THOMAS MANN'S

The Magic Mountain

• • •
A CASEBOOK

Edited by
Hans RudolfVaget

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UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publi(ation Data

Thomas Mann'sTbe magic mountain: a casebook I edited by Hans RudolfVaget.
p. em.
ISBN 978-0-IY-530173-2; 97S-0-I9-5.1(H74-9 (pbk)
1. Mann, Thomas, IK75-1955. Zauberberg. l. Vaget, Hans Rud"lf.
1'1'2625. M4L 4475 2007
S33'.YI2-dd2 211117026.,79

246S97531

Printt'J in tht' Irnitt'd Statl'!I uf A.l11t'rica

on '!lid-frel' raper
 Credits
• • •

Dorrit Cohn, "Telling Timelessness in Der ZauberberB." Originally published in

Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, NF 44 (1994): 425-439. Reprinted with
permission of the author and Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift.
Eric Downing, "Photography and BildunB in The MaBie Mountam." A revised and
much abridged version of an essay entitled "The Technology of Devel-
opment: Photography and Bildung in Thomas Mann's Der ZauberberB,"
published in Deutsche Vlerteljahrsschrift fUr Literaturwlssenschaft und GeistesBe-
Sch,chte, vo!' 77 (2003): 91-129. By permission of the author and Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschnft.
Anthony Grenville, "'Linke Leute von rechts': Thomas Mann's Naphta and
the Ideological Confluence of Radical Right and Radical Left in the Early
Years of the Weimar Republic." Originally published in Deutsche Viertel-
jahrsschrift Jur LiteraturwlSSenschaJi und Geistesgeschlchte, vo!' 59 (1985): 651---675.
By permission of the author and Deutsche Vlerteljahrssehrift.
Malte Herwig, "The 'MagiC Mountain Malady': Der ZauberberB and the Medical
Community, 1924--2006." A revised and updated version of "Framing the
'Magic Mountain Malady': The Reception of Thomas Mann's The MaBie
Mountain in the Medical Community, 1924-2000," published in FraminB and
ImaBininB Disease In Cultural History, ed. George Sebastian Rousseau (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 20(3): 129-150. By permission of the author.
Todd Kontje, "Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain." Original
contribution.
 vi Credits

Franka Marquardt and Yahya Elsaghe, "Naphta and His Ilk: Jewish Characters
in Mann's The MaB'c Mountain." Original contribution.
Nancy P. Nenno, "Projections on Blank Space: Landscape, Nationality, and
Identity in Der ZauberberB." A revised and updated version of an article pub-
lished in German Quarterly, 69 (1996): 305-32l. By permission of the author.
Ellis Shookman, "The MaBie Mountain: A Humoristic Counterpart to Death in
Venice." Original contribution.
Martin Travers, "Death, Knowledge, and the Formation of Self: The Magic
MountaIn." Original contribution.
Hans RudolfVaget, "The Making of The MaB'c Mountain." Original contribution.
Hans Rudolf Vaget, '''Politically Suspect': Music on the Magic Mountain."
Original contribution.
 Contents
• • •

Introduction 3
HANS RUDOLF VAGET

The Making of The MaBie Mountain 13

HANS RUDOLF VAGET

Death, Knowledge, and the Formation of Self: The MaBie Mountain 31

MARTIN TRAVERS

Photography and Blldun8 in The MaBie Mountain 45

ERIC DOWNING

Modern Masculinities on the MagiC Mountain 71

TODD KONTJE

Projections on Blank Space: Landscape, Nationality,

and Identity in Der Zauberbers 9S
NANCY P. NENNO

"Politically Suspect": Music on the Magic Mountain 123

HANS RUDOLF VAGET
 viii COrrrel11S

"Linke Leute von rechts:" Thomas Mann's Naphta and the

Ideological Confluence of Radical Right and Radical Left in the Early
Years of the Weimar Republic 143
ANTHONY GRENVILLE

Naphta and His Ilk: Jewish Characters in Mann's The Ma8lc Mountain 171
FRANKA MARQUARDT AND YAHYA ELSAGHE

Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberbrr,q 201

DORRIT COHN

The Ma8'c Mountain: .A "Humoristic Counterpart" to Death In Venice 219

ELLIS SHOOKMAN

The "Magic Mountain Malady": Vrr Zauherbrr8 and the Medical

Community,1924-2006 245
MALTE HERWIG

Suggested Reading 265

Index 269
 Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain

A CASEBOOK
 Introduction
HANS RUDOLF VAGET

• • •

T HE LITERARY FORTUNES of Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The MaBie Mountain

in the English-speaking world, unlike those in his native country, have
been rather mixed. Looking back over the eighty years since its publication, we
can readily distinguish three phases in the critical reception of the book: first,
a period of widespread acclaim, in which The MaBie Mountain was generally held
in the highest regard; second, a period of benign neglect in which the novel
receded into the background of the literary landscape; and third, during the
last two decades a period of significant new interest in Mann's work. The pres-
ent anthology is designed to suggest what forms that new interest has taken
and to inspire further critical forays into some of the unmapped territories of
this great mountain of a book.
For some two decades after the appearance in 1927 of Helen T. Lowe-Porter's
translation of Der ZauherberB' American critics routinely ranked the author of
The MaBie Mountain among the foremost men of letters of his age. This view
found strong support in Hermann Weigand's book-length analysis of the
novel, the first such undertaking in any language, which appeared in 1933. 1
It soon became customary to refer to Mann in the same breath as Proust and
Joyce as one of the outstanding practitioners of the modern novel. Aston-
ishing as it may seem to today's professors of literature, it was by no means

3
 4 Hans RudolfVager

unusual in and around the mid-twentieth century to offer one-semester

college courses devoted to the study of Remembrance ofThinBs Past, Ulysses, and The
MaBie Mountain. It appears that Harry Levin at Harvard was the first to design
this kind of course; many others followed suit.
The MaBic Mountain appeared at a time that, due to a confluence of diverse
factors, proved especially propitious to its success in America. In 1929, Mann
received the Nobell'rize for Literature, and even though the prize was expressly
awarded for his first novel, Budden/nooks (1901), it was generally assumed that the
Nobel committee at the time had been swayed by the powerful groundswell of
acclaim triggered by his more recent work. That prize, the most coveted and
consequential of all literary awards, confirmed the no\"el's favorable critical
reception in America and added greatly to Mann's prestige. Further evidence
of his preeminence came a year later, in 1930, when Marro and the MaBician, a
sophisticated political parable about Italian fascism, met with unanimous crit-
ical acclaim and strengthened many intellectuals' perceptions of Mann as one
of the most perceptive diagnosticians of the age. Indeed, Mann's credentials
for such a role seemed impeccable. IJeeply rooted in German culture, he was
nonetheless conversant with all major intellectual currents on the continent.
Furthermore, he had by then shed the posture he had initially adopted of the
nonpolitical artist and had assumed the political responsibility of the public
intellectual when, in 1922, he called for the support of the unpopular Weimar
Republic and expressed his alarm over the rise of the Hitler movement. He
did so with increasing urgency in the years leading up to the Nazi takeover
in 1933 and, as an exile, with ever increasing passion, after 1936. (That self-
imposed three-year hiatus of silence resulted from Mann's desire to protect
his JeWish publisher and to prolong the availability of his books in Germany.)
In comparison with Proust, whose work was greatly admired but not widely
read, and with Joyce, whose Ulysses was condemned to a clandestine existence
for twelve years after its publication in 1922, the author of The MaBie Mountain
appeared to many as the one writer who was most alive to the intellectual and
ideological issues confronting an age that began to look to many like a mere
interlude between two terrible world conflagrations.
The crucial factor in all of this was, of course, the literary character of
Mann's work itself. The MaBic Mountain was seen both as a novel filled with
wide-ranging ideas articulated on an elevated plane of philosophical self-
consciousness, and as a novel offering an abundance of incident and pure
reading pleasure. It could be read both as a meditation on the timeless topics
of love, death. and disease and as a highly topical inquiry into the mental-
ity of pre-World War I Europe. In fact, Der Zauherbers seemed to reach more
profoundly into the etiology of the twentieth century's seminal catastrophe
 Introductioll 5

t han did any of its rivals. Furthermore, here as elsewhere, Mann followed the
footsteps of Richard Wagner, his artistic idol from early on. In particular, like
Wagner, he strove to win over hoth readers of uncommon sophistication and
readers of perfectly ordinary intelligence. It is this happy fusion of daring and
accessihility that continues to ensure the standing of The MaRlc Mountain among
the great novels of all time.
In the later 1940s, Mann's reputation suffered a marked decline for a num-
her of reasons, most of which are still poorly understood. First, with the end of
World War II in 1945 and the defeat of Nazi Germany, for which this German
l'xile had heen relentlessly agitating ever since settling in the United States in
1938, Mann's prestige as the figurehead of the "good Germans" began to fade.
Similarly, Mann's own fondness for the United States, of which he hecame a
citizen in 1944, chilled rapidly after the death of President Franklin Delano
I{oosevelt, \vhom Mann idolized, and after the rise of the hysterical sort of
anti-communism that marked the Truman and Eisenhower eras. This dra-
matic political climate change once again drove Mann into exile-back to
.<..;witzerland, where he had first taken refuge from 1933 to 1938.
Second, in the mid- and late 1940s, American critics, with some notable
l'xceptions, of course, became disenchanted with Mann's dazzlingly ironic style
and weary of his old-world intellectual baggage. In 1948, with the appearance
of Doctor Faustus, a novel that continues and greatly expands the theme-first
sounded in The MaBie Mountain--of music as a "politically suspect" force, most
American critics became perplexed. Typical of many, Orville Prescott, who
reviewed it for the New York Times (on October 29, 1948), complained that to
make sense of the new novel one needed a degree from the Juilliard School
t ,f Music. Indeed, the challenges of the musical discourse of Doctor Faustus

(Iilr which Mann profited from the expert advice of fellow exile Theodor
W. Adorno) seem to have liberated certain critics to express the misgivings
'lhout the supposedly superfluous intellectual baggage of Mann's work that
t hcy had secretly harbored all along. The perception of Mann as a Teutonic
hl'avyweight was unintentionally reinforced by Hermann Weigand, who clas-
silil'd Der Zauberberg under the rubric of Transzendentalpoesil!--using Friedrich
Schlegel's romantic notion of a literature shaped by irony, "sovereign play,"
philosophical self-consciousness, and "a conscious synthesis of creation and its
criticism."z Such a conception of the novel is foreign to the Anglo-American
litcrary tradition and difficult for non-Germans to embrace without reserve.
And finally, there was the powerful force of literarv fashion, which every
so often, with a change of historical circumstances, seems to dictate a swing of
the pendulum in the opposite direction. In the late 1940s and for some time
thereafter, the accomplishments of the great masters of the modern novel
 6 Hans RudolfVagel

came to be viewed as historical monuments so weighty as to seem oppressive,

as barriers in the road toward the new shiny palace of postmodernism. A char-
acteristic purveyor of these sentiments was Leslie A. Fiedler, a highly esteemed
critic in the 1960s and 1970.>. Writing in 1970, Fiedler declared that "the age of
Proust, Mann, and Joyce" was "over," adding with acid-tipped hyphens that "the
works of Proust-Mann-Joyce ... evoke a trilogy which seems at the moment
more the name of a single college course than a list of three authors.".1 Mann in
particular was Fiedler's bete noire; he called him the "master of many kinds of
tedium" and painted The MaHie Mountain as the "most oppressive" of the long,
modern novels.' As postmodernism became the new shibboleth of Anglo-
American literature, the fortunes of Thomas Mann suffered a downturn, and
The Magic Mountain in particular became temporarily fogged in. Everyone was
aware of its looming presence, but few ventured to scale it or to inspect its
face and contours. Thus in 1979, when the distinguished Mann scholar Henry
Hatfield bravely spoke of "a consensus that The MaHie Mountain is one of the
very few great novels that this century has produced," he was in fact echoing
not the consensus of the late 1970s but that of an earlier era.)
It is impossible to pinpoint the moment when Mann's reputation began
again to ascend, but by the late 19805 a new appreciation of The MaBie Mountain
and its creator does seem to have taken hold. In the late 19705, Mann's diaries
began to appear in Germany, and this sparked a new wave ofinterest in Mann
and his amazing family, in particular in Mann's lifelong preoccupation with
homoerotic desire, on the one hand, and with his role as critic of Germany, on
the other. It is difficult to say to what extent contemporary German critical
perceptions resonated in the English-speaking world, but signs of a renewed
interest in Mann's novel began to appear on this side of the Atlantic in the late
1970s, and were soon found everywhere. Examples not from the academy but
from the larger literary scene best illuminate the picture.
In 1978, Susan Sontag published her landmark essay Illness as Metaphor; she com-
ments on The MagIC Mountain only in passing, but her observations and the critical
thrust of her project combine to open up significant new perspectives. Sontag
characterizes the book as a "compendium of speculations about the meaning of
tuberculosis"-the most thorough such compendium we have, she noted, along
with the letters of Franz Kafka. She further defines tuberculosis as "a disease of
time," which is to say, a condition that "speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes
it"-observations particularly apt to Mann's work. Most important, by align-
ing Mann with those writers who undermine the "conventions of concealment"
and who resist the temptation to "glamorize" and "mythologize" tuberculosis,
Sontag assigns to Mann a prominent and honorable place in the perennial strug-
gle against obscurantism and on behalf of an enlightened humanism. 6
 Introduction 7

In 1986, Harold Bloom offered a succinct and important reassessment that

seems especially persuasive for cutting through the crust of cliches that had
accrued around the novel. Bloom acknowledges the presence of the quali-
ties that so impressed previous generations of readers-irony, satire, and
a spirit of earnest philosophical inquiry-but he refuses to make a big fuss
about it. Sixty years after the publication of The MaB/(~ Mountain, he plausibly
argues, these elements appear "quite archaic" and need to be viewed histori-
cally. Mann's characters, according to Bloom, have acquired a certain "antique
charm," reminiscent of old photographs that strike the beholder as "uncan-
nily right and yet altogether odd." Todav's readers, therefore, cannot help but
"experience the book as a historical novel ... a loving representation ... of a
European culture forever gone, the culture of eoethe and Freud." Neverthe-
less, thanks to "Mann's superb workmanship," Hans Castorp emerges as "one
of those rare fictions who acquire the authority to call our versions of real-
ity into some doubt" and make us ask ourselves: "What is my dream of love,
my erotic illusion," and how do these things "qualify my own possibilities of
unfoldingl"7
It is precisely the question of sexual identity that a decade later emerged
as the central thematic concern in Anthony Heilbut's reading of The MaBie
Mountain. "What other novel of this stature is so pre-occupied with the body,"
he asks, neatly shifting the focus of attention from the notorious intellectual
sparring over Castorp's mind and soul to the indisputably dominant role of
the body in Castorp's life. Drawing on Mann's diaries, Heilbut celebrates the
writer as a "mythographer of homosexual desire" and characterizes the book
as a "novel of forbidden love" in the widest sense of the term. R
It seems to me that future readers of The MaBie Mountain will most likely
discover their own reading pleasures along lines suggested by Susan Sontag,
Harold Bloom, Anthony Heilbut, and certain other unconventional read-
ers, some of whom are represented in the present collection of essays. Those
future readers should be greatly aided by John E. Woods's new translation of
1995, which manages to steer clear of the highfalutin tone that today mars
Helen Lowe-Porter's pioneering effort of 1927. Indeed, The MaBie Mountain can
still provide that rare reading experience that turns a skeptic into a convert,
as it did Walter Benjamin. Mann was not one of Benjamin's favorites; in fact,
he "hated" the author of the Reflections of a NonpolItical Man "like few other
writers." But after reading Der ZauberberB, Benjamin confided to Gershom
Scholem: "What was unmistakably characteristic of this novel is something
that moves me and has always moved me; it spoke to me in a way that I can
accurately evaluate and acknowledge and that 1 must, in many respects,
greatlyadmire."9
 8 Hans RudoU'Vaget

In preparing the present volume I have been keenly aware of the existence of
two similar collections, published respectively in 1986 and 1999, \vhich make
available some landmark contributions to the ~tudy of The MaBlc Mountain. How-
ever, since most of those essays date from an earlier period of Mann scholar-
ship, a stock-taking of more recent developments is surely now in order. This
volume both illustrates some of the fresh approaches developed by a new gen-
eration of readers and revisits some of the familiar issues of the literature on
The MaBie Mountain, otfering helpful perspectives, in light of new sources and
recent scholarship, on the questions that are likely to form in the minds of
todav's readers.
I have chosen to open the collection with a study of the genesis of The Ma&ie
Mountam, as this is a fundamental and yet somewhat complicated matter. With
the publication in 1979 of Mann's diaries from 1918 to 1921 and, in 2004, of
the annotated edition of Mann's letters from 1914 to 1923, the genesis of Der
ZauberherB can now be laid out more accurately and in greater detail than was
heretofore possible. The facts regarding the making of the novel \vill pull the
rug from under some dearly held assumptions about the supposedly grand
design of the narrative. At the same time, readers equipped with them will
feel encouraged, I hope, to explore fresh angles and to pursue new leads, of
which there is surely no lack, when they have at their disposal a full account
of the circumstances that brought forth this novel.
Foremost among the issues readers will encounter is the question of genre.
Der Zauberbers occupies an ambivalent position toward the German tradition of
the Bildunssroman, the novel of development. Taking a bird's eye view of the mas-
sive novel and singling out two central themes-the fascination with death
and with knowledge, especially self-knowledge---Martin Travers retraces and
nicely illuminates the crucial stages of Castorp's development, thereby open-
ing for readers unfamiliar with German literature an easy access. Looking at
the concept of Bildung and of the Blldun&sroman from an entirely different and
highly stimulating angle, Eric Downing skillfully exploits the double mean-
ing of Entwicklung and of the Entwlcklun&sroman, as these relate both to personality
formation and to photography. This neat shift of perspective enables Down-
ing to explore the insinuation of photography into the thematic space of the
Bildunwroman traditionally occupied by a work of art (such as a painting, for
example, in the case of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister) and to show how the tech-
nology of the new medium-the process of development; the relation of the
negative and the positive; the need for a fixative-affects the very concept of
Blldung in The Magic Mountall1.
The extent to which Mann was compelled to ponder the unstable status of
his own masculinity and thus the larger question of sexualitv in modern societ,
 Imroducrion 9

hecame apparent to all with the puhlication of his diaries of 19 I8-1921. fxamining
the reflection in the novel of these personal matters, Todd Kontje reads '/he M'We
Mountain as an expression of the hroad sense of cultural crisis relating to modern
masculinities. He shows that Mann, via his finely detailed analysis of Castorp as a
sexual being, rejects the specifically German cult of masculinity-a stance that
was to have far-reaching implications for his own political reorientation.
It is instructive to remember that Mann's novel is set in a period of cultural
history that was marked by the introduction of two new technologies: the
cinema and the gramophone. Both were perceived as threatening to the two
main pillars of Cerman high culture, music and literature. Early cinema--
referred to in the novel as Bioscope Theater-comes in for a good measure
of condescension as an overly melodramatic, inferior form of entertainment.
Nonetheless, as Nancy Nenno argues, The Maille MOlmtaln \vhen read in the con-
text of contemporary narratives of Alpine climbing and Arctic exploration
reveals some surprising affinities to the thematic concerns of an emerging,
specifically Cerman genre of film-the Berf(film-and thereby becomes the site
for the projection and inscription of both national and individual identity.
Following Nietzsche, his intellectual compass, Mann came to view German
culture as an essentially music-centered culture. In The MaHic Mountain, music-
specifically the German cult of music-is viewed for the first time in Mann's
oeuvre as an art that is "politically suspect." This issue is treated only lightly at
the beginning of the novel but reaches, toward the end of the book, a memo-
rable climax in Castorp's nightly musical orgies, made possible by the Berg-
hof's acquisition of a new, state-of-the-art electric gramophone. My analysis of
Castorp's fascination with music aims to draw out some of the historical and
political implications of the novel's subtle and masterful treatment of the art
that mattered to Mann the most.
The vitally important political context of Mann's novel is further illumi-
nated, this time from the outside, by Anthony Crenville, who interprets the
extraordinary figure of the Jewish Jesuit, Leo Naphta, as an embodiment of the
twin threat from both the radical Right and the revolutionary Left, as Mann
perceived it, to the newly established, fragile democracy of the Weimar Repub-
lic. Another layer of the novel's intellectual physiognomy is further revealed
in Franka Marquardt and Yahya Elsaghe's probing reading of the figure of
Naphta, and in particular of his origins in the JeWish orthodoxy of Eastern
Europe. Marquardt and Elsaghe are able to show that Naphta represents the
embodiment of a broad spectrum of anti-Semitic projections in the aftermath
of Enligh tenment.
The many-faceted phenomenon of time itself is an obviolls leitmotif in
The MaHlc Mountain and has for decades been J convenient focal point of philo-
 10 Hans Rudo!fVagel

sophical and narratalogical analyses. In an exemplary reading, Dorrit Cohn

problematizes the meta-narrative comments on the problem of time that are
dispersed throughout the text, and argues that the novel's chief concern is
not with the experience of time as something subjective but rather with the
transcendent experience of timelessness.
When Mann conceived his "Davos novella" he was still preoccupied with
Death In Venic~--a configuration that has given rise to the notion, very much
encouraged by the author himself, that The MaHle Mountain was conceived as
a "humoristic counterpart" to the tragedy of Aschenbach in the city that
the Italians callia Serenis.llma. Ellis Shook man examines the implications of the
author's desire to associate the two works and thereby illuminates one of the
crucial transitional stages in Mann's career as a writer.
We tend to forget or find it hard to imagine that Mann's novel about Davos
\vas at first widely perceived as a satirical attack on the medical profeSSion
in general and on the highly profitable business of sanatorium CUfe for the
tubercular in particular. Malte HerWig here reconstructs that controversy
(carried out mainly in medical journals), affirms Mann's status as a pioneer in
the exploration of the psychological effects of prolonged cures, and observes,
in conclusion, that Mann's own brushes with disease and death have them-
selves become texts that are now firmly woven into the cultural narrative of
medicine.
The anthology closes with suggestions for further reading, some of which
will be familiar to Mann enthusiasts, others of which may have escaped their
notice.

