Thomas Mann, for those who may not have heard of him, ranks quite highly on the list of influential modern German authors.  Born in Lübeck in 1875, he enjoyed a career spanning over fifty years and in 1929 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his two greatest works; Buddenbrooks and Der Zauberberg.

Both of the books are epics.  Buddenbrooks, which I read several years ago, tells the story of the decline of a bourgeois merchant family in nineteenth century Lübeck.  It is a long book certainly, but it has pace and excitement; people are born and are killed, get married and divorce, become rich and go bust, and the characters are both likeable and believable.  A deeply sad book I think, and one which is definitely worth reading, via the English translation of the same name.

If I expected Der Zauberberg to be in anyway similar than I was in for a big disappointment.  I would have done well to wiki it first and see it described as ‘a book of ideas’, and therefore low on action.  As it was, I was eager to read it on the grounds that whatever action there is takes place in the town of Davos in Eastern Switzerland.  Davos is probably my favourite place in the entire world, and reading a novel set in places I know and love seemed like an attractive prospect.  This was my entire motivation for purchasing the book, two days before I joined the JEB forums in May 2006.

First published in 1924, Der Zauberberg is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential novels in modern German history.  Later translated into English as The Magic Mountain, it tells the story of a young man called Hans Castorp who, finding himself in need of a holiday before he embarks on his engineering career, sets off on a three week visit to see his cousin Joachim who is undertaking a cure for tuberculosis in a Davos sanatorium.  For anyone who has never heard of Davos, it became famous in the nineteenth century because of the exceptional quality of its air.  Situated in the Swiss Alps at an altitude of 1,560m it has a distinct advantage in terms of air purity over other locations because it is officially the highest town in Europe.  There are Alpine settlements, certainly, at higher altitudes, but none which merits the description of being a town.  Davos has two rail stations, several hospitals, a massive ice stadium and a conference centre which hosts the World Economic Forum on an annual basis.  These days it is popular as a ski destination, sharing many runs with the neighbouring town of Klosters made famous by its royal patronage, but at the turn of the last century Davos was the place to be for anyone who was wealthy and sick.  Robert Louis Stevenson wrote part of Treasure Island here, Arthur Conan Doyle is credited with ‘discovering’; skiing at the Strela pass high above the town, the famous German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner who immortalised many of the local landscapes in his work committed suicide here.  There was a time when almost every building in Davos was a sanatorium.  These days strides in the treatment of TB mean that most of them are hotels, and not very attractive hotels at that, looking as they do more like institutions than chalets.  But Davos still has a unique microclimate with a pure, dry air which is particularly beneficial for people with asthma and there are still an awful lot of specialist research institutes dotted all about the place.

It is a climate which certainly takes some getting used to, as Hans Castorp discovers soon after his arrival.  It is a place where seasons are meaningless and snow in August is not an uncommon occurrence.  The lack of oxygen in the air can initially make you feel rather drunk, and until you have had a few days to acclimatise it is likely you will feel sick and dizzy if you walk up the few flights of stairs to your hotel room at speed. Hans Castorp feels unwell from the minute he sets foot off the train, and his original visit of three weeks eventually turns into a residence of seven years.

He is seemingly suffering from a mild form of TB.  I say seemingly, because personally I struggle to remember a point at which he is described as coughing.  I confess up front that I have taken a severe dislike to the protagonist, and to my mind he is nothing but a self-obsessed and egotistical hypochondriac.  He measures his temperature seven times a day and records the results on a chart.  Which of us couldn’t convince ourselves we were sickening for something if we took our temperature seven times a day and monitored the variations?!  For seven years he proceeds to do absolutely nothing, falling under the strange spell of the sanatorium.  The book might better be translated as the Enchanted Mountain, because there certainly seems to be some sort of spell at work.  Hans Castorp swiftly becomes institutionalised.  He eats, drinks, sleeps and measures his temperature at the same time each day and the monotony of the routine combined with the irregularity of the mountain reasons soon means that he loses all sense of time as we know it.

Time, indeed, is one of the chief motifs which I picked up on running through the book.  Hans Castorp loses track of how long he has been on the mountain, and soon also of how old he is.  The book is structured in such a way as the first year or so of his stay is documented in meticulous detail, and then the last few years are galloped through in a mere fifty pages.  This, I think, reflects one of the points Mann is trying to make about how our perception of time differs depending on where we are and what we are doing. 

The longer Hans Castorp spends on the mountain, the more disengaged he becomes with reality.  He never picks up a newspaper, he ceases correspondence with his family thousands of miles away in Hamburg.  The sanatorium becomes his entire world, and indeed it is like a microcosm of European society at the turn of the century, with patients from any nation you would care to name.  He becomes so engrossed with his immediate surroundings that he shows no inclination to be cured and leave, always making himself out to be worse than he is.  One of the most telling moments of the story for me is when one of his relatives comes up to Hamburg to visit him.  Initially he is shocked and disturbed by the change that has taken place in his nephew, by his complete disinterest in real life.  And yet after a few days he finds himself beginning to fall under the trance of sanatorium life himself.  He is so horrified that he gets up in the dead of night and, without saying a word to anyone, runs away back to Germany.

His cousin Joachim, on the other hand, is the opposite. Whilst Hans Castorp, in what Mann will later show to be bitter irony, always proudly describes himself as a Zivilist, Joachim is looking forward to a glittering career in the military.  Secretly knowing that he is terminally ill, he makes his unauthorised escape from the mountain prison and enters the German army where he quickly becomes a Lieutenant.  Sadly, however, before he is able to participate in his first military exercise, he is confined to his bed with fever and soon an emergency visit back to the sanatorium is in order.  He is not destined to leave it for several months, and when he does it is in a coffin.

