“What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even fisticuffs.” Near the end of his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann presents its snowbound setting — a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Davos, Switzerland — as the microcosm of an ill-tempered age on the edge of an abyss of violence. “Every day fierce arguments, out-of-control shouting-matches would erupt between individuals and among entire groups; but the distinguishing mark was that bystanders, instead of being disgusted by those caught up in it or trying to intervene, found their sympathies aroused and abandoned themselves emotionally to the frenzy.”
In a novel crammed with uncanny premonitions of the century to come, Mann’s sketch of the dynamics of online polarisation now seems especially acute. Published exactly 100 years ago, in November 1924, The Magic Mountain unfolds in its highland Alpine enclave — a small world, but the whole world — between 1907 and 1914. We learn that the young marine engineer Hans Castorp from Hamburg, the naive, questing hero with a spot on his lung, will share the fate of his generation on Great War battlefields. Mann, already a German literary heavyweight thanks to his family saga Buddenbrooks and later stories such as Death in Venice, embarked on Hans’s story in 1913. He set it aside during the war, and only finished his epic amid the tumults of the early Weimar Republic. The project began as a compact comic tale but ballooned into a zeitgeist-defining behemoth that took the temperature of an entire civilisation — and issued a grim prognosis.
Make the long, but scenic, trek up Mann’s mountain, and you will be rewarded with vivid vistas of intellectual — and emotional — landscapes that have endured to the present day. Mostly composed when Hitler counted as a Bavarian beer-cellar ranter, and before Lenin’s regime in Russia had solidified into dictatorship, the novel presages, and models, a century of stand-offs, skirmishes, and brutal collisions, between competing world-views and ideologies that never quite triumph, but never quite surrender. That terminal moment of breakdown into “petulance”, when dialogue and disagreement fray into irreconcilable enmity, is a pivotal event. Until then, The Magic Mountain has staged a gigantic carnival of conversation between opposing principles — reform and reaction, health and sickness, flesh and spirit, lust and love, even (and above all) between life and death — that never entirely lose touch with each other. Now words will yield to deeds, chats to blows.
Peopled by a droll, picturesque cast of eccentric characters, the International Sanatorium Berghof isn’t just a political or philosophical talking-shop. Young Hans, whose ambiguous passions encode Mann’s own lifelong predicament as a married paterfamilias primarily attracted to men, must learn about body and soul, love and death, as well as history’s Big Ideas. His infatuation with the alluring Clavdia Chauchat, a central-Asian Russian with her “Kyrgyz eyes”, often makes him despise the abstractions of the sanatorium’s warring ideologues. And Mann always embodies his ideas in oddball characters, with the high-minded Italian liberal humanist Lodovico Settembrini, and the “caustic” Jesuit-trained (but Jewish-born) radical reactionary Leo Naphta, as first among equals. Later they will be joined, and dethroned, by a sinister but spellbinding Dutchman, Mynheer Peeperkorn.
Settembrini and Naphta are the two disputatious frenemies between whose poles the impressionable Hans bounces like a rubber ball. But they finally agree to settle their differences not, as before, over tea and wine or on hikes through the snow — but in a duel. Nothing except blade or bullet will resolve the endless arguments of liberal against conservative, freethinker against believer, progressive against reactionary. “The Absolute, the holy terror these times require,” thunders Naphta, “can arise only out of the most radical scepticism, out of moral chaos.” Only bloody convulsion will redeem a sick time.
With their weak lungs and strong opinions, Mann’s pair of senior wranglers gaze out from their mountain vantage-point over future decades of furious debate. The terms of the Settembrini-Naphta disputes have not really aged. If you’d tuned in, for example, to this week’s American presidential election, you would have found that liberals and conservatives, utopians and authoritarians, still go to rhetorical war armed with the weapons his antagonists deploy. Partisans continue to scrap in the same way that Mann’s Italian literary scholar, with his belief that “the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race”, does with the feline Jewish Jesuit, who maintains that flawed, sinful humanity craves “discipline and sacrifice” under the benign rod of a hierarchical authority. No other great novel of the 20th century punctures a pompous and hypocritical liberalism with such relish and cunning — at the same time as it demonstrates that the puncturing, at the hands of a ruthless and illusion-free “realism”, may pose a greater risk than the pomposity.
In an era once more beset by divisive wars of words, much of the book feels strikingly contemporary. Later writers who challenge its premises have echoed its procedures. In her newly-translated novel The Empusium, for instance, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk may probe Mann’s patriarchal blind spots with scenes of self-satisfied chinwags among bloviating blokes who believe that “a woman can only develop and retain her identity within the sphere of a man”. Still, her feminist take-down — which transfers the venue to pre-1914 Prussian Silesia — also acts as a spirited homage. Mann’s principal figures survive: Settembrini becomes “August August”; Naphta, “Longin Lukas”.
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