Notes

1. Hermann Weigand, The MaB,e Mountain. A Stud), of Thomas Mann's Novel "Der Zauber-
beriJ" (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933; reprinted Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1965).
2. Ibid .. 86, 95.
3. "Cross the Border-Close the Gap," The Collected E.lSa)'s of Leslie FIedler (New York:
Stein and Day, 1971),2: 462.
4. Ibid., 461.
5. Henry H. Hatfield, From ··The MUBie Mountam". Mann's Later Masterpieces (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell II niversity Press, 1979), 34.
6. Susan Sontag, Illness as MelaphDr (New York: Farrar, Straus & Ciroux, 1978).7, 14, .14.
7. Thomas Mann. The MaBie Mountain Modem Critical Interpretations, edited with an
introduction bv Harold Rlool11 (New York: Chelsea House, 19S6), 4-5.
 lnlroducr;on II

R. Anthony Heilbut, 'l'homas Mann. Eros and Litmlture (New York: Knopf, 1996),401,
422,538.
9. I.etter to Gerhard Scholem, April 6, 1925, The Corre.lpondenre of Walter Benlanlln.
/910-1940, edited and annotated bv Cershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno,
translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: lIniversity of
Chicago Press, 1994),265.
 The Making of The Magic Mountain
HANS RUDOLF VAGET

• • •

A s H 0 R TTl M E after the publication of Doctor Faustus in 1948, Thomas Mann

began to write The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, a book that lays
out the biographical and historical context from which the novel sprang, cover-
ing the period from May of 1943 to February of 1947. Mann had an excellent and
compelling reason to rehearse the composition of Doctor Faustus and to make
his account public. He wanted to acknowledge the contribution to his work
ofTheodor W. Adorno, the philosopher and theoretician of the twelve-tone
method of musical composition advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and his fol-
lowers, and thereby nip in the bud a clear and present danger-that Adorno
might one day raise the issue of intellectual property, just as Schoenberg him-
self had done after the publication of the novel when he accused the author of
Doctor Faustus of having appropriated the invention of dodecaphonic music and
of having misleadingly attributed it to his fictional hero, the composer Adrian
Leverkiihn. Similar issues of mimesis had been dogging Mann from the time
of Buddenbrooks. As we shall see, they acquired a new and speCial virulence with
The Ma8,e Mountain.
Rut in 1924 the author of Der Zauherber8 felt no compulsion to lay his cards
on the table. Had he done so, the result would most certainly have been a
highly absorbing account. The story of the genesis of the novel, w'hich manv

13
 14 Hans RudolfVager

consider his greatest achievement, would in itself have been epic, surpassing
even the historical drama that provides the historical backdrop of The Genesis
o( Doctor Faustus: World War ll, the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the painful
question of German guilt. The story of Der ZauhrrberiJ spans the years 1913 to
1924-a period in which Mann witnessed an even more profound cultural,
social, and political upheaval than that recounted in the later hook. Those
years include, of course, the period of the Great War, from 1914 to 1918, which
in German historiography is now routinely referred to as the Urkatastrophe, the
seminal catastrophe, because it spawned the twentieth century's two most
destructive totalitarian ideologies, communism and fascism. It also hrought
to an end the Bismarckian Reich and ushered in the Weimar Repuhlic-a new
regime that was widely viewed as the unpalatahly bitter fruit of German mili~
tar), defeat and of German humiliation thmugh the treaty of Versailles.
Even though \ve lack a comprehensive authorial account of the work's gen~
esis, there is no dearth of documents from which to trace the road to The MUSIC
Mountain. And Mann himself did offer several condensed versions of the stor)"
first in Sketch oj My Lije, written in 1930, and in two addresses he gave in 1939
and 1940 when he was a lecturer in the humanities at Princeton University.'
These retrospective accounts, however, are by no means entirely forthcom~
ing or reliable. For a more accurate account of the making of The MaBie Moun~
lain we must draw on letters, and, for the crucial period, from September 11,
1918, to December 1, 1921, on Mann's private diaries. 2
No writer had a higher stake in the outcome ofthe drama of German history
that began with the guns of August 1914 than Thomas Mann. He was heavily
invested in the political fortunes of Germany, having at the outset identified
with the German cause and having made himself its most articulate defender.
As a consequence, no other writer experienced the whole gamut of traumatic
emotions brought about by the conflict as immediately as he. Mann jumped
into the fray in a fit of feverish patriotism and relinquished his position of
machtiJesehiitzte Inneriichkelt, that "resigned turning~inwards under the protec~
tion of a powerful state," which Georg Lukacs had diagnosed as the charac~
teristically nonpolitical attitude of German bourgeois Iiterature. 3 This turned
out to be the most consequential decision of his life as a public figure. For
by defending Germany's war aims as he saw them, he was irrevocably drawn
into an open~ended learning process that was to keep him in the limelight
of political controversy for the rest of his life. DraWing more than one lesson
from recent history, Mann announced his support of democracy at a time
when the Weimar Republic was experiencing serious threats from the radical
Left and the radical Right alike. He went public with the declaration of his
political reorientation in 1922, two years before completing The MaHic Moun~
 The Making of The Magic Mountain 15

lain. In due course, he hegan to oppose the rising tide of thc Hitler movemcnt
whose ultimate aim, he realized, was to prepare Cermany for a new war and
to accomplish what had not been achieved in World War I: political suprem-
acy over Europe. His steadily increasing understanding of the situation put
him on a path that eventually led to his exile from Nazi Germany and to his
role, among German writers, as Hitler's most ardent opponent. It is the pain-
fulness of Mann's political learning process-fraught with ambivalence, as it
had to have been-that lends the MaRie Mountain its incomparahle intellectual
vihrancy and that makes this novel a chief exhihit in any investigation (If Ger-
man mentallte in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The English Mann scholar T. J. Reed has made the point that this book
is not only a parody of the "novel of education"-of moral and intellectual
development-the BildunBsroman, it is itself "a Bildunwroman in good earnest.'"
This is unquestionably an apt observation. But in order to appreciate the full
weight of the deSignation, we will have to apply the concept of BlldunR both
to the simple hero of this anything hut simple tale and to the German nation
as a whole, as it struggled from the ruins of a defeated empire toward a new
understanding of what its place in the world should be.
In its heyday, the BildunBsroman, typically, gave us the portrait of a young man
as a would-be artist who outgrows his artistic inclinations and becomes a mature,
useful member of society. In the aftermath of Goethe's novel of 1796, Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship, this kind of book became the most well-regarded and
prestigious narrative genre in German literature. A hundred years later, the
Bildun8sroman had lost its distinctive aura, had become old-fashioned, and was
Widely deemed fit for parody and experimentation. Mann had produced a
highly condensed version of the genre with Tonio KroBer (1903), the story of a
budding writer. However, when he embarked on what became The MaBie Moun-
tain, the model of the Bildungsroman was far from his mind; but as new characters,
episodes, and issues crystallized around his original narrative nucleus, Mann
seems to have backed himself into the familiar pattern of the novel of devel-
opment and education. That nucleus-a young man from Hamburg visits
his cousin in an Alpine sanatorium in Switzerland-proved to he extremely
receptive and malleable. Fittingly, Mann compared it to a sponge, capable of
absorbing just about every thing. I This does not mean that it was smooth sail-
ing once he had made a start. On the contrary, the writing of this book turned
into something of an odyssey; it was marked hy numerous interruptions,
course corrections, and other diversions." Repeatedly, the date of completion,
anticipated prematurely on several occasions, had to be postponed.
A characteristic example orMann's method of work is the introduction into
the sixth of the book's seven chapters of the formidahle figure of Leo Naphta.
 16 Hans RudoljVage!

The subchapter in question bears the ironic headline: "Noch jemand," mean-
ing simply "someone else." This somewhat studied posture of understatement
is designed both to acknowledge and downplay the basically additive method
of composition. Giving in to his insatiable appetite for what was nevi-be it
psychoanalysis, winter sports, cinema, the electric gramophone, parapsychol-
ogy, and much more-Mann kept expanding his "ordinary" hero's horizon by
constantly opening up new vistas and angles. Accordingly, we may say that the
adventures of Hans Castorp on the Magic Mountain are distilled from the writ-
erly adventures of his progenitor at the time. To a surprising degree, then, the
author of The MaB'c Mountain proceeded in a hand-to-mouth kind of way. Only
a writer with supreme confidence in his digestive and organizational capaci-
ties could dare to proceed in such an almost improvisational fashion. Mann,
we must remember, liked his readers to believe that his narratiYes resembled
"good scores," which is to say, seamless webs of motifs, composed according to
a secret master deSign, in the manner of Wagner's mature music.' Critics have
been all too willing to take his word for it, claiming that "despite the vastness
of the patterns, conscious control is manifest down to the most infinitesimal
details of its composition."x But even a cursory glance at the story of The MaBie
Mountain shows us that the notion of a "good score" must be considered prob-
lematical. I suspect that the "good score" label owes as much to Mann's self-
fashioning as a Wagnerian as it does to his innate, well-defined sense of form.
The first surprise we encounter on looking into the novel's chronology
is the realization that Katia Mann, the author's wife, played a key role in the
conception of Del' ZauberberB. Katia, diagnosed as tubercular, was sent on
March to, 1912, to Davos, in the canton of Grison, Switzerland. Before medi-
cal science discovered and made available streptomycin in the early 1950s, the
most widely recommended treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis, for those
who could afford it, was a prolonged sojourn at a high-altitude sanatorium.
Such resorts had sprung up everywhere in the wake of the discovery by Rob-
ert Koch in 1882 of the bacillus that caused the dreaded and devastating dis-
ease. Davos opened its doors to tubercular patients in lS89 and soon acquired,
on account of its altitude (1,600 meters; 5,000 feet) and its state-of-the-art
medical care, a reputation as one of the world's leading retreats. In 1912, when
Katia Mann arrived, Davos was host to some thirty thousand patients from
all corners of the globe. They lived in private guest houses, ordinary inns and
hotels, or in one of the twenty new sanatoriums, such as the Berghof that is
the novel's setting. In the major newspapers of Europe, Davos advertised itself
as Europe's premier "refuge for the healthy, the sick, and the recovering."
And after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Davos offered special rates for the
"\;\ounded and sick combatants of all nations.""
 The Making of The Magic Mountain 17

Katia was a perceptive and sharp-tongued letter writer, unabashedly given

to gossip. So when Mann visited his wife he already possessed an epistolary
acquaintance with the medical staff and with some of Katia's colorful new
companions. Suspecting that her husband would sooner or later want to
make use of his Davos impressions, Katia continued to report on life in Davos
after Mann's return to Munich, thus providing him with an untold number
of concrete details that eventually found their way into the novel. It is a great
pity that Katia's letters have not survived; they remained in Munich-along
with all the other materials Mann used, including the manuscript of Der
Zauherhel'B itself--when during a lecture tour in 1933 he decided not to return
to Germany; they are presumed to have been lost in the war. 'O
Mann stayed in Davos for four weeks, from May 15 to June 13, 1912. While
there he agreed to submit to a medical examination, and predictably enough,
the examining speCialist diagnosed him as tubercular. However, noting the
"profiteer's smile" on the man's face, Mann, unlike Hans Castorp, his ficti-
tious hero, returned to the "tlatlands," where the completion of Death In Venice
awaited him. Curiously, on the basis of a reexamination of her records in light
of current medical knowledge, we know today that Katia, too, was misdiag-
nosed-the result of an overly cautious approach to the disease. 11 She lived to
the ripe old age of ninety-seven and died, twenty-five years after her husband,
in 1980.
Later that summer of 1912, Katia's mother, HedWig Pringsheim, joined her
for a prolonged visit. A former actress and astute observer of human nature,
Hedwig was struck by a surprising feature of life in Davos that tends to irritate
readers of The MaBie Mountain still today. "All of them," she reported in a letter,
"crack jokes about their terrible disease," so much so that one almost forgets
that they are dwelling in the "valley of the moribund." She also noted the bra-
zen alliance of medicine and commerce. Once they get hold of you they'll try
to keep you here "with an iron grip." "Just between you and me," she added,
"I think Davos is all bogus."'2 [fMann had come to the same conclusion-and
indications are that he did-his decision to turn to tuberculosis as a subject
matter strongly suggests that he intended to use it as a diagnostiC tool rather
than to portray it as an aspect of social reality.
Thomas Mann arrived in Davos uniquely sensitized to life in this kind of place.
From an early age he had spent time in a number of similar resorts and, more
important, he had already written a brilliant story, Tristan (1901), set in a sanato-
rium for patients with tuberculosis. In Davos he was prepared to take in every-
thing and to compare Katia's descriptions and stories to everyday life in Davos.
We may also assume that he began to process the wealth of new impressions with
the contours and shapes of that earlier masterpiece still vividly in his mind.
 18 Hails Rudolj'Vagel

With the completion of Death In Venice in July 1912, Mann would have been
free to turn his attention to the ideas he had brought home from Davos, but
these, it seems, were as yet insufficiently developed. He turned instead to the
Confessions of Felix Krull. Confidence Man, the novel he had set aside in 1911 in order
to write the novella about Venice. When he did take up the Davos matter a
year later, in July 1913, shelving yet again the memoirs of Felix Krull, he seems
to have projected a "Davos-Novelle" with three distinct features. First, it was
indeed to have the dimensions of a novella, a long short story, of which both
'Fr,stan and Death in Venice are such outstanding examples, Second, it was to be
a satirical counterpart to Gustav Aschenhach's Venetian tragedy-lighter
in tone and akin, perhaps, to the kind of Bur/eske he had accomplished with
Tristan (which satirizes both the cult of Wagner and life in the new, fashion-
ahle sanatoriums for the tubercular). Third, the story was to he called "Der
verzauberte Berg" (The Enchanted Mountain}--another oblique allusion to
Wagner, specifically to the "Venusherg" (Mount Venus), where Tannhauser
has been lingering for longer than he cares to remember. When Mann speaks
of his "Horselbergidee" as the germ of the story, he refers to precisely the same
locus, the Horselberg being the mountain in Germany where after the advent
of Christianity, according to legend, the heathen goddess of love found refuge.
Although it may seem at first glance that the extraordinary amplification of
Mann's plan obliterated the original connection to Wagner, in reality, the Wag-
nerian elements, of which there are many, lie just beneath the surface. \3
Mann began with Castorp's childhood and adolescence in Hamburg. By
the end of 1913, moving along at a satisfactory pace, he estimated that he had
completed about one-quarter of the novella and was confident enough to have
the Neue Rundschau, his publisher Samuel Fischer's literary review, announce
the appearance of a new book by Thomas Mann in the course of 1914. These
hopes were dashed by the outbreak of war on August 1, 1914. For the work
at hand, the war had two immediate consequences. It would provide, Mann
realized, a fitting end to his Zauberber8' as the book was now called, with a dis-
creet nod to Nietzsche. 14 It would also cause Mann to interrupt work, for if the
story was to be understood as a kind of prequel to the present war, it was to
require a great deal more reflection.
Like most of his compatriots, Mann expected the war to be brief and vic-
torious for the two Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Initial
reports about German advances in the east and in the west reinforced this
expectation, Swept up in the nationalist tide, he lent his support to the German
cause in three articles that reveal his strong desire to relinquish the role of
the artist as outsider (the role that he had assigned to the artist throughout
his early work) and instead to ally himself, as a kind of soldier-artist, with his
 The Making afThe Magic Mountain 19

people and his nation. I.' [n the most strident of these, he welcomed the war,
relieved as he was that the world order of which he had grown thoroughly
weary was finally going to collapse. 16
Mann returned to the "Davos-Novelle" in January 1915 and continued to
work on it off and on for several months. We do not know how far he got. It
appears that by August the writing had proceeded a little beyond the subchap-
ter "Hippe" in the middle of chapter 4. This does not mean, however, that he
had reached the midpoint of his work. Far from it! For it is one of the struc-
tural characteristics of this book that the seven years Castorp spends on the
Magic Mountain are not equally distributed among the seven chapters of the
book. Like the deterioration of Castorp's own sense of time, the later chapters
stretch out over increasingly lengthy historical periods. By August 1915, hav-
ing covered less than one-quarter of the road ahead of him, Mann reached
another caesura. In a letter to the Austrian critic Paul Amann, written on
August 3, be takes stock and tries to explain, as much to himself as to Amann,
where his book was heading. He now defines its fundamental intent as "peda-
gogical and political"; its thematic focus was to be Castorp's etIort to come
to terms witb life's greatest seductive force-death. Here, for the first time,
he speaks unambiguously of Der Zauberber8 as a novel; and the kind of novel
that he has in mind does indeed seem to be a Bildlln8sroman. At the same time,
he wonders whether at present it is even permissible to continue spinning a
tale such as this when so many "burning issues" demanded clarificationY It
was dawning on him that some sort of major soul-searching and confessional
essay was going to have to take precedence over the book. Accordingly, after
tinkering a little longer with the manuscript, he decided, in October 1915, to
put it on hold for what turned out to be the longest and most consequential
hiatus in the genesis of the novel. There were other factors, too, that per-
suaded him to give the novel a rest. He may have sensed that he was headed
for a major philosophical and artistic impasse, for he was unclear in his own
mind how the model of the Bildlln8sroman could be reconciled with the model
of the historical novel. The one pointed upward to some educational goal; the
other pointed downward to an epochal catastrophe.
It took Mann two and a half years to write his Reflections ofa Nonpolitical Man.
This whale of an essay is at least three things in one. It is a spiritual autobiog-
raphy in which Mann movingly pays tribute to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and
Wagner-that "triple star of eternally united spirits that shines powerfully
in the German sky."IX It is also a spirited defense of Germany's right to be dif-
ferent from the Western democracies and to honor a culture in which music
takes precedence over politics. And last but not least, it is a polemical rejec-
tion of Western Zivilisation, including democracy, in the name of a superior
 20 Hans RudoljVaget

German Kultur. The characteristics of Z'I'Il!satlOn are specifically associated with

French culture and with his own brother, Heinrich, an ardent Francophile.
We encounter these views again in the sparkling figure of Lodovico Settem-
brini, one of Hans Castorp's two chief mentors. This is but a small indication of
the various communicative lines by which the Rejleetlons and The MaBi,- Mountain
are connected. Whenever Mann reports in letters about the progress of the
essay, which in the end ran to six hundred pages, he almost always mentions
the novel waiting in the wings. Moreover, he repeatedly draws attention to
the close ties between the two books, emphasizing that he would not have
succeeded in completing the novel had he not undertaken the intense intel-
lectual warm-up exercise of writing the RefleetlOns. 1Y
As the war dragged on, expectations of a victory for the Central Powers gave
way to a painful sense of reality, and of doom. In the "Prologue" to his Reflec-
tions, written in February and March of 1918, Mann appears reSigned to accept
the "progress from music to democracy." He wonders aloud: "Do I contain
elements in my own conservative inner nature that aid and abet Germany's
'progressl''' And he continues his soul-searching: "I myself with a part of my
nature was and am fated to further Germany's progress to what in these pages
is given the quite figurative name ... of 'democracy."'2o It is along these lines
of thought-away from the cult of music and toward the (to him) somewhat
fuzzy notion of democracy-that Mann would now bend his still dormant
Zauberbe1fJ_ However, continuing the story where he had left it in October 1915
proved impOSSible. Too many things had happened-and, alarmingly, contin-
ued to happen-to be ignored with respect to the novel: the fall of the Hohen-
zollern and the Hapsburg monarchies; the establishment, however short-lived,
of a Soviet-style revolutionary regime in Munich, before his very eyes, and the
first stirrings of the Hitler movement, likewise on his Munich doorstep. So
instead of taking up the complex thread of his Davos story, Mann turned, as
a kind of narrative warm-up exercise, to two relatively small-scale domestic
idylls: A Man and H,s DOB, which is now regarded as one of the great dog stories
of world literature, and the Ges£lnf{ von! Kindchen (Song of the Infant), in which
he celebrates in classical hexameters the baptism of his daughter Elisabeth, the
fifth of his six children.
At last, on April 9, 1919, after an interruption offour and a half years, Mann
unpacked his ZauberherB materials and picked up where he had left off. Over
the next two weeks he reacquainted himself with what he had written and
took stock of what needed to be rewritten. He began by prefacing chapter I
(at this stage, chapter 1 was the Hamburg chapter), with a brief Vorsat: (Fore-
word) that serves to emphasize the "extraordinary pastness of our story"-a
pastness that results "from its haVing taken place hefore a certain turning point
 The Making of The Magic Mountain 21

on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and conscious-
ness."ll This remark adds a tremendous weight to the story by suggesting that
it is meant to illuminate, on a personal, psychological. and intellectual level,
some of the reasons for the Creat War-that "turning point" that forever
changed the intellectual and political climate of Europe. Mann also amplified
the Hamburg chapter by giving greater prominence to the figure of Castorp's
grandfather and by adding the weighty matter of the baptismal bowl. Still not
satisfied \vith the novel's beginning, he copied and rewrote parts of chapter 4,
breaking new ground with the subchapter of the "Two Grandfathers and a
Twilight Boat Ride," in ""hich Settembrini begins to mutate ever so subtly
from a tiresome "organ grinder" of liberal commonplaces into the voice of a
"New Humanism," Mann's growing concern and pet intellectual project in
the 1920s. During that transitional period, in the summer of 1919, he began to
read Oswald Spengler'S The Decline oj"the West (Der Untersans des Abendlands), which
had appeared the previous year and become a best-seller. Spengler offered a
morphological interpretation of the rise and fall of civilizations and had much
to say about a problem that had been part of Mann's conception from the
start: the phenomenon of time (Das Zeltproblem). His fascination with Spengler
lasted hardly two years. When in 1923 he read an essay critical of Spengler
by the political scientist Ernst Troeltsch, his doubts about the objectionable
aspects of Spengler's fashionable cultural pessimism were confirmed for good.
Nonetheless, traces of Mann's reading of Der UnterBanB des Abendlands do show
up in the second part of The MaBie Mountain.
Before taking up chapter 5, on January 15, 1920, Mann realized that revers-
ing the order of the two first chapters would make a more effective opening.
And indeed, starting with Castorp's arrival in Davos and delaying, as in Death
in Venice, the presentation of the hero's background (in the Hamburg chapter,
now chapter 2), dispelled his lingering doubts about the beginning. At that
stage, much of the writing was done in the "Villino," Mann's retreat in Feldaf-
ing on Lake Starnberg. There, at the house of a friend, he was introduced to
the sonic wonders of a state-of-the-art gramophone with an innovative elec-
tric turntable that improved the sound of recorded music and allowed the
playing of excerpts considerably longer than was heretofore pOSSible. Mann
realized immediately that this was a true "find" and that he would want to
make use of it at a later stage of J)er ZauberberH. When the gramophone does
make its appearance in "Fullness of Harmony," in chapter 7, it takes a spe-
cial bow as what has become one of the showpieces of this novel. In the early
months of 1920, Mann made good progress but knew only too well that he
still had a long way to go. Nonetheless, he felt sufficiently confident to antic-
ipate completion of the work sometime during the following year. And as
 22 Hans RudoljVagel

though he wanted to put even more pressure on himself, in May of that year,
he allowed the Neue Ziircher Zeituns to print the first three sections that make
up chapter I, thereby creating a notable stir of anticipation among the wider
literary public. Now everybody knew that a major new \vork by the author of
Buddenbrooks would soon be forthcoming.
In January 1921, while on a reading tour of Switzerland, he took the oppor-
tunity to reacquaint himself with the setting of his novel. Returning to Davos
after a span of nine years, he felt "as in a dream." For three days, at the height
of the winter season, he wa~ "all eyes," as he wrote to his friend Ernst Bertram.
He attended sports events and paid a courtesy visit to Dr. Jessen, the director of
Katia's Berghof sanatorium, who understood from the publication of the first
chapter that in his afterlife he would forever be known as Hofrat Behrens. By
the middle of March, Mann was ready to tackle "Walpurgis Night," the great
carnival scene that brings chapter 5 to a close. For several reasons, this took
longer than expected. For one thing, the whole scene was to be laced with
intertextual references to the corresponding scene in Goethe's Faust, and for
another, the conversation between Castorp and Madame Chauchat, for psy-
chological reasons, was to be conducted in French. Mann also agonized over
the question of the exact nature of their sexual relationship: should Hans and
Clavdia become lovers on the night of the Walpurgis festivities? Or at a later
date? Or not at alll After attending a performance of Wagner's SieBfried, which
culminates in a no-holds-barred love scene, he was persuaded to opt for their
instant union. Clavdia's memorable line as she retires to her room-"Don't
forget to return my pencil"---settles the question.
At the end of May 1921, another major interruption ensued. Mann had
to prepare a lecture on the topic of "Goethe and Tolstoy," to be delivered in
September in his native city of LUbeck and elsewhereY Further urgent writ-
ing obligations also needed to be dispatched: an essay on 'The Problem of
German-French Relations" and another on "The Jewish Question." As in the
case of the RefLections, these three essays helped Mann clarify in his own mind
certain issues raised by the novel. This is particularly evident in "Goethe and
Tolstoy," which in its revised form runs to 120 pages and is subtitled "Frag-
ments on the Problem of Humanism." He was able to return to The MaBie Moun-
tain on October 15, completing the first section of chapter 6 in a little over six
weeks. That chapter is organized around three high points: the introduction
of the figure of Naphta; Castorp's adventure in a blinding snowstorm-the
philosophical centerpiece of the work; and the death ofJoachim. Of these, the
story ofNaphta is particularly telling. Indications are that Mann had planned
from the beginning to introduce a second mentor as a rival and intellectual
counterweight to Settembrini. He had conceived that figure, who was to be
 The Making of The Magic Mountain 23

