Nazism and World War Two. Mann realised that his reactionary nationalism had helped to propel Germany to a disastrous defeat, and he became an advocate of liberal democracy. In December 1918, a month after Germany had lost the war, Mann confessed, “I live a solitary, withdrawn, brooding, peculiar and sad existence.” The Magic Mountain, which takes place between 1907 and 1914, portrays “a society unaware of its impending collapse and destruction.”
In his over-the-top Acknowledgements Jensen praises the “invaluable copyediting,” “invaluable work,” “incredible work” and “incredibly helpful work” of the editors—followed in the text by many spelling, grammatical and factual errors, and by several contradictions. The correct spelling should be Kurhaus and Frederick the Great. There are at least 15 examples of awkward English by this Danish writer. For example, the correct words should be “decline,” not “declinism”; “meditating”, not “marinating.”
Death in Venice was published in 1912, not 1913. The Mexican mourner is the mother of Tous-les-deux, not a patient. Until 1945 the Dutch East Indies, not yet Indonesia, was a current, not a former, colony. Of Mann’s last two children, Elisabeth was one year older, not younger, than Michael. Mann was not “improbably planted” in Southern California. He had a luxurious life among an extremely stimulating group of anti-Nazi German writers and composers. Jensen also makes several pointlessly banal statements: “There is something special about The Magic Mountain. . . . No other book seems to embody the greatness and peculiarity of Thomas Mann. . . . This vibrancy continues to enchant readers the world over. . . . It has attained canonical status as one of the towering achievements of literary modernism.”
Joseph Conrad captured the mixture of luxury and morbidity, the unrealistic and horrific essence of the Alpine sanatoria when he wrote of “Davos-Platz where the modern Dance of Death goes on in expensive hotels.” Jensen contradicts himself about the behaviour and treatment for tuberculosis. He states that the patients “are required to enter into a hard struggle for life”. But he also says that in the novel Dr. Behrens, ignoring the struggle, tells the fatally ill “not to ‘make a fuss’ on their deathbed” and responds to the tragic death of the young Leila Gerngross with a callous shrug.
Jensen states that at high altitudes “the air is ‘thinner’ and harder to breathe because there is less oxygen.” But he also maintains that the high air was “easy to breathe”. In fact, the Alpine cure for tuberculosis, before penicillin was used to treat the disease in 1943, was useless. Patients actually received less oxygen and gasped for more breath at great heights. Since Davos caused latent illnesses to erupt, it’s not surprising that in Mann’s novel no patients ever recover.
More could be said about the hedonistic atmosphere, the main characters and their names. One doctor foolishly criticised “the hopeless cases plunged into a round of parties, drinking, gambling and sex”. But the moribundi, bored to death and with nothing to lose, desperately seize any available pleasure in a gesture of carpe diem. Patients lying on the balcony, wrapped up like mummies and “horizontal,” also suggest the planar positions of sex, death and burial. Mann subtly puns on the similar sound in French of l’amour and la mort.
Hans is as completely obsessed with the Russian femme fatale Clavdia Chauchat as Aschenbach was with Tadzio in Death in Venice, and both men prolong their stay in exotic locales because of their overpowering love. The pencil that Hans borrows from Clavdia screws in and out, and she commands him to return it to her room that night. Dr. Behrens not only looks inside Clavdia’s body with an X-ray, but also penetrates her body during their lovemaking. Hans retains his intimacy with Clavdia’s by bonding with her principal lovers, Behrens and Peeperkorn.
Clavdia’s name recalls the town of Clavadel, five miles from Davos. Mann, who’d watched doctors taking X-rays on Ziemsensstrasse in Munich, took Joachim’s surname from that street. Settembrini turns on the light when he enters Hans’ room; Hans turns on the light to end the disastrous séance. The caustic Naphta, who takes hold of Hans when Clavdia is absent, combines asceticism and fanaticism that justify terror and violence.
Jensen twice mentions, but does not discuss, the German television series of The Magic Mountain (1982). It’s intelligent and faithful to the themes of the novel. The Alpine and sanatorium settings are superb. Rod Steiger as Peeperkorn and Charles Aznavour as Naphta are excellent. The great scenes—Hans Castorp buried in the snow, Peeperkorn’s speech at the waterfall, the duel between Naphta and Settembrini—are effectively dramatised. But the gangling actor who plays Hans is unconvincing; the man who plays his cousin Joachim would have been more effective as Hans. Clavdia Chauchat, well played by the stunning French actress Marie-France Pisier, could not possibly have been interested in the awkward, unromantic Hans.
All the characters in the novel come to a bad end. The doctors, Behrens and Krokowski, fail to cure their patients and exist primarily to increase the profits of their dying capitalistic enterprise. Clavdia flees, still inwardly tainted. The moribund Settembrini is profoundly disillusioned. Joachim, the sons of Tous-les-deux, Leila Gerngross and many others die of TB. Naphta and Peeperkorn kill themselves.
Hans, subject of the most brilliant Bildung in any Roman, reaches intellectual maturity. Despite everything he has learned in his seven years of discourse and study, he’s propelled into a disastrous war—a kind of willed death that resembles his willed disease. He begins by accepting all the bourgeois conventions of Hamburg and ends by accepting the German justification of war. Hans takes Joachim’s place in battle, returns to a dying civilization and to the most senseless carnage Europe has ever known, and becomes a meaningless sacrifice in the mud of Flanders. Hans never abandons his attraction to disease, which has nothing to do with genius, or his sympathy with death, which is not dignified, not holy, not spirituel.
Jeffrey Meyers published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014).
He took the dust jacket photo above) of a hearse-gondola on his first trip to Venice in 1956.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
