Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg

thefoggiest.dev/content/img/ThomasMannDerZauberberg.jpg Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, original cover

“Siehst du wohl, daß man einen Hut aufhaben soll! Es ist mir natürlich aufgefallen, daß ihr keinen tragt hier oben. Man soll aber einen aufsetzen, damit man ihn abnehmen kann (Do you see that one should wear a hat! Of course, I noticed that you don’t wear one up here. But you should put one on so that you can take it off)”

• - Hans Castorp

In my newspaper, NRC, I read a column where someone wondered who still reads a great bildungsroman these days, such as Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). Der Zauberberg, a rather hefty pair of volumes, is about Hans Castorp, a young naval engineer from Hamburg who visits his cousin Joachim Ziemszen in a Swiss sanatorium high in the mountains. Castorp doesn’t like it at all, the mountain is too high for his sea legs, but when the residential medical director, Behrens, tells him that he can get better here too, he stays there. Apparently he is ill.

Much about nothing

In a podcast by De Groene Amsterdammer, inspired by their double-thick summer issue of 2025 about doing nothing, Der Zauberberg passed me by again. It was explained that the sanatoriums, where the story takes place, emerged in the late 19th century to expose tuberculosis patients from their unhealthy cities to nothing but sunlight and clean air, and furthermore to as little as possible. Antibiotics didn’t emerge before the 1930s and only became widely available after the war. It was also not known that the disease was caused by bacteria. The Liegekuhr (the laying treatment) was seen as an answer, but that was not scientifically substantiated. Because the sanatoriums were profitable businesses, people whose symptoms seemed to have disappeared were fired and obviously incurable patients were not even admitted. The luxury was great and those who sat there had to pay a lot for it.

The book from 1924, NRC promised me, was about polarization. Polarization from the perspective of a tolerant German intellectual in the interwar period. I was sold. On Kobo, the Dutch translated version was almost €20, the original German version only €2. I’ve enjoyed Hans Fallada and Erich Maria Remarque when in school, so I figured, if my vocabulary has declined too much since, I’ve only thrown away €2.

Gun duel

The most important secondary characters are femme fatale Clawdia Chauchat, who acts as a catalyst for Castorp’s feelings about love and sexuality, and the gentlemen Settembrini (enlightened optimist) and Naphta (reactionary mystic). The first volume ends with a fantastic dialogue in which Castorp finally declares his love to Chauchat. Sadly, the entire dialogue, which lasts many pages, is in French. Je ne parle pas Français is the only French sentence I know. Fortunately, I found a German translation online.

Settembrini’s and Naphta’s dialogues are about reason versus mysticism and liberalism versus authoritanism. Settembrini argues normatively and morally. Naphta uses dialectical tricks and paradoxes to disrupt Settembrini’s statements. These dialogues are great. The problem is that to even get to these pages, you already read hundreds of pages about nothing but the day-to-day affairs of a sanatorium that aims to be and do nothing. At the end of the second volume, Settembrini and Naphta finally decide to solve their differences in a gun duel.

Her grave has already been dug

The first volume also contains a complete virus theory, but I prefer the one in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach, which is my favorite book ever. One thing that stuck with me was a scene in which Castorp takes Ziemszen on a quest to give the dying patients some attention. It bothers him that people suddenly disappear while he saw them in the Liegekuhr the day before. Dying is kept away from life by the sanatorium. Together they visit a number of patients who are almost dead, including a young girl. Another woman seems to be doing so well that they take her into the village and to parties and performances. When they accidentally end up with her in the cemetery of the sanatorium, they are horrified to see that her grave has already been dug, stone and all.

I didn’t seem to be the only one who had recently been inspired to read Der Zauberberg. Especially in NRC and De Groene Amsterdammer, while I read it, the book and its author passed by with some regularity, and not often positively. Author Thomas Mann and his wife behaved ungratefully towards a friend who secured Mann’s work in Germany. Mann, after fleeing to the U.S., is said to have said of German writers who stayed behind that all their work had been corrupted by the Nazis and should be pulped. It is not good to slowly start thinking more negatively about its author while reading a long book.

According to my e-reader, I spend 85,7 hours on Der Zauberberg.