called Bunge, as a Protestant minister of a conservative and perhaps even

reactionary bent. But in light of recent political events and as a result of a per-
sonal encounter with Georg Lukacs, this figure was thoroughly reconceived.
This sort 01" fortuitous interplay of disparate factors. personal and historical, is
perhaps the most characteristic feature of the genesis of this book.
Georg Lukacs was a distinguished literary critic who wrote in both Hun-
garian and German. Mann had already taken note of his work and drawn
on one of his essays in Death in Vemce.nln 1918, Lukacs had converted to com-
munism; in 1923 he would publish History and Class Consciousness. one of the
landmarks of Marxist philosophy in the twentieth century. Tn Hungary he
had served as commissioner for education in the short-lived Soviet-style gov-
ernment of Bela Kun; after the overthrow of the Kun regime. Lukacs fled to
Vienna. When the Austrian authorities arrested him. a group of German and
Austrian writers, Thomas Mann among them, Signed a protest that resulted
in Lukacs's release. Mann was aware that this ardent convert to communism
came from a well-to-do Jewish background because whenever he visited
Budapest he frequented the house of Lukacs senior, the banker Joseph von
Lukacs. But Mann had never met the banker's son, now a famous political
refugee, and so on his next visit to Vienna, he vowed to do so. On January
19, 1922, Mann listened for an hour to Lukacs expound on his theories. He
later recalled: "What remained was the impression of a highly abstract mind
bordering on the uncanny, but also of an intellectual purity and nobility."li
About his famous interlocutor Mann further noted, somewhat caustically:
"As long as he was holding forth he was right," implying that that impression
quickly passed as soon as Lukacs stopped talking. That one-hour meeting in
Vienna was all Mann needed to put an unmistakably Lukacsian stamp on the
figure ofNaphta and to fashion this Jew-turned-Jesuit-turned-Marxist into an
advocate of totalitarianism and a defender of terrorism. Fearing that he might
take offense, Mann tried to convince himself that Lukacs would not recognize
his portrait as Naphta. Mann was wrong. But Lukacs, who had pursued an
intellectual love affair with Mann's work ever since reading Tonio Kroser and
who would become Mann's staunchest advocate in the Marxist world, was
generous and defended as a matter of principle the writer's right to portray
living persons. As a public figure, Lukacs argued, one had to accept being
viewed as representative; furthermore, he considered it an honor to be por-
trayed by Thomas MannY
That sentiment was, however, not shared by Gerhart Hauptmann,
Cermany's leading dramatist, when he discovered that Mann had used him
as a model for the figure of Mynheer Peeperkorn. the Dionysian Dutchman
who. with Clavdia in tow, descends on the Magic Mountain in chapter 7. But
 24 Hans Rudolj-Vaget

chapter 7 had yet to take shape in Mann's mind, for there ensued further
interruptions, and chapter 6 was taking much longer than he had reck-
oned; indeed, this would turn out to be the longest chapter of the novel. It
appears that Mann had written five of the eight sections that make up chap-
ter 6 when, in Julv 1922, he set aside the book once again to prepare a major
political address. This was "The German Republic" (Von deutscher Repubhk), to
be delivered in Berlin on October 13. 2°That speech, written in the wake of the
assassination on June 24 of Walther Rathenau, the Cerman minister of foreign
affairs and a prominent Jew, marks a turning point in Mann's political think-
ing. His reorientation was the logical result of the political learning process
triggered by the writing of the Reflections and, to a degree that is difficult to
gauge, by the writing of the novel. Mann invoked the example of the German
romantic poet Novalis and of the American poet Walt Whitman-the one an
icon of conservative thought and inclination, the other an icon of the demo-
cratic spirit Mann now embraced-and declared his support of the embattled
Weimar Republic. And he called on the youth of Germany to do likewise. The
preparation of "Von deutscher Republik," which made Mann a despised fig-
ure among his erstwhile conservative and nationalist admirers, preoccupied
him during the months of July and August of 1922. In September he wrote
the first in a series of eight "German Letters," reports on the German cultural
scene, for the American journal The Dial; these proved to be a much-needed,
stable source of income at a time when inflation had begun to gallop. The
month of October was spent on the road in Germany and Holland, where he
read from his works, including Der ZauberberB, and repeated his Berlin address.
In December 1922 and January 1923, he discovered a new distraction when
he attended a series of parapsychological seances in Munich and reported on
them in a substantive essay, "An Experience in the Occult" (Okkulte Erlebnisse)Y
Much of this essay would be integrated into "Highly Questionable," the third-
from-last section of chapter 7. Once again, in December 1922, Fischer, who
had decided to publish Der Zauberberg in two volumes, announced the publica-
tion of the novel, leading people to believe that 1923 would see its completion
and publication. But that was not to come to pass.
The new year began with Mann continuing his lectures and public read-
ings in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. On April IS, Katia and Thomas
Mann embarked on a preViously planned publicity tour of Spain; they returned
by boat, arriving in Hamburg, Castorp's native city, on May 22. Two weeks
later, Mann invited Bertram to a reading of "Snow," the seventh subchapter
of chapter 6, most if not all of which must therefore have been written before
the departure for Spain. The conclusion of chapter 6, "A Good Soldier," pre-
sumably occupied him during the summer and fall of 1923, with the usual
 The Making of The Magic Mountain 25

interruptions due to trips and other writing commitments, among them a

scenario for a film on the medieval romance of Tristan and Isolde--a project
that came to naught because the filmmakers saw their funds dwindle in the
runaway inflation of that year. Beginning in September, a distraction of an
altogether different kind was added to all the others: galley proof~. For Christ-
mas 1923, the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt was preparing a special edition of Felix
Krull, still a fragment. Soon thereafter the proofs of volume 1 of Der ZauherheT£j.
comprising chapters 1-5, began landing on his desk. Fischer had decided to
go ahead with the printing of volume 1 in order to be ready for a speedy pub-
lication of volume 2 and the release of the overdue novel in its entirety. By
the end of 1923 matters stood as follows: chapters 1 through 5 had been set,
proofread, and printed; chapter 6 had been written but not set; and chapter 7
was still all but nonexistent.
Throughout the fall of 1923, Mann seems to have been intensely preoc-
cupied with clarifying in his O\vn mind the shape and the direction of the
concluding chapter 7, which would lead up to the Great War. On January 27,
1924, he informed Fischer that he was making progress with the final chapter
but that it would be unrealistic to set publication for the summer, since he
intended to honor his usual travel commitments in the spring. Mann now
set a new target date of September 1924 so that the book could appear in time
for the Christmas season. This led Fischer to schedule the successive printing
of all the parts of volume 2 already written and the printing of the remaining
sections as they came off Mann's desk; it also led him to go ahead and give the
green light for the Hungarian and Swedish translations.
Chapter 7 received a tremendous boost, in October 1923, from Mann's
fortuitous encounter with Gerhart Hauptmann, whom he had first met in
1903 at the house of their mutual publisher, Samuel Fischer. Mann's rela-
tionship to the author of Before Sunrise (1889) and of an impressive string of
very successful plays, which had made him the uncrowned king of German
letters, was intensely ambivalent, an uncomfortable mixture of admiration
and envy. In 1922, for Hauptmann's sixtieth birthday, Mann had been his offi-
ciallaudator-a semiofficial duty to which he attended regularly, even after
Hauptmann's death. Now in 1923 they found themselves vacationing with
their families at the same hotel in Bozen (Bolzano), in the Alto Adige, the
German-speaking part of northern Italy. Over wine and conversation, the
two men got along famously, the jovial Hauptmann soon calling his younger
colleague his "brother." As Mann tells the story, seeing the great man on a
daily basis soon produced a "vision" of the larger-than-life character that he
had been looking for in order to complete the novel's last chapter. Such a
towering and memorable figure materialized in Mynheer Peeperkorn, the
 26 Hans Rudoij-Vagel

coffee king from Dutch Indonesia who, by the sheer power of his vitality
and charisma, comes to dwarf Castorp's other two mentors. Peeperkorn,
apart from his function in the larger context of the narrative. turned out
to be the spitting image of Hauptmann in both appearance and manner of
speech, with his incomplete sentences and non sequiturs, his Olympian and
Goethean airs, his priapism. his alcoholism. and more. When Hauptmann
discovered what Mann had done he called him a cad (Schuft). As Hauptmann
saw it. Peeperkorn was drawn as a "moronic pig"; particularly galling must
have been the discovery that Peeperkorn commits suicide when he looses his
sexual potency.
When Mann picked up signals that his caricature of Hauptmann was brew-
ing a scandal. he wrote to his colleague and confessed that if he had "sinned" it
had been in a case of artistic emergency. His novel needed a Peeperkorn; that
figure suddenly became real for him when they were having such a fine time
in Bozen. Mann's letter is a masterpiece of diplomatic double-speak; it borders
on hypocrisy. but it seems to have worked. 2x Hauptmann rose to the occasion
and sent a one-line telegram: "Far from being angry. I greet you with the old
cordiality. Letter follows." No letter followed. Their relationship. remaining
correct on the surface. proved to be irreparable.
As regards the literary and historical ramifications of the Peeperkorn affair,
there is a great deal more to it than meets the eye. for apart from his brother.
Heinrich, no German writer troubled Mann more than Gerhart Hauptmann.
It was Hauptmann who stood in the way to Mann's ultimate goal of achieving
in German culture a preeminence comparable to that of Goethe or Wagner.
Particularly bothersome was Hauptmann's own coquettish self-fashioning as
a second Goethe, when the author of Der Zauberber8 had quite different and
more sophisticated ideas about Goethe and his heritage. In these circum-
stances, Mann could not help but consider Hauptmann an obstacle to the
progress of German literature toward modernism. Figures of Hauptmann's
standing lent credibility to the Germans' veneration of the anti-intellectual
type of Dichter that he embodied, to the detriment of the appreciation of the
more modern and sophisticated type of Schriftsteller represented by Mann. Fur-
thermore. as long as Hauptmann remained a dominant figure, the traditional
predominance in German culture of the drama over the novel would be
maintained. 29 Indeed, to upset that imbalance of power was one of the hidden
agendas of Der Zauberberfl, the most ambitious and challenging and at the same
time entertaining German novel to date. To accomplish such a goal. nothing
short of regicide would do. because only after Hauptmann's literary execu-
tion would it be possible for Mann to live with Hauptmann and to maintain
friendly. though distant relations.
 The Making of The Magic Mountain 27

Mann learned of Hauptmann's death on June 6, 1946, as he was writing

Doctor Faustus, his novel about the role of Cerman culture in the ascendant
history of Nazi Cermany. Two years later, in The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, it was
Mann's turn to rise to the occasion and write a generous and moving trib-
ute to his lately deceased rival. Here he treats with generosity Hauptmann's
foolish dalliance with Nazism, and he speaks movingly of the unique merits
and talents of a man whom he now acknowledges as both a "brother" and
a "father." His summarizing characterization of their relationship-"we had
been friends after a fashion" (elwas Me Freunde)-says it all:~'
The genesis of chapter 7 has as yet not conclusively been chronicled. On
April 29, 1924, Mann informed Bertram that the introductory section, "A
Stroll by the Shore," had just been completed and the shape of the final
chapter as a whole was now clear. In May, Mann spent three weeks travel-
ing in Holland and England. On July 17, he left for the island of Hiddensee
in the Baltic Sea, where Hauptmann maintained a summer residence and
where the two writers spent another two weeks in close proximity. Just prior
to that sojourn, "Fullness of Harmony" was sent to the printer. Because it is
unlikely that Mann had managed to write the five intervening sections in the
roughly seven weeks between his return from London and his departure for
Hiddensee, we must assume that at least some of those sections were written
before the trip to Holland and England. It seems likely, therefore, that at least
parts of the four long sections devoted to Mynheer Peeperkorn were written
in the wake of the earlier encounter with Hauptmann, in October of 1923, and
before the writing of "A Stroll by the Shore," in April 1924.
In the summer of 1924 the production of the two-volume set of Der Zauber-
berg was picking up pace. As soon as a particular section was completed it was
sent to the printer. The last three sections were written, with uncharacteristic
speed, after the Manns' return from their summer vacation on August 26, in
a mere five weeks. "The Great Petulance," the novel's penultimate section, is
remarkable, among other things, for the introduction of the marginal per-
sonage of Wiedemann, the only openly anti-Semitic character not only in
The Magic Mountam but in all of Mann's fiction. Mann's work is populated by
a considerable number ofJewish figures, all of them problematical to a post-
Holocaust sensibility, but nowhere but here, with the figure of Wiedemann,
do we meet a true anti-Semite. Mann's Germany-in The MaBie Mountain,
in Doctor Faustus, and elsewhere-is free of avowed Jew-haters. The fact that
Wiedemann admits to his prejudice, and that Mann registers anti-Semitism
as an element of pre-World War I mentality, is almost certainly attributable
to the recent appearance on the scene in Munich of Adolf Hitler. In Mann's
third "German Letter," written in June 1923, five months before Hitler's failed
 28 Hans RudolfVaget

Putsch, he noted sadly that Munich had become the city of Hitler and of the
swastika, thus becoming the first prominent intellectual figure to register
Hitler on his radar screen.
Mann encountered a final obstacle when he came to write the conclud-
ing battle scene on the muddy fields of Flanders. Having himself no firsthand
experience, he chose an almost cinematic mode of presentation. The closing
pages of the novel therefore exhibit some unexpectedly experimental fea-
tures. Finally, on September 27, eleven years after he began Der Zauherberg. he
was able to put "Finis Operis" at the end of his manuscript.
The two-volume first edition of the novel went on sale two months later,
on November 28, 1924. It met with overwhelmingly positive critical acclaim.
Single-volume printings soon followed. The first English translation by
Helen T. Lowe-Porter appeared in 1927. And in 1929 Mann was awarded the
Nobel Prize in literature. Because Professor Martin B6i:ik, the kingmaker of the
Swedish Academy, disliked Mann's new novel, the prize was awarded nomi-
nally for Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann had been proposed
and recommended to the Academy by the Nobel laureate of 1912, Gerhart
Hauptmann.

Notes

1. "The Making of the Magic Mountain"; Thomas Mann, The MaBie Mountain, trans-
lated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 717-727; "On Myself,"
Thomas Mann, On Myself and Other Princeton Lectures: An Annotated Edition Based on Mann's
Lecture Typeseripls, edited by James N. Bade (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996), H-79.
For a summary account of the novel's geneSiS, d. Heinz Sauerellig, "Die Entstehung
des Romans 'Der Zauberberg,'" BesichtlBunB des Zauberberas, edited by Heinz SauereBig
(Biberach an der R.iB: Wege und Gestalten, 1974), 5-53; Michael Neumann, "Entste-
hungsgeschichte," Thomas Mann, Der Zauberherg. edited by Michael Neumann (frank-
furt am Main: Fischer, 2002), GroBe Kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, 5.2: 9-46
(henceforth GKFA).
2. Mann's comments about his novel have been collected in Dichter Uher ihre Oich-
tunwn. Thomas Mann, part 1: 1889-1917, edited by Hans Wysling and Marianne Fischer
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975),450--592 (hem'eforth: DUD). Mann destroyed all his
pre-1933 diaries in 1946; the reason his journals of 1918-1921 escaped that auto-da-fe
was a practical one. In 1945 he was in the midst of writing Doctor Faustus. for which he
drew extensively on his personal notes of those years.
3. Mann uses the term machtwschiit:te Innerlichkelt in Lelden und CroYle Richard WalJners,
Gesammelte Werke in drel:elm Biinden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990),9: 419 (henceforth
 The Making afThe Magic Mountain 29

Gil'} English version in Thomas Mann, E,.lay.' or Three Dectlde.l, translated bv Hekn T
Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf. 1(47),347.
4. T J. Reed, Thomu.I Manll: The [l.Ie.l "JTradllioll, 2nd ed. (Uxford: Clarendon, 1996),
226.
5. Letter to Ceorge C. Pratt, a literary critic t()r the ehicull" Dady New.', Novemher
24,1933; DUD I: 541; GW 13: 106-107.
6. Foremost among these was the idea of writing a novel ahout the hiblical
"Joseph in Egypt." This idea came to him in May 1922, when he saw in a Munich gal-
lery a series of lithographs hy Hermann Enders illustrating that famous hihlical storv.
Eventually, from this gre\\' the monumental four-part cycle, Joseph und HIS Brother.I, a
project that occupied him for sixteen vears, from 1926 to 1942. This means that as
Mann wrestled with the second half of /ler Zauberber!l' his mind was pregnant already
with the Joseph project.
7. Mann encouraged his admirers to think of his narratives as "good scores"; see
for instance ReflectIOns of a NonpolItical Man, translated with an introduction hy Walter
D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1(83),2.12: "judge what I have done, my works
of art, as you will and must, but they were alwuys !lood score.l, one like the other: musi-
cians have also loved them: Gustav Mahler, for example, loved them, and I have often
wanted musicians as public judges" (emphasis added).
8. Hermann Weigand, The Mallie Mountain: A Study of Thomas Mann's Novel "Der Zauber-
bera" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1%5),95.
9. Advertisement in Frankfurter Zeituna, December 13, 1914.
10. All that has survived are a few discarded drafts of the early parts of the novel;
these are preserved in the Beinecke Library at Yale and have been edited by James F.
White, The Yale-Zauberbera Manuscript· Rejected Sheets Once Part of Thomas Mann's Novel (Berne:
Francke, 1980).
11. See Christian Virchow, "Katia Mann und der Zauberbua," in Auf dem WeB zum
"Zauberbers," Die Davoser LiteraturtaBe 1996, edited by Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1997), 165--186.
12. Letter to Maximilian Harden, August 2,1912: cited in Inge and Walter Jens, Frau
Thomas Mann Vas Leben der Katharina PrinBshelm (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2(03), 93--94.
13. Cf. my essay: " 'Fin Traum von Liehe.' Musik, Homosexualitat und Wagner in
Thomas Manns Der Zauberherll," in Auf clem We!l :um "Zauherbers," DIe Davoser Literaturtaw
1996, edited bv Thomas Sprecher (frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1(97), 111-141.
14. Nietzsche uses the term ZauberherB in the follOWing context: "Now it is as if the
Olympian magic mountain had opened hefore us and revealed its roots to us." This in
response to "wise Silenus's" speech to King Midas: "What is best of all is utterly beyond
your reach: not to be born, not to be, to he nothinll. But the second best for you is-to die
soon." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth or TraHedy, translated hy Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage, 1(67),42.
 30 Hans Rudol{Vagel

15. "Gedanken im Kriege," GW 13: 527-545; "Gute Feldpost," GW 13: 524--527;

"Friedrich und die groBe Koalition," GW 10: 7f:r 135. Only the latter is available in Eng-
lish: "Frederick the Great and the Grand Coalition" in Thomas Mann, Three Essays,
translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1929), 143-215.
16. "Gedanken im Kriege," GW 13: 533.
17. Letter to Paul Amann, August 3, 1915, Thomas Mann, Briefe 11: 1914-1923,
edited by Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini (Frankfurt am Main:
fischer, 2004), GKM 22, 85.
18. Reflections 4a Nonpolitical Man, 49.
19. Indeed, it may be argued that the ramifications of Mann's immersion in the
nationalism and irrationalism of the war years extended far beyond the intellectual
requirements of Der ZauberberIJ and provided him with the experience that prepared
him for the role of critic of Germany that he was to play so courageously in the 1930s
and 1940s. Writing in 1946, Albert 1. Guerad aptly observed: "He [Thomas Mann Jcould
not serve the world so well today if he had not written Betrachtunaen eines llnpolitischen."
Albert L Guerard, "What We Hope from Thomas Mann," American Scholar 15 (January
1946): 35--42.
20. Rejlections of a Nonpolitical Man, 23-24.
21. The Masie Mountain, translated by John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995), xi.
22. "Goethe and Tolstoy." Essays of Three Decades, 93-175. For a thorough and com-
prehensive commentary on this work, see Thomas Mann's "Goethe and Tolstoy": Notes and
SOl/rees, edited by Clayton Koelb, English translation by Alcyone Scott and Clayton
Koelb (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984).
23. Cf. T. J. Reed, Death in Venice: Makins and Unmakins a Master (New York: Twayne,
1994),87.
24. Letter to Ignaz Seipel, n. d. (1929], GW 11: 780-782.
25. Cf. Peter de Mendelssohn, "Nachbemerkung des Herausgebers: in Der Zau-
berbers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981), 1042; see also Judith Marcus, Geors Lukacs and
Thomas Mann: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1987),53-153, who deals exhaustively with the Naphta-Lukacs matter.
26. Thomas Mann, Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades, translated
by Helen T. Lowe-Porter and others (New York: Knopf, 1942),3-45.
27. Three Essays, 219-261.
28. Letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, April 11, 1925, in Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-
1955, selected and translated by Richard and Clara Winston, introduction by Richard
Winston (New York: Knopf, 1971), 140-141.
29. Cf. Hans RudolfVaget, "Thomas Mann, Schiller, and the Politics of Literary
Self-Fashioning," MonatsheJte 97 (2005): 494-510, here 507ff.
30. The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of "Doctor Faustus," translated by Richard and Clara
inston (New York: Knopf, 1961), 194-200.
 Death, Knowledge, and the Formation of Self
The Magic Mountain

MARTIN TRAVERS

• • •

T HE EXPERIENCE OF DEATH is central to all of Mann's early fiction, from

Buddenbrooks (1901) through to Death in Venice (1912). Tonia Kro8er is the only
major work of this period in which that experience is absent; in all of Mann's
other works, death appears either as a brute reality, the inevitable culmination
of physical decline, or, more metaphysically, as the object oflonging, a solution
to the crisis of alienated sensibility that besets many of Mann's early" heroes,"
from little Herr Friedemann (in the short story of that name) through to
Hanno Buddenbrook. To a large extent, this preoccupation with death arises,
quite logically, out of the themes that Mann addressed in this early body of
work: the relationship between knowledge and sickness, between attenuated
sensibility and decadence, and the plight of the artist torn between bourgeois
happiness and artistic vocation. These are themes that belonged to the artistic
generation of fin-de-siecle Europe, who seemed to live permanently in repu-
diation of the comfortable securities of life, and in admiration of all forms of
transcendence, including the ultimate one. Indeed, Mann himself, as a young
man, had not been impervious to the idealism of longing that characterized
the other-worldly temperaments of his generation; nor had he been a stranger
to the experience of death as a fact of family life, as is evident in his sensitive
treatment of the subject in Buddenhrooks.