As far as I’m concerned, any sense with which Hans Castorp might have behaved disappears with the death of Joachim and he becomes even more dangerously introspective than before.  When I got to the end of the book I googled it and flicked through some other people’s reviews in an attempt to find out what the novel was really supposed to be about; I didn’t find anything conclusive, the consensus seeming to be that a lot of things are ambiguous.  But to me the book is surely a comment on the sheer decadence of the European middle class society which was about to be destroyed by the coming of the First World War.  Don’t go away from this with the impression that spending five years in a sanatorium was some sort of hardship.  The residents had five meals a day, each with several courses, and regularly stayed up into the night drinking all manner of expensive alcohol.  They lived quite simply in the lap of luxury, and there were very few who were ill enough to be required to keep to their beds.

There are a few deaths to look forward to as the book progresses.  Cousin Joachim is the main one of course, but there are also a couple of suicides to liven things up.  On the whole though, this is a book in which nothing happens.  Vast swathes of it are taken up with the chronicling of intellectual debates between various acquaintances of Hans Castorp, all of whom I must add are more intelligent and interesting than him.  I get the impression that the story is supposed to show how illness has increased Hans Castorp’s education, by broadening his horizons and bringing him into contact with new thoughts he would have been incapable of having himself, but whilst some of the political and philosophical debate is worth reading in moderation, I can’t see that Hans himself ever adds much too it save self important comments which don’t make perfect sense

Much of his time is spent in contemplation of his love interest, a married Russian woman of dubious morality with who he is supposed to be in love.  I say supposed with a certain amount of sceptism, since he manages to get himself into this state without having so much as spoken to her.  He borrows a pencil from her on the night she is due to leave, which is the occasion of their first conversation, then spends at least a year moping around waiting for her to return.  My sympathy for him is limited.  Love is not an emotion which you can feel for a person you don’t know, and the amount of time he spends contemplating this imagined love is quite tedious.

Interestingly, Mann started the novel, which was inspired by a brief visit of his to visit his wife in such a sanatorium, in the years prior to the Great War.  Not incidentally a war to which Mann was opposed, but one which interrupted his writing.  It was 1924 before the book was finished, and it certainly would not have been what it is without the influence of that conflict.

As the story draws to a close, the last few months of Hans in the sanatorium seem a reflection of the last few years of that comfortable middle class life which the war destroyed.  The little world of the sanatorium is increasingly rocked by violent deaths and conflicts which mirror the increasing tensions building up in the outside world.  As 1914 progresses, Hans himself seems to come to a realisation of the stupefaction under which he is suffering, to become restless almost and to long for a distraction.  He has the feeling that soon there is going to come a ‘Donnerschlag’ which will end the world as he knows it.

And sure enough, it comes.  The last few pages of the book describe Hans Castorp finally leaving the sanatorium.  The declaration of war has burst the bubble in which he was living and suddenly the spell under which he has been living is broken.  He has joined the army, and is on his way back to Germany to fight.  I read an English review, I can’t remember whether it was on Amazon or Wikipedia, and it implied he had actually been conscripted.  I’m not sure; I didn’t actually read it like that.  The impression I got from the use of adjectives such as ‘entzaubert’; (which I’m not sure how to translate into English, but it means the opposite of being bewitched, unbewitched) was that he recognised his escape from reality was over and he was voluntarily returning to the normal world.  Who knows.  The last two pages describe a battle scene, all the noise and horror of the trenches, and in the midst of it our ‘hero’ next to whom there is soon a deafening explosion, and we are left with ambiguity as to whether it has killed him or not.  The narrative voice, with which the novel commenced a thousand pages ago, steps in again to tell us that ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether that particular blast killed him or not, it is not likely that he will survive the war.  And so the overall impression you are left with is one of futility; of the sheer pointlessness of the golden existence Hans was leading in the sanatorium, the time and effort put into to preserving his life which is now to be lost on a battlefield.  And the sheer pointlessness of the amount of time you have wasted reading the novel to get to this point.  Yet bizarre as it may seem it is hard to view the war as a bad thing, it comes at the end of this book like a breath of fresh air and a blessed release.

So, my advice to anyone who is contemplating reading this book is quite simply don’t bother, unless it is part of a course you are taking at university and someone is going to explain it to you.  I don’t mean, of course, to criticise one of the great literary works of the twentieth century and probably the reason I have not enjoyed it is quite simply because I was not intelligent enough to understand it.  Not that my German was not good enough, although the prose of Thomas Mann is not exactly light and untaxing, but the book was so erudite that I know I wouldn’t have understood large chunks of it in English.  Of course I would have understood the words, but that is not the same as what is actually being said.  It’s the sort of book where you get to the end of a sentence and realise it has flown completely over your head, so that you have absolutely no idea what it was about.

Oh, there was one sentence on page eight hundred and something which made me laugh; Thomas Mann made a mention of Esperanto.  When talking about some of the desperate measures the inmates take to amuse themselves, he says:

“Einige Berghofinsassen trieben Esperanto und wussten sich etwas damit, in dem künstlichen Kauderwelsch bei Tisch zu konversieren.”

Without seeing if I can borrow a German dictionary off someone I’m not sure how to translate Kauderwelsch.  My initial thought was ‘gibberish’ because to me it certainly gives a negative connotation, but then I thought that might be a bit too strong and that something like ‘Double Dutch’ might be more appropriate.  In either case, I think it was a comment which was supposed to be slightly scathing.

So, I’m glad to have read the book, with the emphasis being on the completed aspect of that action and I look forward to reading shorter and more lively books over Christmas.  I feel saturated with Thomas Mann for one lifetime!