31
 31 Martil1 Travers

Throughout these early works, Mann leaves the reader in little douht that
although the nature of this longing for death may be noble, being (as its fre-
quent association with music suggests) a precondition for artistic depth, its
physical fact is often brutal and far from noble. Mann takes pains to undermine
the romantic aura surrounding death, both by describing its process in sober-
ing naturalistic detail (as is the case with the death of Hanno Buddenbrook),
and by deflating it in an ironic fashion from within, as he does in his depiC-
tion of the death of Thomas Buddenbrook. Buddenhrook's Schopen hauerian
yearning for transcendence culminates in the bathos of the fatal heart attack
hrought ahout by a broken tooth.
Death represents, then, an ominous attraction that must be resisted but not
ignored. This is Gustav von Aschenbach's fatal flaw; for the sake of producing
a new classicism in his art, one agreeable to official policy, that artist hanishes
from his life as from his work the psychological honesty and essential openness
to experience that makes health possible. Repression of the signs of disease and
the growth of a death wish are not the way to health either for the individual
or for a society; as Nietzsche had argued. the path toward health lies in recog-
nizing decadence and in overcoming it. Thomas Mann himself, writing in 1925,
put it in the following way: "one can come to appreciate life in two ways. The
first way is robust and entirely naive, and knows nothing of death; the other
way is familiar with death. I believe that it is only the latter that has any intel-
lectual value. This is the way chosen by artists, poets and writers."1
If the experience of death is a necessary stage along the road to knowl-
edge from innocence to maturity, the fundamental question arises: "how can
the individual be close to death without belonging to it?" It is this problem
that Mann explored in his longest and, for many readers, his most intellectu-
ally challenging novel, The Ma8ie Mountain, which he began as a short story in
1913, before completing it as a two-volume novel in 1924. The enigmatic title
refers to the Berghof, a Swiss sanatorium where the hero of the novel, Hans
Castorp, has come to visit his cousin who is convalescing from a tuhercular ill-
ness. Intending to stay for three weeks, Castofp remains for seven years, held
in awe by the larger-than-life characters who inhabit this magic realm of the
privileged. and fascinated by the ever-near presence of death. It is here, in an
apparently timeless world dominated by habit and a regime of bodily obses-
sion, that Castorp. the blond young engineer, undertakes a journey of intel-
lectual and moral discovery, moving "in a comically sinister way, through the
spiritual oppositions of humanism and romanticism. progress and reaction,
health and sickness.',2
In undertaking this journey, Castorp also succeeds in overcoming certain
propensities within himself. For Castorp, like so may of Mann's heroes. is a
 Death. Knowledge. and the Formation ofSelj- 33

Biirga manque; he is caught, like Thomas and Hanno Budden brook before
him, between a recognition of the importance of the patrician values of fam-
ily, tradition, and the work ethic, and a realization that he is temperamentally
and physically unable to live up to such ideals or to practice them. As the
narrator frequently asserts, Castorp's defining feature is that he is mltteimiipig
(mediocre, but a description that also connotes one who seeks "modera-
tion and the golden mean ").' Castorp belongs neither to the shadowy world
occupied by the artist figures of Mann's early fiction nor quite to that of the
blue-eved Biirger, the doyen of healthy unself-consciousness, who inhabits a
world of secure values and moral propriety. What distinguishes Castorp from
the latter is a certain inflection of sensibilitv (evident in his feeling for music,
to \vhose "narcotic effect" he regularly gives himself over), but above all, his
early acquaintance with the dead and the dying, which leaves him in a short
span of time without mother, father, and, tinally, grandfather. The process
of this familial tragedy is condensed into one short chapter, a narrative tech-
nique that serves to highlight the impact of the experience on the suggestible
young Castorp, as the ritual and ceremony of bereavement for the loved ones
imprints on the carte blanche of his senSibility firm impressions of the "sadly
beautiful" state of death (26/46). Standing in front of his grandfather's bier,
witnessing a phenomenon that is part noble resolution, part physical decay,
Castorp develops (as we learn later) a spiritual craving to take suffering and
death seriously.
This feeling for the "transcendent strangeness" of death is reawakened in
the youthful Castorp when he visits his ailing cousin, Joachim Ziemssen. The
latter came to the sanatorium to seek a cure for a minor ailment but becomes,
like the other dwellers of this "magic mountain," seduced into the many hab-
its and rituals that constitute its regime of sickness. The sanatorium is much
more than a medical institution; it is a self-perpetuating community, with
its own laws and customs, goals and values, where a privileged elite remain
victims "of monotony, of an abiding now, of eternalness" (181/280). "Fed up"
and "cynical," the inhabitants of this world-the ailing Russian aristocrats,
German financiers, and English gentility-fill their lives with a round of
petty activities: meals, medical consultations, and parlor games. Even the
staff work "With no real devotion to [their] profession, but lare] kept restless
by curiosity and the burden of boredom" (10/22). The guiding principle of
this community, its raison d'etre, is sickness. This is evident not just in the
maladies suffered by its inhabitants but more concretely in their welcom-
ing of disease as a mark of honor, as a confirmation of their elect status. The
patients of the sanatorium, spurred on by the director, the doyen and the
theoretician of the ailing body, Hofrat Behrens, are proud of their illnesses,
 34 Marlin Travers

and talk of acquiring them as a "talent." When they describe the air of the
mountains as "good for illness," the narrator leaves the ambiguity uncor-
rected. As Castorp himself soon notes, up here "anyone vvho had the honor
of being healthy didn't count" (79/126).
The sanatorium represents, then, a world set apart from the normal; it is a
"magic" mountain, inhabited by a priVileged clique whose members have cho-
sen to flee from history into a sphere hermetically sealed from the social and
political changes that are taking place in pre-World War I society. But these
characters live not only beyond history; they also exist beyond time, or at least
in a realm characterized by a quite singular notion of time, one that possesses
the "magical" proportions of circularity and repetition, where even the sea-
sons fail to follow their conventional chronology. In such a society, the notion
of objective time makes no sense; as Castorp soon realizes, the same unit of
time can be both long and short, depending on how the individual responds
to the regime of habit that dominates the lives of the inmates. It also possesses
the quality of circularity; turning in on itself, it serves to keep the patients of
the sanatorium locked within a hermetic sphere where they are unable "to
differentiate between 'still' and 'again,' out of whose blurred jumble emerges
the timeless 'always' and 'ever' " (535/822). Relativism and fluidity of time pose
problems for those characters, such as Castorp's cousin, who see themselves
as still part of the normal world of goal-orientated action and achievement;
but for Hans Castorp, they proVide the necessary medium for introspection,
and a chance to experiment with established notions of truth, morality, and
self, a process that he refers to as reBieren (taking stock of matters, gUiding the
self) (404/621)'
Castorp is helped along this path of self-discovery by a number of exceptional
individuals. The first is the young Russian emigre Clavdia Chauchat. With her
high cheekbones and challenging demeanor, Chauchat reawakens in Castorp
long-suppressed sexual stirrings, first experienced with his childhood friend
Pribislav Hippe. Exotic, both in terms of his (Slavonic) ethnic background and
also in terms of his sexual status, Hippe reoccurs as a leitmotif throughout the
story, appearing in Castorp's imagination whenever the latter feels distant from
the restrictive ethos of bourgeois society, only to disappear again back into the
unconscious of hero and text alike.
Clavdia Chauchat exercises a consistent erotic influence on Castorp.
Whenever she appears to the latter, it is her body that attracts the narrative
focus. Like Hippe, she too possesses eyes of an ambiguous color, which speak
of the unobtainable and the illicit; indeed, her entire being exudes a moral
ambivalence (nachliissise Haltunil) that both fascinates and repels the bourgeois
Castorp (123/191). Chauchat is to be an important influence on Mann's hero,
 Death. Knowledge. and the Formation ofSelj' 3S

not because their association culminates in an amorous involvement (she

soon leaves the sanatorium to return later in the novel accompanied by her
"guardian," the charismatic personality Pieter Peeperkorn) but because she
unlocks an essential and repressed component of Castorp's psyche: a feeling
that love and death are somehow equated. C1avdia Chauchat comes to repre-
sent for Castnrp an exotic terrain beyond the confines of bourgeois existence.
Their relationship culminates in an extended conversation held (in French)
during the carnival celebrations for Sbrove Tuesday, when in the aptly titled
chapter "Walpurgis-Night," Castorp comes under her inHuence to espouse a
witches' brew of dubious tendencies centered on the powerful alliance between
the body, love, and death. On the eve of her departure from the sanatorium,
Castorp concludes his confession of love for the enigmatic Cham-hat with a
testimony to those late-Romantic values that he has since childhood found
irresistible: "The body, love and death, are simply one and the same. Because
the body is sickness and depravity, it is what produces death, yes, both of
them, love and death, are carnal. and that is the source of their terror and
great magic!" (336-337/519).
This romantic equation is all the more attractive to Castorp because he has
already, by this stage, begun a reassessment of the value of sickness. Inspired
by the example of Herr Albin, a young man who has renounced all contact
with the flatland below, Castorp begins to relax his own hold on bourgeois
propriety and, putting himself in the place of the dissolute and nihilistic Albin,
begins to appreciate "how it must be when one is finally free of the pressures
honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of dis-
grace" (79/125). This reference to freedom needs to be noted, for Castorp's
empathy with Albin is symptomatic of his growing feeling that the regime of
sickness that reigns on the magic mountain can provide the basis for a sense
of personal liberation unattainable in the "normal" world beyond the sana-
torium. Castorp gradually begins to acclimatize himself to the regime of the
sanatorium, accepting its social customs and surrendering to the various rou-
tines that center on the care and control of the body. He comes to accept the
habits of the convalescent. Measuring his temperature each day, he is proud
when the mercury rises, and gives himself over to the comforts of the patients'
reclining chair, whose "almost mysterious properties" induce a total feeling of
cocooned passivity (101/158). Above all, Castorp now rediscovers that earlier
ominous respect for death and things connected with death, a recognition
that he elaborates into a conviction that seems to signal a final leave-taking
from the flatland of conventional society: "one assumes stupid people must
be healthy and vulgar, and that illness must ennoble people and make them
wise and special" (95/149).
 3b Martil1 Travers

Such sentiments suggest that Castorp has joined those artist figures in
Mann's early work who are irretrievably locked into that late-Romantic par-
adigm of excessive sensibility, erotic sensation, and social alienation. As he
finally brings himself to write the letter to his uncle down below, indefinitely
extending his stay in the sanatorium, Castorp seems to have reached the end
of a familiar line of development for the heroes of Mann's early work; only
Tonw Kro'tler ends on a positive note, with the hero discovering an irrepressible
respect for "normal" values. But this is a respect that looks for fulfilment in
the future, not in the present, and the reader leaves that particular work with
a sense of matters incomplete, resolutions as yet unfulfilled. It is to be left to
Hans Castorp, the blond young engineer with the faint taint of tuberculosis,
to give a substance to Tonio Kroger's rather too blithe optimism about the
chances of reconciling health and knowledge, the bourgeois and the artistic. It
is Castorp's task to overcome the Schopenhauer-inspired pessimism inscribed
into Mann's early worldview, and to grope toward the basis of a new human-
ism. Writing in 1927, Mann outlined the terms of this learning process in the
following way: "The German reaches God by going through the demolition
of dogma and the desolation of nihilism; he arrives at the community by first
experiencing the depths ofloneliness and individualism, and he reaches health
only by acquiring final knowledge of sickness and death."4
Castorp, then, is to undergo a formation of self, and break through his
affinity with death and sickness into a higher state of being where he can,
on the basis of full experience, assert the primacy of a humanistic vision. In
giving literary substance to this process of formation, Mann drew on a genre
that had traditionally found its greatest exponents among German novelists:
the Bildun8sroman ("the novel of personal formation"). The classic works of this
genre, which include some of the greatest novels in the German language,
such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796), Adalbert Stifter's Indian
Summer (1857), and Gottfried Keller's Green Henry (1879), trace their heroes'
development from individualistic and somewhat naive self-assertion through
to acceptance of a broader ethical commitment to their respective societies.
Above all, the Bildun8sroman charts the process of growth and the overcom-
ing of adversity. As the philosopher and literary theorist Wilhelm Dilthey
noted: "The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary grO\vth
points through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity and
harmony.'"
The Magic Mountain may be viewed as a Bildungsroman, but it is one that regis-
ters many departures from the earlier classical models. The context of Hans
Castorp's process of self-formation is not SOCiety but the hermetic world of the
sanatorium. It is here that he encounters a number ofinfluences, positive and
 Death. Knowledge. and the Formation ojSelj 37

negative. He is first confronted with forms of medical kmwiledge that pretend

to offer an insight into his inner self: psychoanalysis and X-ray photography.
Both, quite clearly, use different means to reach different parts of the bod v,
but they have one thing in common: each attempts to illuminate the infected
areas of the patient's inner self, and has, as its natural goal, the discovery of
sickness, not health. Hofrat Behrens thinks of himself as "an artist" who is also
"part-time physician, physiologist, and anatomist with some intimate knowl-
edge of life's undergarments," and his interest in the body oscillates between
scientific analysis and voyeurism. He shares with his psychoanalytic colleague
Edwin Krokowski (who wears black to indicate that his proper field of study is
the darker side of personality), the conviction "the very riddle of life itself ...
might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of ill-
ness, than by the direct road of health" (255/392,644/991). The director and his
assistant are, in fact, part of the regime of illness that reigns in the sanatorium,
and confirm rather than disrupt Castorp's preexisting penchant toward mor-
bidity and the romanticization of death. To overcome this propensity, Castorp
must look elsewhere, beyond the realm of the sanatorium.
Ludovico Settembrini is one such influence. Although he too is a patient
at the sanatorium, it is Significant that the Italian lives apart from that institu-
tion, in independent accommodation in the village below, closer to the "nor-
mal" society beyond the magic mountain. Settembrini, poet, pedagogue, and
man of letters, is a fervent critic of the Sickly ethos that pervades the sana-
torium. Although in many external respects a comic figure, Settembrini, by
casting Castorp in the role of "Odysseus in the realm of the shades" is the first
to alert the reader to the fact that the hero of the novel has embarked not
just on a medical cure but a spiritual journey (56/90). His Latin dictum placet
experiri ("he desires to experiment") is a neat tag for Castorp's attitude toward
his new experiences on the magic mountain. Settembrini is a character rare
in Mann's fiction, for he represents a first attempt to define intellectual depth
outside of the heritage of ideas left by that constellation of mentors who gov-
ern Mann's early work: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche. Settembrini is
both a rationalist and a humanist, a believer in progress as a force for political,
social, technological, and scientific change. Settembrini is a self-styled advo-
cate of European Enlightenment, and a radical opponent of the varieties of
"darkness," intellectual and moral, that he sees as constituting late-Romantic
thought. He endeavors, in a number of far-reaching discussions with Castorp,
to dissuade the latter from his growing sympathy with disease, music, and
death.
Settembrini is, at times, a sententious and bombastic dialectician; but
he does have a positive effect on Castorp who, under his influence, starts
 38 Marlin Travers

to view critically the mystique of illness that is such a powerful presence

on the magic mountain. He is on the point of accepting his mentor's ideas
when a second powerful intellectual force appears to challenge the humanist
ideals expounded by Settembrini. Leo Naphta, a renegade Jesuit with Marx-
ist leanings, represents a philosophy that completely negates the humanism
of Settembrini, and in a series of intellectual disputations forces Castorp to
reconsider the humanistic philosophy that he was slowly coming to accept.
Espousing a philosophy compounded out of medieval scholasticism and late
Romanticism, Naphta, in his first two dialogues, turns Settembrini's world-
view on its head: not the individual but the state, not internationalism but
nationalism, not freedom but belonging, not the political but the religiOUS, not
rcason but terror, not self-expression but asceticism constitute the ways that
govern the world. Believing that Cod and the Devil "were one, were united in
their opposition to life," Naphta is a master of paradoxes and an exponent of a
nihilism, the contours of which hover disturbingly around Castorp's personal
development (454/698). [n his explicitly political views, Naphta rejects the
"bourgeois" heritage of parliamentary democracy and, styling himself as a "a
revolutionary of reaction" (etn[en] RevolutlOniir der ErhaltunB), embraces a politics
that clearly anticipates the fascist models of the state that were to develop in
the 1920s and 1930s in Italy and Germany (452/694).
As Castorp himself soon realizes, the continuing debates between these two
"opposed spirits" constitutes, in effect, a struggle for his soul, "like God and
the Devil struggling over a man in the Middle Ages" (468/719). When, after one
particularly heated debate, Castorp asks himself where the true position lies,
"the true state of man," he can find no answer, because, in spite of his modest
contributions to the disputations between Naphta and Settembrini, Castorp
has remained up to this point a passive onlooker, the object rather than the
subject of the elaborate intellectual dialectic charted in the novel. That posi-
tion changes quite radically in the chapter titled "Snow." Here, in an attempt
to clarify his thoughts regarding all he has learned and experienced, Castorp
takes himself alone into the "blinding chaos" of the treacherous snowfields a
good distance from the sanatorium. This trip into the snow is, however, much
more than a day outing to clear the head. As the narrator's qualifying references
to "deathly silence," "sleep," and the "unconscious burden" suggest, Castorp is
undertaking a metaphorical journey into himself, to confront his own fascina-
tion with death, "the wave itself, the gorge, the sea," and to establish, once and
for all, whether he is strong enough to withstand that fascination when the
chance of turning it into a reality finally presents itself (467/718).
The imagery of the "Snow" chapter, in fact, metonymically echoes the
intellectual terminology of the preceding chapters where Castorp has been a
 Dearh, Know {edge. and [he Formariol1 of Selj 39

witness to the disputes hetween Naphta and Settemhrini. There we were told
that Castorp had heen more confused than enlightened hy the erudite pyro-
technics of the Settembrini-Naphta dehates, unable to come to terms with the
"varied impressions and adventures, which were not easy to sort out, because
they often seemed interlaced, hlending into one another until palpable real-
ity was often no longer distinguishable from what had merely been thought,
dreamed or imagined" (3S1/585). This is exactly the spectrum of mental states
that Castorp must grapple with in his foolhardy venture in the snow. As he
notes at one point in his predicament, the "ghostly pantomime was extremely
entertaining. You had to pay close attention to catch each stealthy change in
the misty phantasmagoria" (463/711). But now that mental threat has become
a physical one, and loss of self means not intellectual confusion but very extinc-
tion, death. He later hemoans the fad that he has become lost in "a chaos of
white darkness," the oxymoron standing for the frequent paradoxes in the
thinking of Naphta, who now returns "in Spanish black with a snow-white,
pleated ruff," as if to emphasise the continuity between physical and intellec-
tual destitution that constitute the two poles (and the novel thrives on such
binary oppositions) between which Castorp must seek his path. Settembrini's
comment that Castorp is "in danger" is fully recognized by the young hero,
who feels that he is being sucked further and further into Naphta's "morally
chaotic void" (459/705).
Castorp's journey takes him "higher and higher towards the sky" (glowing
with an ethereal blue that was a sign of dissolution for the German Romantics),
and farther and farther away from recognizable landmarks and, hence, possible
assistance. The journey allows Castorp to take stock of the varied personal
and intellectual influences to which he has been subject during his stay on the
mountain: the well-meaning "wind bag" Settembrini, the more sinister figure
of Naphta, "that knife-edged little Jesuit and Terrorist," and finally Clavdia
Chauchat, with her disturbing likeness to Castorp's boyhood friend with the
"wolf's eyes" (469/721).
Castorp leaves them all behind, as he ventures yet deeper into a snow-
storm, deliberately trying to get lost. It is here, in the heart of this "whirl-
ing nothingness," that he must confront that part of himself that wishes to
surrender to the "merciful narcosis" of the snow, and clarify his relationship
with the seductive philosophy of sickness and death embodied in the ethos of
the sanatorium and given an intellectual footing by the theories of Naphta.
Bemused contemplation now must give way to determined action, one way
or the other; he must choose life or death. To choose the latter would mean
a consummation with "the bride of the storm," a particular marriage of ail-
ing body and late-Romantic intellect into which a number of Mann's heroes
 40 Marrin Travers

hefore him, such as Hanno Buddenbrook and Gustav \·on Aschenbach had, in
their different ways, willingly entered, and for which his experiences on the
mountain had more than adequately prepared him. To choose the former,
the way of life, would mean a ne\\" start, or a new regaining of those aspects of
his "unmagic" past, the "shabby bourgeoisiosity of life, philistine irreligiosity"
that he had come to despise (476/731).
Castorp chooses life, and. on its hasis. erects a vision of the future that
transcends not only the unthinking health of the flatland but also the intel-
lectual "knowledge" met with on the mountain. Momentarily resting from
the exertions hrought about hy his will to survive in a rare spot of shelter,
he experiences a vision of a fecund. southern clime inhabited by "children
of the sun," who, forming a community of mutual reverence. seem to have
found the perfect compromise between the hody and the intellect, hetween
individualism and the community, he tween austerity and "an ineffable
spiritual influence, earnest yet never gloomy, devout yet always reasonable"
(483/742). Castorp, the embodiment of Mittelm~~i8keit, of "mediocrity" and
"averageness," has come to find the golden mean between the extremes of
Naphta and Settemhrini, replacing their dubious influences hy a third: that of
the Homo Dei, the lord of counterpositions who occupies that privileged posi-
tion between the dignity and moral seriousness of death and the health and
animal nature of life. Fully recognizing that "death is a great" power (a rec-
ognition that the somnolent hero is compelled to register in his grisly vision
of the witches' sacrifice). Castorp is nonetheless capable of winning through
to a perception of humanistic maturity. which finds expression in a famous
formulation: "For the sake of 800dness and love, man shall want death no dominion over his
thoughts" (487/748).6
The concluding section of the "Snow" chapter marks a high point in Castorp's
personal development. As if in recognition of this. Mann accords increasingly
less space to the debates between Naphta and Settembrini that follow Cas-
torp's important experience. Incapable of intellectual resolution, their appar-
ently interminable disputations can only he stilled by a violent action that
calls into question the validity of their respective philosophies. As if affected
by the atmosphere of the "acute petulance" and "nameless impatience" that
becomes increasingly evident in the sanatorium as Europe heads toward World
War I. Naphta and Settembrini agree on a radical solution to their dialectical
impasse (673/1034). Following one particularly acrimonious debate, where
they exchange mutual accusations about the willful misleading of youth and
moral conduct, Naphta challenges Settembrini to a duel. In the tragicomic
scene that follows, the two antagonists confront one another at short distance
with pistols drawn: Settemhrini shoots first, humanist to the last, in the air;
 Death. Kl1owledge. al1d the Formation ofSelj 41

l'\aphta, the grim anti-humanist, takes perfen aim, and shoots into his (J\\n
forehead.
Long before this violent confrontation, Naphta and Settembrini had been
displaced in Castorp's affections by vet a further character in the novel, Pieter
Peeperkorn. With his broad chest and regal countenance, his irrepressible good
humor and gargantuan appetites, Peeperkorn becomes the final and most vital
influence on Castorp. Beside the bulk and energ\' ofPeeperkorn, his two other
"over-vocal mentors" seem like dwarfs, their confusing disputations an cmpt\'
rhetoric when compared with the "leaping spark of wit" that shines through
the admittedly rambling but nonetheless energizing anecdotes and narratin's
produced by the burly Dutchman. What Castorp discmers in Peeperkorn is,
above all, the force of personality; in one of his last conversations with Sl'ttcm-
brini, Castorp explains it in the following way: "I am talking about a mystery
that extends beyond stupidity or cleverness .... And if you are for values, then.
in the end, personality is a positiw value, too ... positive in the highest degree,
absolute(y positive. like life itself" (.'i74/RR3).
As the personification of the simple values of humanity, whi,'h Castorp
has so recently discovered, Peeperkorn is an important messenger of life; but
he is not an unambiguous one. In his imposing corporeality and carnivalis-
tic high spirits, he is in a long line of larger-than-life confidants who have
regularly appeared in European fiction since Dickens. And yet there is more
than a trace of irony in the narrator's treatment of Peeperkorn; for the burly
mentor is, like all who dwell on the magic mountain (including the enigmatic
Clavdia Chauchat, who now makes a reappearance as his consort), diseased,
the victim of a series of bodily appetites that frequently lead to overindulgence
and intemperance. The "classic gifts of life" (which he so frequently espouses
in grandiloquent terms) consist almost entirely in eating and drinking, a fact
that is not lost on the narrator, who at the very end of one of Peeperkorn's
most impassioned speeches, expounding a form of hedonistic pantheism,
cannot resist a concluding ironic comment: " 'Man is nothing more than the
organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxi-
cated life. And if man fails to feel, it is an eruption of divine disgrace; it is the
defeat of Cod's manly vigor, a cosmic catastrophe, a horror that never leaves
the mind-.' He drank" (594/913). Peeperkorn's philosophy, with its insis-
tence on the primacy of experience, comes paradoxically close to that held
by the life-denying Naphta, because it pursues pleasure to a point of intensity
where the self loses all sense of its individuality and moral identity. His end-
ing, thus, comes as no surprise; too old, tired, and ill to live out his hedonistic
ideals to the full, the sensual "instrument of God's marriage" chooses death in
preference to a life of diminishing prowess.
 4.2 Marrin Travers

What the episode with Peeperkorn shows is that the cult of the person-
ality possesses its own insidious mysticism. On Castorp. it has the effect of
undermining much of the rational humanism that Settembrini had installed
in his pupil, as well as reactivating Castorp's susceptibility to the romantic
lure of dissolution and loss of self. Quite typically. it is the highly irrational
(but, for Mann, quintessentially Cerman) art form, music, which provides
the medium through which Castorp can at least partially satist)' such incli-
nations. 'T(")ward the end of his period in the sanatorium, a gramophone is
supplied. It opens up a new terrain of emotional and aesthetic experience, as
he gives himself OWl' to the intoxication of musical transport: "Every fullness
held back up to now was realized for one fleeting moment, which contained
within it the perfect blissful pleasures of eternity .... It was depravity with the
best of consciences, the idealized apotheosis of a total refusal to obey Western
demands for an active life" (637/980).
Here, after so many years of hermetic-pedagogic diSCipline, of ascent from
one stage of being to another. Castorp uses this musical occasion as the con-
text for reflection. Just as in the classic Bildunt/sroman the hero comes to acquire
a higher wisdom, which allows him a greater insight into the relationship
between self and others, so too in Mann's novel Hans Castorp has reached
the point where, through music, he has come into contact with the "blessed
hush" that exists behind the bustle of the world and its intellectual fa~ades.
It is not, however, until Castorp hears a subsequent piece of music, the song
"Am Brunnen vor dem Tore," a central Lied in Schubert's song cycle Die Winter-
reise, that he is able to give a name to this new reality with which he feels such
an affinity: "It was death" (642/988).
Writing to the literary critic Ernst Fischer in 1926, barely two years after
the publication of The MaBie Mountain, Mann argued that the only way the
novel could be regarded as being part of the "revival of the German BildunB-
sroman" was as a "parody" of that genre.? Such an assessment seems, at first
sight, to be borne out by Castorp's admission of his fatal attraction to music
and to that nebulous metaphysical world that it helps him to see. Rut is this
the same concept of death that had such a negative hold on the young Cas-
torp, seven years before, at the beginning of his stay on the magic mountain?
There are signs that it is not; but they are only signs. His comments on the
seductive alignment between music and otherworldly longing are certainly
reflective and of some sophistication, but so was Aschenbach's elaborate
employment of classical Greek philosophy in Mann's earlier novella, Death in
Venire, which was there intended to hide, from protagonist and reader alike,
the far from noble changes taking place in the psychology of that character.
As with Aschenbach, so with Castorp: at what point is it possible to establish
 Death, Knowledge, and [he Formation ofSelj 43

where the theoretical triumph oyer desire elides into its rationalization)
The reader, following the example provided by the "Snmv" chapter, might
well expect the final actions of the hero to provide the answer to the central
question posed by the nOYeI: what has Castorp actually learned? The nar-
rator not only refuses to solve the enigma but also dismisses its relevance,
noting that "we arc not really bothered about leaving the question open"
(706/1085).
Instead of providing a clarification of, or neat resolution to, C:astorp's fate,
the final chapter simply adds one more puzzling episode to the enigma of
Hans Castorp's "development." For our hero has returned to the flatland of
the normal world, not to resume his profession hut to enlist in one of the
many volunteer regiments that sacrificed Themselves in the hopeless hattles
on the Western Front in the early years of World War I. The elaborate and some-
times painful process ofintellectual formation that Castorp experienced on the
magic mountain seems, as he moves forward, surrounded hy his dead com-
rades, singing the same Schuhert song that had first reawakened his darkly
romantic instincts, ahout to he undone. And yet, as the heightened language
of the narrator in this final episode seems to suggest, all may not be lost. To die
in a spirit of determined idealism born out of a feeling for the darker recesses
of German Romanticism may, in the final analYSis, be all that Castorp knows;
but it is not all that he has known. Even if it does appear that Castorp, after
an elaborate process of self-formation, has come full circle, to embrace what
he always was, the memory of the journey that he and we, the readers, have
undertaken may remain as a "dream of love" to be set against the somber
irony of the Castorp's ending (706/1085).
But must we necessarily view Castorp's concluding conduct in a negative
light? Earlier in the novel, in one of his tete-a.-tetes with Castorp, Settem-
brini had prophesied: "one assumes you will seek to hreak out of your isola-
tion with deeds" (508/780). Indeed, is this not the most appropriate context
to judge Castorp's final actions? The novel makes it guite clear that Castorp
moves through the battlefield with deliberation and courage. It also makes
it quite dear that he will die. But the important consideration is that he dies
knowingly, Castorp does not succumb to death; he chooses it, thus moYing
himself, for the first time in the novel, from a passive to an active subject of
the narrative. Death represents the culmination of a personal philosophy for
which he has never found the words in his process of BzldunR on the magic
mountain, being caught (at times, speechless) between the diyergent and
rhetorically angular discourses of Settembrini and Naphta. Action, then, is
Castorp's answer to relativism ofhoth kinds. Death, indeed, can be redeemed,
but only as a conscious act imposed on life.
 44 Marlin Travers

Notes

I. See Mann's "Tischrede bei der Feier des fUnfzigsten Ceburtstags," given in 1925
and republished in DIchter iiber Ihre Dlchtunwn, Volume 6.1, Thomas Mann, Part 1: 1889-1917,
edited by Hans Wysling, with Marianne Fischer (Frankfurt am Main: fischer, 1975),
500 (my translation).
2. See Mann's letter to Paul Amann of August 1915. Reprinted ihid., 455--456, here
455 (my translation).
3. Thomas Mann, The MaBlc Mountain, translated from the Cerman by John E.
Woods (New York: Knopf, 1997),31 and 494. For the German source, see Thomas Mann,
Der ZauberherB' herausgegeben und textkritisch durchgesehen von Michael Neumann
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 53 and 759. f'uture parenthetical references in the
text are to both editions, with the German edition following the English one.
4. See "Zur BegrUlIung Cerhart Hauptmanns in MUnchen," first published in
1926, and reprinted in Wysling, ed., DIchter uher Ihre Dlchtunwn, 6.1: 521-522, here 522 (my
translation).
5. Quoted from Martin Swales, The German BlIdun!lsroman ji-om WIeland to Hesse (Prince-
ton: Princeton lJ niversity Press, 1978),3.
6. The italics are Mann's, and rare in his novels.
7. From The Letters of Thomas Mann, selected and translated by Richard and Clara
Winston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 136-137, here 137.
 Photography and Bildung
in The Magic Mountain
ERIC DOWNING

• • •

I N THIS CHAPTER, I want to piece together an argument for how The

MaBie Mountain is a BildunBsroman and is not one, and is rather an EntwieklunB-
sroman, that is, a novel of development; and I want to try to account for these
distinctions in terms of the insinuation of photography into the thematic
space traditionally occupied by painting within the BildunBsroman genre. How,
I want to ask, does the introduction of the discursive or metaphorical regime
of the photograph fundamentally alter the project of BildunB, including the
characteristic engagement of Bilder (pictures) in its program:!
On his first evening at the Berghof sanatorium, after dining in the
restaurant with his cousin, Joachim, Hans Castorp is introduced to Edhin
Krokowski. We hear of Krokowski's incredibly pale, almost white pallor, set
off against his black eyes and brows and even more against his black suit and
shoes. And we hear of a peculiar feature of this suit, "a soft floppy collar such
as Hans Castorp had seen only once before, on a photographer in Danzig, and
indeed it did impart something of the studio to Dr. Krokowski's appearance"
(29/16f The identification of Krokowski as a photographer, whom we soon
discover to be something of a psychoanalyst, happens only this once, when he
is first introduced. It is, however, enough, especially since Mann never ceases
to describe him in such (photographically) black-and-white terms; nor does
the doctor himself ever stop wearing his photographer'S outfit.

45
 46 Eric Downing

Walter Benjamin reminds us that the advent of psychoanalysis coincides

with that of photography. and however parodied in the figure of Krokowski.
we also know that psychoanalysis in The Maflie Mountain remains one of the
more important sites for both a reconception of the subject and. more press-
ingly. for the imposition of an interceding practice of social supervision for the
production of the "truth" of the individual-which is to say. for his Bildunfl,
his Entwlcklunfl.' Moreover, Krokowski is hardly alone in his association of the
photographic with such mechanisms of social supervision and subject forma-
tion; as we will see, in one way or another. each of Hans Castorp's primary
pedagogical intluences is situated within the metaphorical field of photogra-
phy and its model of development. The question provoked. then. by both the
initial description of Krokowski and the subsequent situation of Hans's men-
tors and his Bilduntj w'ithin the new discursive field. is this: how exactly does
photography figure in this refiguring of both the conception of the subject
and the practices of Bildul1tj?
Perhaps the best place to look for an answer is to focus on the narrator's
initial reference to Hans as "this unwritten page" (dies unbeschnehene Blatt, 55/35).
As we know, the tabula rasa is a rather set trope for the subject of Bilduntj at
least since Locke in the seventeenth century, and it well suits the eighteenth-
and early-nineteenth-century contlation of Bildung and Bilder (pictures), the
characteristic depiction of subject formation as a kind of surface inscription in
which writing and painting seamlessly merge. In a slightly later chapter in The
Magic Mountain, however, Settembrini revises and improves on the trope in a
highly revealing way. He says, "The gifted young man is no unwritten page [or
'unpictured surface'], but rather one on which everything has been inscribed,
so to speak, with invisible ink, the good with the bad. And it is the educator's
task deciSively to develop (entwickeln) the good, but forever to obliterate the
false that would come forth" (142/98).
Settembrini reformulates the basic premises of the image of the subject as
a tabula rasa in terms that are recognizably photographic; that is, the newly
emergent medium seems to have informed the conventional topos, and simul-
taneously to have altered its traditional representation of both the self and its
Btldung. The blank page or Blatt of the self has been refigured as much like a
photographiC plate or Platte; the clean slate or tabula has become. so to speak,
the only seemingly opaque tablet (Tafe/chen) of a photographiC negative, with
all its invisible "script" (cf. 540/382). As such, the subject. rather than being
simply inscribed or painted (Beblldet), is to be developed (entwickelt); or, more
precisely. having first been "exposed" and taken on or in its impressions from
the oLltside world-and in this respect \ve mLlst understand the sustained
emphasis on Hans Castorp as "receptive" (aufnahmelustlfl or aufnahmefiihlH)-the
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic MOllntain 47

subject is then to be developed, hrought out and, finally, potentially, "fixed"

or hefestiBt (d, 139/96).
The new notion of character-and, implicitly, of memory-suggested
by Settembrini's reformulation of the tabula rasa motif and its relation to the
field of photography is hardly unique to Mann. Rather, many of his modernist
contemporaries were similarly engaged in rethinking the model of the psyche
and its mnemonic apparatus, often focusing on precisely those same new
properties of the "plate" introduced by Settembrini, and doing so even more
explicitly in terms ofthe new technological medium. Among those figures are
Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, and Walter Benjamin, and, perhaps most useful
for an analysis of Settembrini's reformulation, Sigmund Freud. For without
anything like a direct connection, and despite the known skepticism tow'ard
Freud expressed by Mann, both Mann and Freud-like their French con-
temporaries-found themselves similarly registering the impact of this new
recording system on their conception of the suhject.
Perhaps the most basic property and far-reaching aspect of the (relatively)
new apparatus of photography attributed by Freud to his equally new psychi-
cal apparatus is what he famously calls latency or Nachtrii8ilchkeit.< For example,
in Moses and MonotheISm (1939), Freud describes the "uncomfortable discovery"
that "the strongest compulSive influence arises from impressions which
impinge themselves on a child at a time when we would have to regard his
psychical apparatus as not yet completely receptive. The fact itself cannot be
doubted; but it is so puzzling that we may make it more comprehensible by
comparing it with a photographic exposure which can be developed after any
interval of time and transformed into a picture."5
This model of latency and the specific conception of belated personal
development it entails clearly present a challenge to the sequential unfolding
and historical continuity of the subject traditionally assumed by Bilduna-what
D. A. Miller calls the nineteenth century's "genetic" notion of both narrative and
character-as well as to its assumption of its subject as always somehO\v (even
if ever increasingly) evident. h Instead, the new model introduces a potentially
radically staggered, nonsequential, and nonevident model for subject t()rma-
tion, or as Freud puts it, for a "compulsive influence" exercised on the subject's
identity. And the model clearly corresponds quite closely with that elucidated
by Settembrini in the passage cited above. Each involves a similar, new dialectic
of the latent and manifest that opens up a temporal gap between the negative,
unconscious plate of the self and its eventual manifest representation-preciselv
that gap into which the process of dewlopment inserts itself.
Freud also evokes photography in a passage from "Resistance and Repres-
sion" (1917) in order to account for the issue that is most personally central
 48 Eric Downing

to Settemhrini's reformulation, namely the matter of selection: the idea that

certain scripts, impressions, or images get developed and others do not. Freud
writes: "Let us assume that every mental process ... exists to begin with in an
unconscious stage or phase, just as a photographic picture hegins as a negative
and only hecomes a picture after heing turned into a positive. Not every nega-
tive. however, necessarily hecomes a positive; nor is it necessary that every
unconscious mental process should turn into a conscious one.""
This is. I \vould say. a notion of the self and its J:lltll'rlklullH that is essentially
alien to the notion of the self and its Bddung supported by the Single or simple
Bdd \ocabularv of painting or the tabula rasa. one more in keeping with the
potential multiplicity of the selt" assumed by modernism. And while the extent
to which the strategy of selection actually holds for the case of Hans Castorp-
that is. the success of Settembrini's efforts at discriminatory exclusion-must
remain undecided, the new metaphorical regime here certainly stresses how
Elltll'lcklullH or development is always somehow a matter of repression: not the
simple additive or expressive procedure of BlldullH' hut rather necessarily sub-
tractive and censorious. Or to draw the distinction less radically. we might say
that the photo analogy graphically presents a facet of BrldunH always implicit
but unexpressed by the previous pictorial parallel: that the desired manifest
image-of-the-self is not simply a positive product, nor for that matter a release
of a potential but oppressed and occulted self, but is rather itself somehow a
negative product, a matter of repressive (non)production.
As Settembrini's description of the subject of Bilduns as "no unwritten page
(or unpictured surface)" makes clear, the newly figured topos also provides
room for a developer, for a new position of pedagogical intervention inti-
mately related to the new conception of the modern self. For once memory
and its mechanisms for subject formation have been reconceived in photo-
graphiC terms, it seems almost inevitable that the supervisory tactics of
Flllduns would also become refigured in the same way.x And again, Settembrini,
or rather Mann, is not alone in recognizing and exploiting this new regula-
tory space: other contemporary authors also sought it out. Y For all of them,
the new field of photography and its concomitant new conception of the self
allowed, too, for a new conception of the practices and importance of the
external, supervising, manipulating agent, a new conception that deciSively
transformed traditional Biidung into Entll'rcklunB'
As J mentioned hefore, each of Hans Castorp's primary pedagogical
influellces is situated within the metaphorical field of photography, and
each one\ mediating intervention into Hans's development decisively trans-
forms lliidunH hv virtue of its photographic character. Perhaps more than any
other. Hofrat Behrens's supervisory practices stage the gap that has opened
 PholOgraphy and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 49

up between photography and painting, and hence also between modernist

EntwlcklunB and traditional H,ldunB' The X-ray photographs of his patients that
so graphically challenge the truth value oftheir picturesljue (rnalerisch) appear-
ances intervene to impose a different truth-a hidden or latent one-for the
suhject, and hence a different regime of prescrihed hehavior or identity. Simi-
larly, Krokowski's psychoanalysis, or SeelenzerBliederunH, as it is frequently called,
proves a photographic mode of EntwicklunB opposed to traditional Bi/dunB. The
hasic similarity of his mediating apparatus to that of Behrens is hrought out
hy the pairing of his "psychic" and Behrens's "organic" illumination cham-
hers (Dufchleuchtunwkablnette). Indeed, for all its characterization as illicit and
somehow deviant, Krokowski's mode of truth production-which is to say, of
character formation-is far more obviously complicit with the newly domi-
nant technologies for the intervention into and hence regulation of the subject's
inner life than is,forexample, Settemhrini's more licit and "proper" mode. Like
Behrens's, Krokowski's edification of the suhject takes place hehind or before
the visihle, in the dark, hidden. latent, and negative reaches of the soul, which
it then works to develop and bring forth; but the self it would bring forth,
into the picture, so to speak, is of course quite different from the self already
"positively" pictured there. This is one aspect in which Krokowski's photo-
psychoanalytic Entwick/unB of his subject differs from traditional BtidunB. Another
comes in how its development of the subject is, however paradoxically, at the
same time his or her disintegration (ZerBliederunB). Even as the development of
a photographic plate is fundamentally a process of decomposition, of breaking
down the (seemingly blank) exposed surface through the application of cor-
rosive, literally analytiC chemical solvents that thereby reveal or release the
hidden picture, just so does Krokowski's psychoanalysis develop the subject
by dissolVing it. This is, I would say, symptomatic of a peculiarly modernist
notion of the subject, one that seeks at once its articulation and its vanishing;
it is a notion radically opposed to a painterly model of BrldunB, but very much
in keeping with a photochemical one of EntwlcklunB.
The place of Settembrini's humanism within the photo field is also fairly
obvious, although given his pronounced allegiance to the tradition of BildunB, it,
too, is ambivalent. He is of course the one who brings light, taking full advan-
tage of Hans's receptivity and developmental potential. Indeed. in respect to its
siting within the photographic domain, Settembrini's humanistic enlighten-
ment pedagogy very much resembles Krokowski's psychology. Both operate
within the same inaugurating division of the field of EMunB into black and
white, dark and light, and negative and positive values; both attract the met-
aphor of "bringing to light"; and hoth work to develop the latent ideational
"scripts" of Hans's soul. But as the well-known moment at the beginning of
 50 Eric Downing

the chapter "Sudden Clarity" illustrates, Settembrini's enlightening practices

are also potentially destructive forces, as inimical to Hans's development as a
bright overhead light suddenly switched on in a darkroom. In this respect at
least, the requisite conditions for photographic Entwicklun8 are radically opposed
to those ofSettembrini's more traditional efforts at Hans's Bildun8.
Finally, we should note how even the narrator's relationship with Hans
Castorp can be situated within the photographic field, insofar as he, too, devel-
ops his subject, articulates his thought, and brings out the hidden writing,
working to expose and develop the preconscious into manifest consciousness.
This is one of the many parallels between the mediating function of Mann's
narrator and Proust's, which emphatically places both in the same modern-
ist regime. As Dorrit Cohn explains, Proust uses the photographic metaphor
to depict the distinction between the merely sensed and nonverbally experi-
enced and the intellectually and belatedly developed (and then graphically
represented). 10 She shows this distinction and its transfi)rmative mechanism to
define the relation between Marcel as narrator and as character. It might also
be taken to define much of the relation between Mann's narrator and his pro-
tagonist, espeCially the kind of development of Hans that we see in such chap-
ters as "Excursus on the Sense of Time." Here we see how the narrator deploys
his rather formidable mediating technology-which (like Proust's) is always at
once an operation of enlightening exposure and analytical breaking down-in
order to give developed, finished representation to ideas Hans has only more or
less been "impressed" by, bringing to bear his whole intervening, supervisory
apparatus in order to develop the individual's latent experience--and yet also
of course, and simultaneously, to assimilate it to a more generalized, socialized,
discursive realm. This double process, whereby the narrator's "development"
brings Hans simultaneously closer to a state of both self-manifestation and
generic assimilation or representation, is of course something that keeps his
Entwicklun8 firmly within the realm of Bildun8. But as we will see, it also keeps
it within that of the photograph, in ways that subtly change both the process
and its final product.
One of the most notable qualities of the teaching Settembrini expounds
is that it is not an Ori8lnalphilosophte (142(98), and as he explains in describing
Hans Castorp as "no unwritten page (or unpictured surface)," the cliched
quality of his pedagogical discourse is very much in keeping with the model
of development he sees himself facilitating. We note a similar quality in the
narrator's "development" of his character, which (as just mentioned) is
most often directed toward assimilating Hans Castorp's thought to gnomic
generalizations and his experience toward more archetypal, representative
patterns-as if behind his individual character there lurked, shadowlike,
 PholOgraphy and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 51

a more master template, out of which his experience emerges as a particular

copy.
The implication, of course, of both Settembrini's and the narrator's prac-
tice is that the hidden writing on Hans's tabula is not truly original either, and
that the process of development consists in large part in exposing or bringing
out the impersonal, unconscious, archetypal basis of self-identity. This fea-
ture is also an important manifestation of the photographic metaphor, one
brought out particularly well by the French designation of the negative plate
as a "cliche."
The relation between the one master plate or "cliche" and its copy is, of
course, central to Walter Benjamin's reading of the new model of art and reality
ushered in by photography. It occasions a condition of endless reproducibility
that negates the earlier aesthetics of aura tic originality that adhered, for
example, to the unique portrait and, by extension, to its unique subject. By
contrast, the identity of the photograph and its subject are from the start
caught up and characterized by the inherent pOSSibility of more uniform,
interchangeable, succeSSively produced and proliferated copies. As Roxanne
Hanney notes, this condition is centrally represented by Proust's reconcep-
tion of the erotic field in photographic terms, such that "it is almost as if all
the women to whom one man is attracted in the course of his lifetime have
come from the same negative plate."!! Although not presented in explicitly
photographic terms, Freud's notion of a repetition compulSion betrays a simi-
lar importation of the new conditions of standardized reproduction into the
sphere of individual psychology.
Mann himself often explored a related aesthetics and psychology of repro-
ducibility, already in Death in Venice and far more consequently in his later
works, Doctor Faustus and, especially, Felix Krull. In The Magic Mountain, however,
he seems to work a different conception of the negative as stereotype, a differ-
ent interstice of photography and psychology. Roland Barthes hints at some-
thing of this second connection when he writes, "the Photograph sometimes
makes appear what we never see in a real face, a genetic feature, the fragment
of oneself or of a relative that comes from some ancestor. The Photograph
gives a little truth, but this truth is not that of the individual, who remains
irreducible; it is the truth of lineage."!2 It is this aspect of photography qua
psychology that Mann himself explicitly foregrounds in his review essay of
Albert Renger-Patzsch's book The World Is Beaullju[ (Die Well 151 schOn), and he
contrasts it favorably with the earlier art of painting. He writes, "The devel-
opment of photographic portraiture in the direction of the psychological, of
character and type studies, is patent, and it benefits from a circumstance that
is of little use to human painting." 13 In the formulations of both Mann and
 52 Eric Downing

Barthes (and Siegfried Kracauer descrihes much the same effect), the cliche,
the stereotypical quality of the photograph comes to inhere and to manifest
itself in the individual example, almost as if the template character of the
master photographic negative expressed itself as a psychological truth in the
positive print."
In The Magic Mountain, Mann's adaptation of the negative cliche and positive
copy relationship in terms of this second connection is most evident in two
examples: the relation between Hans Castorp and his grandfather, and that
between Clavdia Chauchat and Prihislav Hippe. Hans's grandfather, the Sena-
tor Hans Lorenz Castorp, is Significant to us in many respects, not least because
he represents the first portrait in the novel. Senator Castorp is explicitly
described as the picturesque personality in the family (die malensche l'ersiinhchkeit
In der Familie) and his admirable Rild dominates the entrance of the Repriisenta-
tionsriiume of Hans's childhood home. We are told that the painting is tastefully
executed in the style of the old masters, reminiscent of certain late medieval
Dutch pictorial practices. Significantly, however, the relation between the
model and copy here is hardly a straightfonvard one of the kind normally
associated with Dutch realist portraiture, or for that matter with realist pho-
tography. Rather, the portrait presents a certain cliched, stereotypical image
of the grandfather, which for Hans represents his true or authentic identity.
The grandfather himself, in his apparently irreducible particularity, is only a
slightly marred, somewhat ineptly turned individual copy of the original Bild
or template of the portrait, but a copy that nonetheless retains and manifests
certain perceptible features of that (his own) "true" cliche (41/24-25).
There is, then, this initial discrepancy or space between the picture and its
subject; and as we soon learn, the grandfather himself only gradually devel-
ops into the picture, only becomes the authentic Bild through the workings
of time and the chemical changes brought about by the moment of his death.
Even more than the initial, partial manifestation of the cliched Bild in the
particular grandfather, this subsequent development of the latter into the
former seems to confirm an observation made by Benjamin, that the earlier
medium of painting is not so much (or not only) positioned in opposition to
photography as it is remapped or refigured in terms of photography. 15 More
immediately important for us, however, is that a process of development
almost identical to the one that takes place between the grandfather and his
portrait takes place again between Hans Castorp and his grandfather. We are
told Hans Castorp finds that "the image of the grandfather was imprinted
much more deeplv, clearly, and significantly in him than that of his parents"
(38/22), an imprint or Gepriige, which is preserved as a memory picture, an
ErinnerullBshild. Hans's memory is, again, recognizably photographic. And as
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 53

with all photography, this memory, too, goes through its negative-to-positive
process: even as the supposedly forgotten memories of his parents suddenly
"re-presented themselves precisely, instantaneously, and piercingly in their
incomparable particularity" (43/26) at the moment-we might say, with the
shock or "f1ash"-of his grandfather's death, so does the Hild of his grandfa-
ther sink into a negative, unconscious state until Hans's arrival on the Magic
Mountain, where it reappears in the corporeal form of Hans Castorp's sudden
development of his grandfather's trembling of the chin. Even as the grand-
father develops into his Hild through the chemical metabolic workings of
death, so, too, does Hans develop into the same Rdd by the chemical metabolic
workings of the Mountain, which brings out the resemblance to the grandfa-
ther through an Entw/cklung of one of Hans's stored unconscious impressions
(or "scripts"), recasting the present image through the background negative
cliche. Again, what is at issue here is clearly a logic of reproducibility newly
intrinsic to representation in the wake of photography. But rather than this
reprodUcibility being extended spatially or successively, as in Benjamin's model,
it is kept diachronic and internal, as in Barthes's. And we note how neatly it
thus furthers and refigures the traditional program of Bildung, as through the
development of such preViously installed memory-images (Erinnerungsbilder),
the subject moves simultaneously closer to a moment of self-realization and
one of generic assimilation or representation.
The second example of Mann's adaptation of the cliche and copy relation-
ship is similar, but more pOinted: it comes in the way Hans Castorp finally
finds the negative Urbild (169/117) for Clavdia Chauchat in the Erinnerungsbild
of Pribislav Hippe. Even more emphatically than in the case of the grandfa-
ther, this memory-image is structured according to the schema of what Henri
Bergson, in Matter and Memory, calls spontaneous recollection (Ie souvenir spon-
tam!), a form of memory he explicitly distinguishes as photographic (Ie faculte de
photographie menta Ie ) in its manner of both storage and retrieval. '"
Hans's spontaneous recollection of the image of Hippe and his pairing of
it with the present image of C1avdia occurs in the same chapter-indeed at
the same moment-in which he also develops the trembling chin, or cli-
che, of his grandfather. Mann makes the connection of the former with
the photo-thematics more or less explicit later on, when Hans returns to
the scene of his memory-image (Erwnerungsblid, 540/382) and "in connection
therewith" takes out and contemplates his photographic negative of Clavdia.
But the connection is more or less implicit from the outset. We are told that
the figure or Bdd of Hippe "emerged imperceptibly out of the fog into his life,
slowly taking on ever greater clarity and palpability, until that moment when
he was most near and materially present, there in the schoolyard, stood there
 54 Eric Downing

in the foreground for a while, and then gradually receded and vanished again
into the fog, without even the pain offarewell" (172/120). Benjamin has quite
beautifully described the "fog" out of which, he says, photography arose and
more specifically back into which all early photographs (unless hermetically
sealed) eyentually faded P Such seems the early fate of Hippe's Bild as well.
But while the positive, manifest image fades, the Bddis nonetheless retained
in the "negative" space of Hans Castorp's unconscious, where it remains stored,
latent, awaiting, like the memory-image of the grandfather, its subsequent
development and duplication. And it finds this not only in Hans's spontane-
ously produced, "flash-like" vision of Hippe but also and even more impor-
tant in the figure of Uavdia Chauchat. Interestingly, Hans's early perceptions
of Uavdia are always portrayed as somehow undeveloped, not fully formed;
only once he has retrieved and worked up the negative, unconscious Urbild of
Hippe does the figure or image of Clavdia Chauchat emerge in all its clarity.
Thus, even as Hans Castorp here-precisely here-develops into the Bild of
his grandfather, succumbing to a certain logiC of reproducibility, of belated
reproduction of the unconscious cliche, so does C1avdia Cham'hat develop
out of the negative unconscious cliche of Pribislav Hippe, reprodUcing in her
image the generic features of the master-template (or nonoriginal script).
And as in the case of the grandfather and Hans, as the Erinnerunssbild develops
and reappears, the subject (Clavdia) moves closer to a moment of both self-
manifestation and generic assimilation or representation. Thus memory qua
photography and self-formation qua Entwicklun8 come doubly to further and to
refigure the traditional thematics of Bildun8.
The example of the photo-relation between Pribislav Hippe and Clavdia
Chauchat is, in fact, even more deeply embedded in the metaphoric logic of
the new medial field than that between the grandfather and Hans, and in two
distinct ways. First, the negative/positive relation between Hippe and Clavdia
is conceived far more as just that, as a relationship of opposite or reversed val-
ues; not only of a male as opposed to a female figure, and also of a homoerotic
as opposed to a heteroerotic attraction on Hans's part, but also of death as
opposed to life and a whole slew of other such motivic binaries. Second, how-
ever, the relationship between Hippe and Clavdia is also conceived in terms
even more challenging to the standard mimetic relation of model and copy
than that posed by the grandfather and his Rild, terms that again draw on the
photo-relation of negative and positive, but in such a way as to challenge their
oppositional relation. That is, there is an emphatic sense in which Hippe and
C1avdia are the same figure, the same image \vith the identical blue-gray or
gray-blue Kirghiz eyes, and so on; and similarly, a sense in which there is no
stable or secure way of fixing on one as the source or prior term for the other,
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 55

at least not in a way that would discount a further reversal. Both of these
relations and their seeming contradictions and complications are of course
intrinsic to the photographic domain, and both have major repercussions for
Bildung.
As Naum Gabo insisted in his "Realist Manifesto" of 1920, the WeitallSchauunB
promulgated by the photographic medium was a profoundly black-and-white
one; the emergence of the X-ray, understood at that time as simply the lat-
est extension of the photographic regime, further confirmed the conviction
that the "real" and "true" only came to us in such monochromatic, starkly
contrastive hues. IS And despite Hans Castorp's innovative but disappointing
forays into color photography near the end of the novel. the same baSically
holds true for the ",'orId of The MaRie Mountain as well. Its \vodd is fundamen-
tally conceived in black-and-white terms, in polarized terms of dark and light,
shadow and substance---such as the materialist Behren's white coat and the
spiritualist Krokowski's preferred black smock; or Settembrini's "enlightened"
and positive doctrines of humanism, rationality, and progress and Naphta's
dark and negative principles of mysticism, unreason, and reaction ism; or the
ruling oppositions between East and West, classicism and romanticism, democ-
racy and tyranny, reason and instinct, or life and death, between which Hans's
BiidunB is pOised. 19
At the same time, however, as what Barthes calls the "original truth of the
black and white photograph" imposed such a binary model on the world, it also,
I would suggest, contributed to a radical reconception of the fundamental rela-
tions between the "opposing" poles of the model, as an inevitable consequence
of the new understanding of the relation between negative and positive values
associated with photography.20 We get an early example of what I mean here in
the lecture delivered by our photo-psychoanalyst Krokowski and heard by Hans
immediately after the "Hippe" chapter. The lecture manifests the photographic
in the doctor's discourse in two apparently competing ways. First, as Hans is
somewhat shocked to discover, the lecture works to bring the dark, hidden,
and private subject of sexuality out into the broad daylight (180/124), to
transform the unspoken or unspeakable into the graphic print of language.
This is the primary thrust of Krokowski's Entwick/ung of his topic (181/126),
a mode of development and enlightenment that, as noted, ironically aligns Kro-
kowski's psychoanalysis with Settembrini's humanism, and so, too, perpetuates
the basic oppositional model-of dark and light, negative and positive, and so
on-that the Italian pedagogue in particular imposes and propagates through-
out the novel.
But as Hans Castorp discovers, the lecture also elaborates a rather differ-
ent relation between the dark and the light, the negative and the positive,
 50 Eric Downing

one essentially opposed to the Settemhrinian hu t stiJ I (and even more) within
the photographic domain. The lecture not only descrihes how the process of
development moves its stored ideational material from the dark to the light,
the negative to the positive. It also describes how it moves it in the other
direction, from the positive to the negative; indeed, it describes the "positive"
and the "negative" as simply different stages, or rather, as reversed values of
the same "thing." The suhject is love and illness, and in Krokowski's account,
the negative of disease is simply an almost mechanical inversion of the posi-
tive of love. Psychoanalysis in turn promises a re-reversal, a Wiederl'erwandlun&,
of the latent/negative of illness into the manifest/positive of healthy eros
(IR3/127). Even as the photographic medium introduces a representational
model that requires a serial process of transformative reversals in which the
notions of original and copy, cause and effect, even positive and negative
become vertiginously interchangeable and endlessly extendahle, so, too, does
Krokowski's psychoanalytic discourse pose for the relation hetween the posi-
tive and negative values of the interior life.
The new relations between the negative and positive, the dark and the
light, and so on, suggested hy the photographiC medium and reproduced by
Krokowski's psychoanalytic model have major consequences for the opera-
tion of Bildun8 in Mann's novel. As one might anticipate after Krokowski's
conflation of photography and the erotic-a not infrequent association in
modernist thought-thiS is especially the case for those structures of desire
that are among the privileged mechanisms through which the socialization
of the protagonist is traditionally accomplished in the Bildun8sToman, namely,
those structures-and the so-called Oedipal chief among them-that prop-
erly direct, indeed construct, the protagonist'S impulses toward the ideal of
manliness (Miinnlichkeit) that marks the completion of hoth his personal and
social Bildun8.2t
The consequences of this new set of relations for Hans Castorp's B,ldunB are
most evident in respect to the figure of C1avdia Chauchat, in terms of her place
within both the erotic and photographic thematics of the novel. This in turn
is most evident in terms of her relation to Settembrini, who, as the chief of the
many male figures w'ho undertake the more overt BildunB or Entwick/un8 project
of Hans's acculturation, provides the decisive context for an understanding
of Hans's erotic adventures and Clavdia's photographiC character. For as is
typical of the genre, Mann's central character seems subjected to two concur-
rent educations: one hy men who cultivate his public, social, cultural, and
even political intellectual development, and another by women-or rather,
a woman-v,'ho cultivates his more private erotic development. The critical
task is, as always, to determine the role of the latter within the former.
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 57

Mann himself makes clear the need to consider the figure of Clavdia
Chauchat-and her place \vithin the photo thematics in general and the nega-
tive/positive thematics in particular-in conjunction with Settemhrini and his
education of Hans Castorp in the passage alluded to ahove. In this passage, Hans
hrings the photowaphische NeHatll' of C1avdia to the picturesque (rna/erisch) place
where the memory-image of Prihislav Hippe first and so photographically
appeared to him, and where he now contemplates the transparent Bild of
the human hody as part of his self-appointed task of "playing King" (reHieren).
Hans holds in his hand "a little plate, which when held parallel to the ground
seemed hlack, reflective and opaque, hut when held up to the heavens grew
light and revealed humanistic things" (540/382); and in connection therewith,
he specifically conjures up Settemhrini and the many conceptual hinarisms
he has exposed Hans to-form and freedom, spirit and hody, and so on. The
contemplated Bdd, so starkly divided hetween its dark, earthly character and
its enlightened, uplifted one, would seem to inscrihe a certain fundamen-
tal opposition onto the figure of C1avdia. This is true even as, through the
implicit imposition of Settemhrini's mode of oppositional representation
onto her X-ray photograph, it would seem to inscribe a certain gendered
doubleness onto the image, a joining of male and female principles distinct
from that already suggested by the pairing of Clavdia and Hippe. In any case,
the image confirms that an understanding ofSettembrini is essential to one of
Hans's fascination with Clavdia, or rather, with her Bild.
As mentioned, one of the basic enabling gestures of Settembrini's peda-
gogic, humanistic desire to bring things to light is his essentially metaphysical
division of the world into two opposing states: one dark and one light, one
negative and one positive, and so on (and on). This gesture is clearly evident
in Hans Castorp's manipulation of Clavdia's photographic image here. But
as Alexander Nehamas argues, it is also a gesture whose hasis and motives
are very much at issue and opened to question in the noveJ.22 In the case of
Settemhrini-its prime if hardly sole practitioner-the gesture seems clearly
indicative of a strategy of repression; unable to accept himself or the world for
what they wholly are, he deploys a metaphysical apparatus that consigns all
the conditions and forces he most fears to the "darkness" and emhraces every-
thing that leads away from them as his "positive." The apparatus is not only
applied in the more or less external domain, for the production of those social,
cultural, and political "humanistic" ideals that make up the traditional pro-
gram of Bddun8 that Settemhrini constantly holds up to Hans. It is also imple-
mented in the more internal realm for the manufacture of that suhject-ideal
that similarly supports the traditional picture of Bi/dung. Unahle to accept his
own sensual, internal nature, Settemhrini systematically disavows the erotic
 58 Eric Downing

and material as part of himself. and poses his self instead as a purely rational.
cultural being that is ideally free of relation to slich dark, negative, opposing
forces. And it is worth emphasizing that. despite initial appearances to the con-
trary, the exact same apparatus is wielded by Settemhrini's seeming competi-
tor in Hans's BildunH, namely Naphta. who similarly identifies himself only with
a positive. spiritual ideal that projects itself out and away from the low, mate-
rial, negative hase, which is suhsequentlv left out of the picture (literally) of
the ideally realized self. Moreover. with minor modifications. the same can he
shown to hold true for Hans's other male educators, Behrens and Krokowski,
e\"en I'eeperkorn and ZiemBen, all of whom wield a similar positive/negative,
black-and-white model for the articulation of their ideal (male) subject L1
Hans, however, clearly resists making the choice between the negative and
positive, the dark and light, or any of the other many binary terms produced
hy Settembrini, precisely that choice so central to the subject formation of
traditional BtldunB. He also resists choosing between the various images (Hoch-
Wbllde, 540/383) of the ideal suhject profTered by Settembrini and Naphta. or by
any of his other male mentors. Rather, all are similarly opposed, because all
would separate and eliminate one-half from the \vhole picture-making pro-
cess, from the full (photographic) truth. Instead, Hans increasingly comes to
insist on a more complete logic-a photographic logic-of ongoing inversion
and exchangeability. He comes more and more to learn to take together the
dark and the light, the negative and positive-the physical and intellectual,
the erotic and cultural, the personal and political, and so on; to learn that, for
all their (potentially endless) opposing transformations, they are not even or
ever truly distinct or separable to begin with.
As I said, this has major consequences for our understanding of Clavdia
Chauchat, her photographic Bild, and their place within the novel's BildunB
thematics, primarily because it establishes what is at stake in our reading of
the oppositions associated with her figure and Bild. On the one hand, one
could surmise from Hans's handling of the plate of her X-ray photograph that
Clavdia just represents the dark opposed to Settemhrini's humanistic light.
the body-erotic opposed to the spiritual-intellectual, or the female opposed
to the male. In this reading, Clavdia would simply seem a perpetuation of the
ruling oppositions of the bourgeois patriarchal system of BildunB. w'herein, as
Adorno says. "The feminine character is a negative imprint of the positive of
male domination. But therefore equally bad."24 On the other hand. one could
also surmise from the same evidence that Clavdia represents instead the dark
and light. earthly and intellectual together-after all, the dual-natured B,ld
is of her alone-which would represent her as a rather different challenge
to the humanist's BlldlmB model. It would represent her in opposition to his
 PholOgraphy Qlld Bildung ill The Magic Mountain 59

system of opposition; indeed, In true photographic fashion, it would represent

an insistence on the equally implicated and inseparable relations of opposition
and identity between am of the "black-and-white" values to any given ideal
image, or HochWhild, of the subject.
l.et me mention another, perhaps dearer example of Clavdia's place within
the dark-and-light logic of the novel: Hans's description of his boat ride at twi-
light. The top os is first introduced as Hans listens to Settembrini's portrayal
of his (Scttembrini's) grandfather, whose world Hans takes to be so radically
different frol11 that of his own grandfather. IIis comparison of the two worlds
reminds Hans of his boat ride on a lake one evening, when he sat poised bet\veen
the day and night, the setting sun and rising moon, shuttling his enraptured
attention rapidly and repeated Iy between the two (218/1 SO). At the end of the
same chapter, the narrator informs us that Hans has been conscientiously
heeding Settembrini's educative discourse on patriotism, the dignity of man,
and beautiful literature only in order to license his thoughts in another, oppo-
site direction (in anderer, In entgegengesetzter Richtunfj, 2261 Mann's emphasis!),
namely, in that of Clavdia. When he thinks of her as Settembrini talks, he is
again reminded of his day-bright/moon-night experience. ()ne reading might
take the topos as opposing Clavdia to Settembrini, her misty eastern night sky
to his clear western daylight, with Hans poised between them. But another
reading might note that the entire topos is actually applied to Clavdia alone,
who is made to encompass and include both poles, both worlds, much as was
the case with her contemplated photograph. That is, she is the opposite (die
EntBeBefjensetzte) of Settembrini in not accepting opposition-or rather, opposi-
tion that denies and excludes from itself half its terms. And this includes not
accepting the gender and erotic distinctions that traditionally accompany such
oppositions and on which Bildunfj traditionally depends.
The same implication in and dismantlement of oppositions that we see in
the application of the twilight topos we see again in the two motifs mostly
closely attached to Clavdia in the novel's first half: the X-ray photograph and
the painted portrait. Both are produced by Hofrat Behrens, arguably the rep-
resentative authority of the Magic Mountain; together they forcefully place
Clavdia at the center of the work's photo thematics, and espeCially of its con-
tested (and complicitous) relation between photography and painting, and
also between Entwicklun!:/ and BilJunfj.
The X-ray is of course one of the most dominant and overdetermined
features of The Mat/ic Mountain, and it represents a peculiar form of photogra-
phyY For our immediate concern with C1avdia Cham-hat and the negativel
positive dimension of our topic, the most important aspect of photography as
X-ray is the decisive emphasis it places on the negative. X-rays are one of the few
 60 Eric Downing

forms of photography where the negative is the acknowledged primary form

of the image, where--as Behrens's laboratory with its red-lit darkness con-
firms--the negative is contemplated directly, without any transformation into
a final positive print, into one of the pretty pictures (fide/en Rilder) of lightened
day (303/213). Or rather, because this is not quite accurate, let me phrase this
somewhat differently. The X-ray is a form of photography where the distinction
between the negative and the positive folds, where, for example, Clavdia's X-ray
image can be interchangeably referred to as a NeBativ and [Dialr0sitiv.
It is not of course only through her actual X-ray Portrlit that Clavdia is drawn
into this thematic cluster. Rather, the Ritd of Clavdia, which frequently pres-
ents itself to Hans Castorp even before he acquires his Souvenir, is itself decidedly
X-raylike. For instance, we are told that Clavdia's Bild appears to Hans as he sits
in his darkroom (also equipped with a red light), wringing from him the cry,
"My God!" (289/203), the same cry wrung from him by his viewing of his cousin
Joachim's X-ray (during which Clavdia herself sits waiting in the next room
l305/2151). This is, we remember, the Bitd Hans is picturing when Settembrini
walks in and suddenly turns on the overhead electric light, effectively ruining
the image, and so, too, reinforcing the opposition between the two regimes
and figures; marking Hans's fascination with Clavdia's BlId as one with the dark,
negative state of things-with death, disease, and asocial desire--so contra-
posed to Settembrini's enlightened values of humanistic BildunB.
However, even as through her X-ray Bild Clavdia is associated with the
negative plate of death, disease, and Hans's asocial desire, through her painted
portrait she is also placed at the more positive pole of life, flesh, and Hans's
socializing desire.
Aside from a few, typically complicating factors, the painting of Clavdia is
presented as the opposite of her X-ray, as an "outer" as opposed to the X-ray's
"inner" portrait. After all, the site of its representation is almost obseSSively
depicted as the skin, which is precisely what an X-ray photograph sees
through and misses. More important, the opposition between the X-ray and
the painted portrait also extends into the novel's BildunB thematics. Whereas
the X-ray-and the Clavdia Chauchat associated with the X-ray-seems to
lead Hans Castorp away from the regular, regulating course of BildunB-its
public regimes, its ideals of responsibility, edification, and so on-the portrait
seems to lead him, in both his intellectual and erotic inclinations, back into the
traditional byways-which is to say that the painted Bild fulfills its custom-
ary function of facilitating BildunB. 2n We see this in Hans's conversation with
Rehrens in the latter's apartment, where Hans first encounters the portrait
and, while carrying it about with him, works always to bring it more into
the light (362/255, 363/256). Whereas in the earlier encounter with Behrens
 PholOgraphy and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 61

the X-ray incited Hans's negative obsession with death, in this encounter the
portrait stirs up his positive interest in "life." It instills in Hans an enthusiasm
for medicine, physical nature, traditional aesthetics and notions of beauty,
even extending, in tvpical Hans Castorp fashion, to jurisprudence, philol-
ogy, and theology-in short, to the traditional humanistic callings, the well-
nigh Faustian bases of formaler Btldun8 (362/256). Moreover, these callings (or
rather, the portrait that evokes them) direct Hans in the following chapter
to books-apparently his only extended foray into this most traditional of
educative domains-and so channel his intellectual interests into more or
less socially viable discursive fields and ends.27
The "positive" of the portrait also has its effect on the more general, abstract
Bild of Clavdia that sometimes appears to Hans, and transforms it for the first
time into a truly photographic Rild, one that continually oscillates between the
negative and positive values separately maintained by her X-ray and painted
Bilder. We see this especially in the chapter in which Hans purchases his text-
books and, in the red-lit darkness, engages in his most formal experiments
yet in personal cultural development; and there appears to him the image of
Life (das Bild des Lebens, 385/272; 398-399/281). The Bild is clearly recognizable as
that of Clavdia Chauchat, and is just as clearly related to the Bild Hans con-
templated of her before, until interrupted by Settembrini. But whereas the
previous Bild was an X-ray like negative associated with Hans's dark attraction
to death, this one is more like the portrait and associated with his fascina-
tion with life (and books, and Bildun8)-a Bild that allows Hans to stop at and
dwell on all the minute details of the surface and skin. Das Bild des Lebens is, at it
were, the positive to that previous negative, but still very much the same Bild,
with reversed values. And so the Bild of Clavdia becomes equally, at once and
by turns, negative and positive, set in opposition to Settembrini's pedagogiC
regime both as its negative opposite and, insofar as it also encompasses a positive
state, as not supporting its exclusive oppositional structure.
Exactly how the photographic character of Clavdia Chauchat and of
Hans's attraction to her impacts on his Bildun8 is no doubt best seen in the
chapter "Walpurgisnacht," the early culminating experience of Hans's erotic
education. Significantly enough, the chapter is placed firmly under the sign
of the photograph: not only through the prominent place occupied by both
the X-ray portrait and the painted one in Hans's and Clavdia's presented con-
versation, but also and more famously through the traded Souvenirs in their
occluded tryst. Sexual consummation is Signified by photographic acquisition
and exchange.
I am going to argue that the photographic nature of the encounter
fundamentally atfects and even determines its erotic nature or structure, and
 02 Eric Downing

that includes its function in Hans's development or BilJung. But I should empha-
size that an initial reading of the chapter seems rather to confirm the continued
operation of the traditional mechanisms of erotic Bildung, for until the arrival of
Mvnheer Peeperkorn, no moment more clearly evinces an Oedipal structure
and, in keeping with this, no moment more clearly facilitates Hans's coming at
once into his own and into the social sphere.
The Oedipal is foremost. The requbite triangulation is conspicuously sup-
plied by the relations between Hans, Settembrini, and c:tavdia, with Hans
dearly situated as child between the other two: as "problem child" (Sorwnkind)
vis-a-vis Settembrini and "petit bourgeois" vis-a-vis Clavdia, and as familiarly
"per du" vis-a-vis both. The anticipated moment of aggression against the
Father is most realized in Hans's leave-taking from Settembrini, his first truly
rebellious act against his fatherly mentor as he, Hans Castorp, turns to lay
claim to the forbidden, feminine domain. Moreover, Hans's "Oedipal" action
yields the characteristic paradox that the apparent attack against the patriar-
chal power and reveling in the illicit erotic nonetheless represents an assimila-
tion into the patriarchal and an advancement of its lawful, regulating order.
Hans succeeds, as it were, to the position of the dominant (not-quite-father)
himself, assumes and confirms his proper male and heterosexual identity,
and Simultaneously assumes an ever more responsible role in the social and
cultural sphere, as evidenced, for instance, in the "playing King" he begins
in the chapter immediately follOWing. That is, in typical Oedipal fashion, the
moment of apparently transgressive rupture turns out to be a mechanism for
the protagonist's assimilation and acculturation; and, in classical fashion, the
seemingly competing erotic education of the subject turns out to serve the
more public program of his BildunB proper.
The linch-pin to an Oedipal reading of the scene is usually taken to be
Hans's acquisition of that little mechanical pencil from Clavdia, a maneuver
that, significantly, repeats a ploy practiced years earlier by Hans on Pribislav.
Hippe. For example, Jochen Horisch, who perhaps anachronistically points to
a Freudian text for support, stresses two related aspects of the pencil's "phal-
lie" function in the Oedipal scenario zx First, it acts as a phallus proper, one
that-mobile in good Lacanian fashion-is transferred from Clavdia (klein
aber dem [little but yours]) to Hans. The transfer rids Clavdia of her dominant
"masculine" identity (suggested both by her possession of the pencil and her
conflation with Hippe) and allows her to become a properly submissive, cas-
trated woman. At the same time, the transfer wins for Hans the symbol of
dominant male identity, an acquisition that signals the culmination of a tradi-
tional erotic education, namely, the attainment of his manliness (MiinnUchkelt).
Second and equally important, Hi.irisch stresses the significance of the pencil
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 63

as pencil, that is, as a writing (or drawing: hilden) instrument. In strict coordi-
nation with Hans's obtainment of sexual power and mall' identity comes his
rising control over meaning and inscription, precisely the linkage insisted on
by the reading model of "Oedipal" BildunH.
For all its persuasive strength, however, there is a problem with this read-
ing, one recognized by Horisch himself, though he works hard to avoid its
consequences. The problem is that Clavdia gets the pencil back, indeed gets it
back precisely at the occluded moment of sexual consummation (in the dark-
room, as it were). That is, rather than becoming attached to Hans Castorp, the
phallic pencil retains its (more than good Lacanian) character as exchange-
able or reversible; and in this, I would propose, it becomes subsumed in its
significance to the regime of the other exchange accompanying the moment
of sexual consummation, namely, that of the photographic plates.
Let me explain what I mean. That C1aH~iafirst possesses the (phallic) pencil
and then gets it back alerts us to a rather obvicius circumstance that an Oedipal
reading would overlook or even repress: that Hans's relationship with Clavdia
Chauchat remains in a very meaningful way a homoerotic one. This is true not
only because Hans's attraction to her remains somehow one to Pribislav Hippe:
the same eyes, the same voice, the equivocal causal relation between the two.
But it is also true because, as Hans himself observes, his attraction to Clavdia
Chauchat as the embodiment of disease, death, and sterility renders it func-
tionally, essentially homoerotic: "Because for a man to be interested in a sick
woman was certainly noinore reasonable than ... well, than for Hans Castorp
to have pursued his silent interest in Pribislav Hippe" (182-183/127). As Hans's
infamous seduction speech at the end of the "Walpurgisnacht" underscores,
a good part of his attraction to Clavdia is as an embodiment of this negative
value; and the X-ray negative, as the double sign of the Hippean and diseased
nature of Clavdia's character, subtly brings this homoerotic aspect to the fore,
or rather it brings the scene itself under the sign of the homoerotic, and so, too,
out from under that of the strictly heterosexual regime of traditional Bildun8.
The homoerotic nature of Hans Castorp's attraction to Clavdia can be
seen as photographic in a further, more consequential sense as well. This is
true not only in the sense that Roxanne Hanney, for instance, describes for
Proust's work, where homosexuality is understood as the "inverted" negative
of the positive state of heterosexuality ("inversion" being the preferred term
for homosexuality in the modernist era), even as Hippe seems the inverted
figure of Clavdia, or the deathful Clavdia the reversed negative of Settem-
brini's positive enlightened BildunH. It is also true in the sense suggested by
the previously mentioned topos of twilight (Zwielicht) already associated with
C1avdia and her photographic character. 29 Interestingly, the topos itself is not
 64 Eric Downing

original to Mann, hut comes from Goethe; and hesides its role in The MaBic
Mountain, it also figures prominently in Mann's 1925 essay "Concerning Mar-
riage," where it is cited as part of Mann's personal definition of the homoerotic,
which dearly cannot he reduced to a simple matter of same-sex attraction, nor
to a simple inversion of heterosexuality.:It} Rather, as the twilight image insists,
Mann defines the "homo" in the same epicene sense that, for instance, Roland
Barthes attrihutes to the "neutral," as "a back and forth, an oscillation, the con-
verse of an antinomy"-where the homoerotic represents not so much the
opposite, negative, or inverted form of the heterosexual as the inclusion ofhoth
hy turns and the unending, enormously erotic oscillation hetween them-the
oscillation hetween a same-sex and heterosexual attraction to the same figure,
the endlessly reversihle negative and positive forms of one's one desire:" It is of
course just such a model of the homoerotic that dominated during the mod-
ernist period in the writings of Ulrich, Hirschfeld, Fliess, Weininger, and even
Freud. ll And it is just such an OSCillating and invertihle "homo" figure that is
represented in the Ne8ativ/Dzaposltlv figure of Hippe/Clavdia. or rather, in the
Clavdia of the X-ray and painted pictures combined; and it is just such a figure
that defines the new photo-erotic regime of Hans's EntwicklunB.
The breakdown of the heterosexual Oedipal regime through the comple-
mentary inclusion of the homoerotic dimension also results in a breakdown of
the gender regimes on which the BildunB process usually depends. While BildunB
traditionally aims at the realization of a special ideal of manliness (Miinnlichkeit),
to be achieved through the distinct but complementary gUidance of men and
women, this particular BildunB scene is notably dominated by images of gender
reversals, most prominently in the many "women in men's apparel and, con-
versely, the men who had put on women's clothing" (454/320). In respect to the
two principals of the scene, the gender-blending figures in regard to both Clav-
dia and Hans. We see it for Clavdia not only in her dual character as both Clavdia
and Hippe, but more important for the Blldun8 thematics in her character as both
the requisite female opposite ofSettemhrini's male mentorship and as somehow
Settemhrini-like herself, speaking and philosophizing in ways that clearly vio-
late the conventional distinctions between the male and female educative func-
tions ("Tu parles comme Monsieur Settemhrini," 475/336; cf. 473/334). And we
see it for Hans, too, who adopts not only the masculine position in this scenario
hut also a feminine one. We recognize the latter not only retrospectively, with
the return of Clavdia's pencil (or even later, with Hans's adoption of the role of
Margarethe in the Faustian suhtext that also underlies this chapter), but also in
the scene itself, where Clavdia transfers to Hans hoth her pencil and her paper
triangle hat (Papierdrelspltz), which connotes the feminine as patently as the other
does the masculine (478/3311.474/335; d. 386/272, 477/337).
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 6S

The double androgyny of C1avdia and Hans and the complex way it figures
in their erotic relationship fully justifies why the exchange of that single phallic
drawing pencil-the instrument of bilden-should give way to the double
exchange of IdiaJpositive(negative photographs, as the token not only for the
operant mode of sexuality directing Hans's subject formation but also for that
of cultural meaning, and power, governing the novel in genera!.;\ The photo-
graphs suggest the double nature of both figures and their relation: as Mann
puts it in the essay noted above, "It is about an equalization between the sexes in
matters of R!ldunS," and an increasingly realized bisexuality on the part of both
sexes that subtly alters, shifts, and realigns both the ideal form of sexual and
social identity and the balance or modality of cultural p()wer.\~ Far from assert-
ing some definitive final, singular control or Rtld, this bisexual, photographic
system of representation insists on the continued, shuttling, back-and-forth
reversibility of all its engaged values, whetber man or woman, light or dark,
reason or erotics. Photography and androgyny~a combination already appar-
ent in the passage we started with, wherein Hans, with his dual-natured pho-
tograph of C1avdia in hand, undertakes his resieren conspicuously surrounded
by androgynous flowers-photography and androgyny together have seriously
altered the traditional model of Bilduns posed by Settembrini and his logocen-
tric, phallocentric world.
There is one last aspect of photographs, including X-ray photographs, that
I would like to consider, and that is how, for all their hard and clear objec-
tivity, photographs also introduce a world far more evanescent, momentary,
mutable, and questionable than that normally supported by painting. It was
the custom with painted portraits, as, for example, with that of Hans's grand-
father, that only one needed to be produced of a person. It could then be
scrutinized for revealing details about that figure's personality, past, and even
future prospects, because, as with Hans's grandfather, the painting was taken
to represent the authentic, abiding, auratic self. Unlike painted portraits, how-
ever, photographs are characteristically never singular, and throughout The
Masie Mountam, from Hans's very first days (cf. 67(43) until very near the end,
photos-and not only X-rays-are being taken and distributed among the
patients and doctors. For all their increased claim to true representation, their
representation is never true for long; another photograph is always needed
(cf. 294(207). This fleeting truth of the photograph, including the X-ray, tends
to produce a correspondingly ephemeral sense of self-image, which is no
longer conceived, portrait-like, as a single, sustained and constantly "true"
identity, but rather as a series of possibly disconnected and always changing
truths. And this changed notion of the self--whose incredibly diminished
sense of durative value and dizzyingly accelerated pace of obsolescence exists
 66 Eric Downing

side by side with the new notion of data-storage and master-templating also
introduced by photography-this changed notion also effects the project of
Bilduns, not least in its loss of a goal, of faith in cumulative progress and the
staying power of its fixed ideals.
There is an additional aspect of the photograph that also contributes to the
assertion of the evanescent: its natural tendency to dissolve away. Early pho-
tographs in particular had a marked tendency to succumb to what Benjamin
calls "fog": the quality of the image soon faded, weakened, even vanished.
There were two known ways for postponing this process-postponing hu I not
negating, for the fading away, vanishing, even dying of the photograph can
only be deferred, not denied. Either the photographic image could be hermeti-
cally sealed and stored, or a chemical fixative could be applied. Such a fixative
was, moreover. also needed for another part of the photograph, the negative,
which was also prone to a progressive deterioration, albeit of a different kind.
Without the timely, interceding application of a fixative, the negative plate
w'ould continue to be sensitive to both light and the developing, corrosive, or
etching chemical solvent, such that the Entll'lcklun,q would continue unchecked,
and the stored image would, as it were, self-consume.
While the process of hermetically sealed storage receives abundant attention
in Mann's novel, there is of course no mention of this other aspect of photo-
graphiC fixing. But it is nonetheless interesting to me that its problem makes itself
felt in ways that further confirm the place of the novel within the age of the pho-
tograph; indeed it presents itselfin or as its absence, as the problem of the missing
fixative, and in both its applications. So for instance, the apparent Oedipal tri-
umph achieved in "Walpurgisnacht" at the end of the novel's first half proves to
lack staying power, to be unable to keep itself fixed; and so it needs to be repeated,
to be retaken, first in the remarkable vision of the chapter "Snow" (Schnee), and
then again in the late encounter with the blurred (verwischt) figure of Mynheer
Peeperkorn. Each of these scenes repeats, or updates, the lesson and tableau of the
"Walpurgisnacht," with the latter especially marked as rather unusual in its felt
need to introduce a new major character and a by-and-large redundant scenario
so far into the narrative (758/538). But the retake is required precisely because of
the fleeting character of the previous takes, perhaps most eVidently in "Snow."
Horisch argues that Hans's mountain epiphany proves itself the most Oedipal
moment in the novel, retaking many of the same figures and subjects earlier
depicted in "Walpurgisnacht."·15 And yet I would argue that it also proves-again
in ways that impact the apparatus of Oedipal BrldunB----1.)ne of the most photo-
graphic. Not only does Hans's classical vision evidence the abiding preservation
of what-has-been, the certain assertion of the far-distant past (in all its partiCll-
lar and generic features)--somehow stored on the negative cliche of Hans's
 PholOgraphy and Bildung in The Magic Mountain In

unconscious memory plate, and now developed, made manifest and incontest-
ably visible and present. It also evidences the loss of permanence, the inevitable
fading away of all the phantasmatic spectacle. Hans experiences that fading a\vay
as surely and centrally as he does the vision itself. It is soon paling (688/489), just
as the memory-image ofPribislav Hippe gradually disappeared again into the fog
(172/120); or, in a subsequent scene, as the spirit Holger's poem is no sooner heard
than its details and revelations begin to fade from consciousness, impossible to
hold fast, "so that the poem would now inevitably fade into f(Jrgetfulness, in fact
wa.~ already fading into tilrgetfulness, due to a certain incapacity to hold it fast"
(923/655); or as Hans himself at the novel's end simply disappears from our sight
into the rain and dusk (994/706)-fading away, even dying, without leaving a per-
manent mark or trace, his Bzld and BildunH simply dissolving amid the impatient
explosions of World War I.
The second aspect of the problem of the missing fixative, which results in
the continued, unchecked exposure or sensitivity to both light and applied
chemicals of the photographic negative, such as ultimately to destroy its stored
distinctions between light and dark values and so dissolve its Slid in a moment
of overexposure and self-consumption-this aspect of the problem is also sug-
gestively present in the novel. It appears in the "negative" figure of Naphta,
whose very name means "solvent" and whose corrosive (iitzend, 517/366) effect
is such as to destroy all the imprinted distinctions of Settembrini's intended
development of Hans Castorp's tabula-indeed, to destroy all distinctions
between Settembrini's positive and negative values-and so to render both
Hans's and the novel's own development out of control, excessive, destructive
of its own ground. This effect is especially evident in Naphta's lengthy debates
with Settembrini, which threaten not only to dissolve Hans's imprinted values
but also (as most readers will attest) to consume the very form of narrative
representation-a mode of photographic violence that seems to anticipate the
raging social decomposition of the novel's end, so different from the standard
Bild of social integration and stability previously associated with the conclusion
of BildunH and the Bildungsroman.
Of course, Mann does not leave us with only such adissolved or decomposed
conclusion. Even as Hans Castorp puts an end to the most extreme photo-
graphiC experiment in the novel-the "highly questionable" production of
the image of the dead Joachim during one of Krokowski's seances'---by turn-
ing on the overhead electric light, and even as the lightning flash of war
startles Hans out of his darkroom and down the Mountain into the greater
social world, so, too, does Mann check the extreme consequences of the new
regime of Entw/cklunH by also holding on to the enlightened values of a more
traditionaL Settembrinian program of humanistic Bildung, however worn and
 68 Eric Downing

faded they may have become. 36 As I said at the outset, The MaBie Mountain both
is and is not a BildunBsroman, and Mann is perhaps most Mann in leaving us in
this suspended state, in the endless oscillation between the old and the new,
between BIldun8 and Entwlckluna at once.

Notes

1. See Eric Downing, Ajier lmaBes' Photowaphy. A rchaeoloiJV. and PsychoanalySIS and the Tra-
dition of Bildunf/ (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006).
2. All references to Mann's published work in both the text and notes are taken
from Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke In dreizehn Hiinden (frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1974): those without a specified volume number refer to volume 3, Der Zauberberi/.
Translations are based on John E. Woods, tr., Thomas Mann. The MaRlc Mountain (New
York: Knopf, 1995). and are emended as needed. The page numbers in the text refer to
the German/English editions, respectively.
3. Walter Benjamin, "Kleine C;eschichte der l'hotographie." in Gesammelte Schnften.
edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main.
1980),2: 368-85.
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1, An IntroductIOn, translated by
Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), deSignates the principle of latency as
the most central, constitutive factor in the new construction of subjectivity promul-
gated by the nineteenth century in general and psychoanalysis in particular; see esp. 66.
5. Sigmund Freud, Studienaus8abe, edited by A. Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1982),9: 571. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholo8ical
Works, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953),23: 126.
6. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988),26.
7. Freud, StudienausBabe, 1: 292-293; Standard &blion, 16: 295.
8. Cf. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, who posits this policing, regulatory inter-
vention, namely inscription, as the necessary complement to the principle of latency
(1: 61Mi7).
9. An especially fascinating example comes from William faulkner, Ab.lalom,
Absalom l (New York: Vintage, 1986),87-88.
10. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Mind.l: Narralive Modes for PresentwR ConSCiou.lness in fictIOn
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 146.
11. Roxanne Hanney, "Proust and Negative Plates: Photography and the Photographic
Process in A LLl Recherche du temps perdu," Romanlc ReView 74 ..1 (1983): 342-354: here, 345.
12. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photoaraph),. translated by Richard
Howard (Ne\vYork: Hill and Wang. 1981), 103.
 Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain 69

\3. Mann, (;esammelte Werke, 10: 902.

14. Cf. Siegfried Kracauer, "Die Photographie," in Du.I Ornament der Masse (frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977); also Nancy Armstrong. FictIOn In the Aile of Photography The
Lfllacy afBritlsh Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard lInin:rsity Press, 1999), 16-22; Douwe
Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000), 125--129;
Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," in The Contest of Meaninll Cntical Histories of
Photowuphy, edited by Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989),342-389.
IS. Walter Benjamin, "Kleine Ceschichte der Photograph ie," in (;e.lammelte Schrtfien,
2: 368--385.
16. Henri Bergson, Matiere el memoire.· Essa! sur relatIOn du corps resprit ([ 1896J Paris: Presses
Universitaires de france, 1953),93-94.
17. Benjamin, "Kleine Geschichte."
18. Naum Cabo and Anton Pevsner, "The Realist Manifesto," in Russian Art of the
Avant Garde: Theory and CritiCISm. 1902-1934, edit~d by John E. Bowit (New York: Viking,
1976),208-215; see also Rettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical [mallina In
the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 124-1.18.
19. See Alexander Nehamas, '''Cetting Used to Not Getting Used to It': Nietzsche
in The MaBlc Mountain," Philosophy and Literature 5.1 (Spring 1981): 73-90.
20. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 81.
21. For the centrality of the Oedipal mechanism to the BiidunBsroman, see Gerhard
Kaiser and Friedrich Kittler, DichtunB als Sozialisationsspiel. Studien lU Goethe und Gottfried Keller
(GCittingen: Vanenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978); Jochen HCirisch, Gatt, Geld und GlUck: Zur
LOBlc der Liebe in den BiidunBsromanen Goethes, Kellers. und Thomas Manns (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1983); John H. Smith, "Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference, Bildung,
and the Bildungsroman" MichlBan Germanic Studies 13 (1987): 296-325. My article "Tech-
nology of Development" elaborates more extensively on this model.
22. Nehamas, "Getting Used to Not Getting Used to It."
23. Ibid.
24. Theodor Adorno, "Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschadigten Leben,"
in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980),
4: 105.
25. For a more extended discussion of the relations between X-ray photography
and Bildung in Mann's novel, see Downing, "Technology of Development."
26. The locus classicus for this customary function of the Riid in BlldunB is the pic-
ture of the sickly prince in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. See Kaiser and Kittler,
Dichtung als Sozwlizationsspiel, and Downing, "Technology of Development."
27. Cf. Ceoffrey Winthrop-Young, "Magic Media Mountain: Technology and the
Umbildungsroman," in Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media EeoloBY (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997),29--52.
28. Horisch, Gatt, Geld und C/iick.
 70 Eric Downing

29. Hanney, "Prou,t and i\;egativc Plates."

30. Mann, (;esammeltr W'erke, 10: lY8, 196,
31, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, translated b\ Richard Howard (~ew York: Hill and
Wang, 1977), 132, for more on Barthes's concept of the neutral and the peculiar nature
of photographic desire, see Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken (Durham, NC: Duke 1I niversitv
Press, 11)95), Oscillation or Schwanken---dosely related to Harthl's's "lleutral"-is a kev
lJualitv of the erotic throughout Mann's novel: cf. the t~lmous desniption of C1aydia \
kiss (1;,)1-8.12),
32, Cf. freud, "Die sexuellen Abirrungen," in Studienalls,qahe, 5: 56, It is worth
pointing out that the same oscillating, "neutral" sense of the erotic is also at work in
scenes that might seem predominantly homoerotil in the narrower sense. such as in
"Humanoria." Kenncrh Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs and Other Erections" in Steven
Dowden, ed" A CompunlOn to Thomas Mann's "Mu,qic Mountuin," 177-220, wonderfully ana-
lyzes the over-the-top same-sex play of this chapter; but we cannot discount the part
played by the heterosexual in the form of C1avdia's portrait in generating the scene's
operant homoeroticism,
33. It is the double androgyny of the female figure and the male protagonist that
distingUishes it most radically from the androg,ny also at issue in earlier lli/JunWTcJ-
manen, including Wilhelm Mewer, Catriona MacLeod, Emhodywil AmblilUlty: Androgyny and
Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), has
definitively explored this trope in the BildunBsroman from Goethe through Keller; to
some extent, the photographic androgyny of Mann's novel is yet another case of Ent-
wic1du"8 not so much opposing as incorporating and refiguring a facet of BiidunB that
was always there, even if not fully supported by the pictorial parallel.
34. Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 10: 194f.
35. H6risch, Gatt, Geld und Gliick.
36. For an analysis of the seance scene, see Eric Downing, "Para photography and
the Entwicklung of Bildung in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberheril," Germanic Review 76.2
(2001): 172-191; also Downing, A/ier ImaBes,
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain
TODD KONTJE

• • •

T HOMAS MA N N' S DI ARIES of 1918-1921 reveal that while he was writing

The MaBic Mountain he was preoccupied by questions of sexuality in mod-
ern society and the status of his own masculinity. During this period the sixth
and last of Mann's children was born, and on more than one occasion the
successful author and respectable pater familias professes his love for his wife,
Katia, and his gratitude for her support and understanding. At the same time,
however, Mann regularly notes young men who catch his eye on the streets,
in trains, and at his own public readings, and when Katia fails to arouse him
in bed, he speculates about "going over to the other side": "Wie ware es, falls
ein Junge 'vorlage'?" (What if a boy were lying there1).1 Mann seems particu-
larly preoccupied by his son Klaus's entry into puberty, and records several
instances in which he catches unexpected glimpses of his naked adolescent
body: "Delighted with Eissi IKlaus!, who was terribly pretty in the bath. J find
it very natural that I should fall in love with my son" (n 454). Mann's calm
acceptance of his homoerotic and even incestuous impulses in this passage
nevertheless contrasts with other moments when the sight of Klaus triggers
deeply troubling thoughts: "What sort of life will he have? Of course, someone
like me 'ought not' put children into the world" (Ill 11). He even wonders if
the days of his heterosexual charade are finally draWing to a close: "Es scheint,

71
 72 Todd KonUe

ich bin mit dem Weiblichen endgultig fertig)" (It seems that I am finished with
the feminine once and for all~) (TIl 454).
The intimate details of Mann's diaries might be of interest only to his biog-
raphers if questions of gender and sexuality were not so central to his work.'
Mann's fiction, in turn, reflects a broader sense of cultural crisis among Ger-
man and Austrian intellectuals about the meaning of modern masculin-
ity. Hence I begin this essay with a brief overview of the historical changes
in European gender relations from the end of the eighteenth century to
the beginning of the twentieth. I then turn to a more detailed analysis of
Mann's evolving understanding of masculinity in relation to political and
cultural change in the decade that extends from the beginning of World
War I through the publication of The MaJjll Mountain. The essay concludes
with comments about the complexities of sexual identities portrayed in the
novel, and reflections about the political implications of Mann's notorious
ambivalence.

The Crisis of Modern Masculinity

The revolutionary political upheavals in late eighteenth-century European

society went hand in hand with a sweeping transformation of attitudes
toward gender roles and sexual difference. In the dynastic states of prerevo-
lutionary Europe, ruling families arranged marriages for financial gain and
social prestige--a practice that continues to inform the marital politicS of the
Buddenbrook family. Members of the aristocracy gained privileges by virtue
of their birth, and those born to power made a visible display of their per-
sonal authority.3 For educated members of the middle class who began to fill
positions in the expanding state bureaucracies, acqUired knowledge and skills
began to matter more than the accident of birth. Condemning the heartless
practice of arranged marriages and the dangerous liaisons that followed in
their wake, members of the middle class sought monogamous unions based
on mutual love. In courtly society, women of appropriate social rank could
gain considerable access to political power, but the middle class condemned
such women and demanded a clear division between the exclusively mas-
culine public sphere and the domestic realm in which women were to ful-
fill their "triple calling" as wives, mothers, and managers of the household
economy.4 Class-specific understandings of "natural" gender roles, in turn,
influenced scientific definitions of sexual difference: the female anatomy that
had once been considered merely an inverted and inferior version of the male
reproductive system now seemed radicalh' dissimilar. Women were deemed
 Modern Masculillilies 011 Ihe Magic Moull/aill 7")

passive, maternal, and close to nature, and thus their culturally imposed
domesticity was interpreted as the fulfillment of their biological destiny.'
When first popularized by Richardson, Rousseau, and the many writers
they inspired, the new family values constituted a revolutionary threat to
the entrenched powers of the Old Regimef> By the second half of the nine-
teenth century, however, middle-class morality had long since become the
accepted norm of the status quo. as evidenced in Germany by the phenome-
nal success of such family-oriented journals as lhe Ga,.tenlaube.- Yet e\'(:n as these
journals reached out to a broad reading public, new changes began to shake
the foundations of German society. Within a few decades the country was
transformed from a predominantly agrarian culture to a modern industrial
society. Millions moved from the country to the cities, while many more left
Germany to seek their fortunes abroad. The new urban proletariat began to
agitate for better working conditions, and political movements such as social-
ism, communism, and anarchism challenged the conservative alliance of big
business with the landed aristocracy that controlled imperial Germany.' The
women's movement had begun to organize in Cermany and elsewhere in the
1860s, and by the end of the century homosexual subcultures became increas-
ingly visible in the larger citiesY
Although largely ignored during his lifetime, by the turn of the century
Nietzsche's works began to exert a decisive, if ambivalent, influence on German
intellectuals in their response to the forces that seemed to be dissolVing tradi-
tional social bonds and inverting conventional gender roles.lO There were many
who heeded Zarathustra's call for a new cult of masculine strength: "Diese
neue Tafel, 0 meine Bruder, stelle ich uber euch: werdet hart'" (This new tab-
let I place above you, oh my brothers: become hard!).11 Such a "hard" masculin-
ity seemed in keeping with the spirit of the nation that Bismarck had united
through "blood and iron," and in which martial valor was a cardinal virtue.
Men in military uniforms were ubiqUitous in the Reich, while the cult of honor
led officers and gentlemen to challenge one another to deadly duels with dis-
turbing regularity. II Resentment and fear of emancipated \vomen provoked
misogynist tirades from Nietzsche to Otto Weininger, while biological racism
gave new virulence to an anti-Semitic movement that blamed everything that
seemed wrong with modern culture on degenerate and effeminate Jews. Preju-
dice against women and Jews could be extended by analogy to the teeming
masses of the urban proletariat and the hordes of colonized peoples who alleg-
edly posed a threat of racial contamination to those within the sanctuary of for-
tress Europe. I., Yet Nietzsche also inspired avant-garde intellectuals from Otto
Gross to Ludwig Klages to downplay "the 'masculine' imperati\'e of dYnamic
and sovereign self-creation" in favor of "the more 'feminine' submersion into
 74 Todd Konrje

a transindividual Dionvsian whole."14 Drawing on an intellcctual lineage that

led hack through the BIrth o( Trafled.v to johann jacoh Hachofen's fascination
with the ancient matriarchy and the Heidelberg Romantics' exploration of the
irrational aspects of Creek mvth and religion, the modern thinkers sought to
disrupt the staid comentions of bourgeois morality with a rejuvenating plunge
into a "chthonic" world of elemental passions. I;
Although seemingly diametrically opposed, discourses of hard mascu-
linitv and Dionysian ecstasy found a curious fusion in writings inspired by
the outbreak of World War l. In many ways, the \var represented the logical
culmination of the Nietzschean machismo that dominated Wilhelminian soci-
ety; as if to prove the nation's virility, Cermany had flung itself into the race to
colonize the fe\',; parts of the globe that had not already been claimed by other
European nations, and was soon engaged in a hitter rivalry with Great Brit-
ain that spurred a naval buildup and eventually provoked the war.16 Soldiers
set off for the battlefields with Zarathustra in their backpacks and a sense of
comradery with their fellow men. I ' Yet going to war also promised to release
men from the strictures of everyday life, and the battlefield experience itself
offered tightly wrapped "soldier males" the chance to explode in streams of
violence against the enemy. IX Ernst Junger described the "inner experience" of
war as a weird ecstasy of destruction that contained within it the potential for
"rebirth and renewal," 19 thus voicing a Widely held view that the war marked a
definitive turning point in world history that would sweep away the stagnant
culture of the past and usher in something radically new. "But there will be
war," prophesizes Hermann Hesse's Demian. "People will love it. Even now
they can hardly wait for the killing to begin-their lives are that dull. ... But
that, too, will only be the beginning. The new world ha~ begun and the new
world will be terrible for those clinging to the old."20
Such apocalyptic pronouncements about the reVitalizing potential of war
seem more than a little dubious, particularly considering the shattered state
of German society in 1919, when Hesse first published his novel. In retrospect,
advocates of both masculine rigidity and feminine release appear disturbingly
proto-fascist: the soldiers of the Cerman Freikorps whose fantasies Theweleit
explores represent men at their worst, a swaggering cohort of brutal killers
who reek of misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism, while even \vell-meaning
prophets of mystic renewal like Hesse open the door to irrationalism and
political obscurantism. /1 Both currents in Nietzsche reception would in fact
flow together during the period of I\;ational Socialist rule, which combined
rigid diSCipline \vith the release of atavistic passions. It is newrtheless crucial to
bear in mind that the artists and intellectuals associated with the "Conserva-
tive Revolution" of the earlv J920s were not the same as the Nazi bnatics of
 Modern Masculinities on [he Magic Mountain 75

the 1930s-a few did become active Party members, hut most did not.2l fur-
thermore, although the ideas expressed often seem textbook examples of reac-
tionary modernism, they were not necessarily or intrinsically so, and could in
fact be used to defend progressive politics. The male bonding that has disturb-
ing links to a militarized society also has long-standing ties to ideals of liberty
and equality that inspired fraternity among the French revolutionaries and
that, in turn, fueled the aspirations of Cerman liberals in the struggle against
Napoleon in 11lL) and against the conservative forces nf the Restoration in the
Revolution of 11l41\. Thomas Mann taps into just this tradition in 1922, when
he links Walt Whitman and homoeroticism to a defense ofdemocracv and the
Weimar Republic. 2 \ By the same token, politically suspect irrationalism could
also inspire a critique of the conservative status qun. The alternative com-
munity of Ascona, for instance, drew on the Dionysian side of the Nietzsche
legacv to experiment with nudism, vegetarianism, free love, and other forms of
radical behavior that anticipate the critique of the "Establishment" by the coun-
tercultures of the 1960s. 24 Hence delineating the discourses about masculinity
that circulated during the tumultuous decade from 1914 to 1924 provides an
intellectual-historical context for the development of Mann's thought while
writing the MaBic Mountain, withclU t, however, providing a simple key to unlock-
ing the political implications of that thought.

Mann and Masculinity. 1914-1924

In comments prefacing the published version of "Von deutscher Republik,"

Thomas Mann rejected the notion that his political views had undergone a fun-
damental transformation: "Ich habe vielleicht meine Gedanken geandert,-
nicht meinen Sinn" (I may have changed my thoughts, but not my meaning).
As Mann himself conceded, the distinction between his changing "thoughts"
and consistent "meaning" may well seem sophistical, as does his rather dubi-
ous claim that thoughts "sind immer nur Mittel zum Lweck, Werkzeug im
Dienst eines Sinnes" (are always only means to an end, tools in the service of
meaning)Y Mann had changed in ways that were to have fundamental signifi-
cance for his subsequent career, as the "unpolitical" conservative evolved into
an advocate of Cerman democracy and a leading spokesman in the campaign
against National Socialism. And yet Mann is not entirely disingenuous in his
self-analysis, in part because his political allegiances were still in a process of
transition in the fall of 1922, but mainly because there was an underlying con-
tinuity to the structure of his thought regarding both modern politics and
closely related questions of sexuality.
 76 Todd Kontje

The vast majority of German intellectuals were caught up in the enthu-

siasm that swept across the nation during the first months of the war, and
Thomas Mann was no exception. As several of his more recent critics and biog-
raphers have argued, the war allowed Mann to cast off doubts about his trou-
bled sexuality and to embrace a less complicated form of masculine strength
and national pride. 26 Mann's new militancy is clearly evident throughout the
essay "Friedrich und die groHe Koalition," written in the fall of 1914. Although
he stops short of revealing the open secret of the Prussian king's homosexual-
ity, Mann does place repeated emphasis on Friedrich's extreme misogyny.27
He speculates that Friedrich's hostility toward women may have been caused
by the fact that he spent so much of his time in the army, surrounded only by
men-and this in the century of France, "einem rechten Weibsjahrhundert,
welches von dem 'Parflim des Ewig-Weiblichen' ganz erfilllt und durchtrankt
war" (a real woman's century, that was completely filled and saturated with
the "perfume of the eternal feminine") (1: 225). Friedrich dedicates him-
self entirely to the service of his country, and demands the same commit-
ment on the part of his officers, whom he expects to be unmarried monks of
war-Krie8smiinche-who find their pleasure in the sword, not the sheath (i.e.,
vagina).28 The key distinction is not between homo- and heterosexuality, but
between self-indulgent voluptuousness and ascetic dedication to a cause.
In constructing his image of Friedrich, Mann follows Nietzsche's comments
in Jenseits von Gut und Bose (Beyond Good and Evil). According to Nietzsche,
Friedrich's father had been concerned that his young son could not provide
what the country needed: "Manner fehlten; und er argwohnte zu seinem bit-
teren Verdrusse, daB sein eigner Sohn nicht Manns genug sei" (There were nol
enough men; and he suspected to his bitter annoyance that his son was not man
enough).29 Such concern was unfounded: once in power, Friedrich soon dis-
played a bold masculinity based on courage, toughness, and an indomitable
will. Again following Nietzsche, Mann makes no attempt to depict Friedrich
as an appealing individual who elicits the reader's sympathy. On the contrary,
he goes out of his way to portray him as an evil, even repulsive character, full
of hatred and violence, and yet Mann concludes that this "evil Troll" (1: 267)
was an instrument of fate, a victim of the spirit of history that used him "to
enable a great people to fulfill its destiny on earth" (1: 268).
As the war was drawing to a close and in the immediate postwar years,
Mann read with approval works by fellow conservatives that expressed similar
views about modern masculinity and German destiny. In September, 1918, for
instance, Mann began reading Ernst Bertram's Nzetzsche: Versuch einer Mytholo8ie.
Setting the tone for "the viilkisch appropriation of Nietzsche and his transfigu-
ration into a Germanic right-wing prophet,"~) Bertram celebrates Nietzsche's
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain 77

cardinal virtues of "Harte, Verwegenheit, Mut und Entdeckerlust" [hardness,

boldness, courage, and the joy of discovery I.>! He views Nietzsche as a kindred
spirit of Albrecht Durer, whose famous etching of a knight with Death and
the Devil captures a mood of darkly tragic Nordic heroism. Like the Renais-
sance artist before him, Nietzsche proclaimed a new concept of the German
man: "Nietzsche's ideal was also a reformatory masculine one (eIn reJormatonsch
miinl1lsches): more masculine values, more masculine virtues, more masculine
ideals-like Durer, Nietzsche could only see and present his highest ideals in
masculine types (in miinnllchen Typen)" (58).
Mann found a similarly melodramatic embrace of Western man's tragic
fate in Oswald Spengler'S Der [JnterHanH des Abendlandes (Decline of the West,
1918). For a brief period Mann embraced Spengler'S pessimistic philosophy,
and even expressed admiration for the "masculine" virtues of Spengler's next
work, Preuftentum und Soziallsmus (1920).12 Spengler's concept of socialism has little
or nothing to do with the nineteenth-century movement for workers' rights
and social reform. He ridicules the notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat"
as symptomatic of Karl Marx's "JeWish instinct," to which he opposes Prussian
culture as the purest embodiment of the will to power:13 Spengler embraces
an irrational vitalism based on instinct and destiny, and celebrates the Prus-
sian willingness to subordinate individual desires completely to the collective
will. In passages dripping with scorn, Spengler rejects Western democracy and
the Weimar Republic. What Germany needs, in his view, is respect for social
hierarchy in a government ruled by a handful of elite men "with dictatorial
powers" (mit diktatorischer Machtvollkommenheit) (56). Spengler'S ominous paean
to Prussian "socialism" culminates in a call for a new German masculinity:
"Werdet Manner! ... Wir brauchen Harte, wir brauchen eine tapfre Skepsis,
wir brauchen eine Klasse von sozialistischen Herrennaturen" (Become men!
We need hardness, we need a bold skepticism, we need a class of socialist super-
men) (98).
Hans Blliher completes the dubious trinity of conservative thinkers that
influenced Mann in the immediate postwar years. YI In Die Rolle der Erotik in der
miinnlichen GeselischaJi (The Role of Eroticism in Male Society, 1917-1919), Bluher
identifies the basis of the state in homoerotic bonds between strong men,
while denigrating heterosexual family life as something for inferior weaklings
and Jews. There is always something noble about male society, writes Blliher,
whereas women are a constant source of danger. Blliher continued his anti-
liberal and anti-Semitic celebration of homosocial bonding in February 1919,
on the topic of Deutsches Reich,Judentum und Soziahsmus (The German Reich, Jewry,
and Socialism). Again he proclaimed that the Jews' dedication to family made
them incapable of the male bonding of a true Valk, while rejecting political
 78 Todd Konrje

socialism as Jiidlsches Denkprodukt (thc product of Jewish thought).1' Thomas

Mann sat front rovv center as guest of honor whilc HI uher delivered his tirade,
and he responded enthusiastically to his remarks (TIl 14X).
Thus from the outbreak of the war until less than a year before his turn
toward support of the Weimar Republic, Mann espoused a militant mas-
culinity in his own works and admired right-wing thinkers who expressed
similar views. Yct there are other passages in Mann's wartime journalism
that complicate the neat distinction between French effeminacy and Cerman
masculinity. His very first response to the war, in fact, draws on the "femi-
nine" language of Dionysian rapture to describe the rejuvenating potential
of the conflict. In "Gedanken im Krieg," Mann describes C;crman KlIltllr as the
sublimation of thc demonic, a stylized wildness that gives form to elemental
forces, whereas French Zlvll!satlon is mere intellcct, cut off from vital drives
and passions. Nietzsche had viewed Apollinian culture as the adequate expres-
sion of Dionysian impulses in ancient Creek society, while denigrating mod-
ern civilization as a new version of the niggling Socratic rationalism that had
caused the death of tragedy in the ancient world. Mann greets the eruption
of chthonic forces in August 1914 as an opportunity for the rebirth of tragedy
out of the spirit of German culture. Anticipating the works of Ernst Junger
and Hesse's Demian, Mann welcomes the war as a world-historical event that
promises national purification and the liberation of elemental and rejuvenat-
ing passions, while remaining blind or indifferent to the actual suffering of
millions in the trenches. 36
In his major work of wartime journalism, the BetrachtunBen eines Unpolitischen
(Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1918) Mann adapts the metaphor of giving
birth to a subtler and less bellicose understanding of German identity. To a
certain extent, Mann continues his distinction between German masculinity
and French effeminacy in this work. He derides French civilization as super-
ficial, soft, sentimental, "feminine and deceitful," while praising Nietzsche
as the embodiment of German virtue: "Die ungeheure Mannlichkeit seiner
Seeie, seine Antifeminismus, Antidemokratismus,-was ware deutscher?" (The
monstrous masculinity of his soul, his anti-feminism, anti-democratism-what
could be more German?).\) In other passages, however, Mann switches
Germany's gender from male to female: "In Deutschlands Seele werden die
geistigen Gegensatze Europus ausgetragen,-im mutterlichen und im kamp-
ferischen Sinne 'ausgetragen'" (The intellectual conflicts of Europe are born
in Germany's soul-"born" in a maternal and in a belligerent sense) (EU 46).
Germany becomes the pregnant mother of Europe, a site of intellectual and
spiritual gestation for European conflicts. When defined as a man, Germany's
identity is based on the relatively simple fact that it is not Britain or France;
 Modern Masculinities on [he Magic Mountain 79

when viewed as a woman, Germanv identity Ix'Comes more complex, for in

this case the essence of being C;erman is being not exclusively Cerman, hut
inclusively European."
The same paradoxical notion of Cerman identity' recurs on several levels in
the Betrachtunwn. Thomas Mann himself, who presumes to speak for Germany
in this context and who would later proclaim from his sitc of exile in Beverlv
Hills, California, that "Wo ich bin, ist Deutschland" (Cermany is whercver I
am) (4: 440), nevertheless points out in that in several ways he is also "not a very
proper Cerman" (keln sehr /"/ChtlIW [)eutscher) (Ell 62): he describes himself as a racial
mixture, filled \vith his mother's Latin American blood as \vell as his father's
German heritage; his intellectual interests tend to be more broadly European
than speCifically German; his chosen form, the novel, is not really a Cerman
genre (BU 62); and his chosen medium ofliteratu re rather than music forces him
to defend the "wordless" culture of his nation with the weapons of a foreign
civilization (Illl 42). Yet Mann turns self-deprecation into self-congratulation,
for he maintains that each of his three intellectual heroes displays a similarly
conflicted sense of being both typically German and part of a wider European
culture. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy was of central importance to
all European intellectuals, not just Germans. Nietzsche's "monstrous mascu-
linity" may make him seem particularly German, and yet his European intel-
lect contributed Significantly toward the "DemokratisierunB Deutschlands" (BU
78), which in Mann's eyes is eqUivalent to its de-Germanification (EntdeutschunB)
(BU 60). Even Wagner's music is not really German, but a theatrical performance
of Germanness to the point of parody (BU 69). Mann argues, however, that it is
typical of the German inclination toward cosmopolitanism to present oneself
as un-German or even anti-German, and speculates "that one may have to lose
one's Germanness in order to find it" (Bli 63).
Mann's definition of German national identity as the cosmopolitan mother
of Europe grants him a perspective from which he mounts a sustained critique
of the internal contradictions of the Western European Imperium der Zivihsation
(empire of civilization) (BU 31). By proclaiming their values to be universal,
the French arrogated the right to impose those values on others, including
the Germans. Hence it is not true that the revolutionary principles of free-
dom, justice, and humanity have made France a more benevolent nation.
On the contrary, Mann argues, France's sense of being on a mission makes
it extremely aggressive and warlike. A similar arrogance fuels Britain's belief
in its destiny to rule the world even as it exploits and abuses colonized peo-
ples. Even Bismarck was guilty of leading Germany toward a new 'Tpoche
der deutschen Zivilisation und des Imperialism us" (era ofCerman civilization
and imperialism) (r\l1 232). As an antidote to the evils of modern nationalism
 80 Todd Kontje

and imperialism, Mann proposes an "unpolitical" focus on German BlidunB

and a cosmopolitan openness to foreign influence. To translate this discussion
into gendered terms, Mann defines the Germans in the Betrachtunsen both as a
manly force that resists the blandishments ofhench coquettishness, and as a
maternal realm that fears penetration by an aggressive French civilization and
tolerates difference, even to the point of including a closeted homosexual of
mixed race like Thomas Mann as its most typical representative.
From one perspective, Mann's political thought is blatantly contradictory:
the same man who could mount a self-righteom critique of Western Euro-
pean imperialism in the name of German cosmopolitanism also expressed
views that were uncomfortably close to being anti-Semitic, was outraged
when the French sent "thick-lipped Senegal Negroes" onto German soil, and
shared the fears of Ernst Bertram and other members of Stefan George's circle
that Germany might be polluted by an int1ux of people from "down below"
(ViilkerwanderunB von unten), all symptoms of his infatuation with right-wing
advocates of militant masculinity.19 Yet there is also a certain logic to the
inherent contradictions of Mann's political thought that can be explained,
if not removed, with reference to his concept of "erotic irony." While Mann
professes his admiration for Nietzsche's heroic masculinity in the Betrachtunsen,
he also contends that he had always viewed him as the greatest "psychologist
of decadence" and not "the prophet of some sort of vaguely defined 'super-
man'" (BU 71). In "Von deutscher Republik" Mann identifies an anticipatory
critique of Nietzsche's "blond beastliness" (Bestialismus) in Novalis's disdain
for barbaric weaklings who are fascinated only with extreme strength and
the most powerful life forms (2: 150). In the essay "Die Ehe im Obergang"
(Marriage in Transition, 1925), finally. Mann declares that "ein gewisser
Begriff von Mannlichkeit----galant. hahnenmaBig. roh, geblaht ... erotisch.
steif. formlich. schlGpfrig und toricht-das kommt abhanden" (a certain
concept of masculinity-gallant, cocky. rough, puffed up ... erotic, stiff,
formal, slippery. and foolish-is going out of style) (2: 270).
The rejection of an exaggerated cult of ma~culinity carries over into Mann's
understanding of art and politics. With a thinly veiled reference to the works
of his brother Heinrich, Thomas Mann denounced the ruthless Renaissance
aestheticism affected by some of Nietzsche's more literal-minded misreaders
(BE 17,531). As early as 1903, in fact, Mann had voiced a self-deprecating defense
of writers like himself, "die wir unter dem Hohnlacheln der Renaissance-
Manner ein weibliches Kultur- und Kunstideal verehren " (who honor a femi-
nine cultural and artistic ideal under the scornful smiles of the Renaissance
men) (1: 29). Mann later used the term erotic ironJ to characterize the principles
behind his own artistic production: he is erotically attracted to "life"-most
 Modern Masculini[ies 011 [he Magic Moumain 8L

typically in the form of blond boys like Hans Hansen of Tonio Krbiw--but
remains an intellectually detached observer who sublimates homoerotic pas-
sion into art.·n In the famous example of Death in Venice, Gustav Aschenbach
writes chiseled prose while he ogles Tadzio on the beach. In August 1914, "life"
erupted in the form of war. For a brief period, Mann hoped to channel this
new, masculine life force into a celebration of Germany's martial valor, and
even in the immediate postwar years he continued to admire writers such
as Bertram, Spengler, and Blliher who espoused a militant masculinity. As
the evidence of the Betrachtungen reveals, however, Mann soon realized that a
simple affirmation of German machismo was out of character because it did
not accurately reflect the complexities of his political thought. To be sure,
Mann published a long essay in praise of Friedrich's iron discipline and repeat-
edly chastised France for acting like a woman. Yet he also described Germany
as the cosmopolitan mother of Europe, as an ,unpolitical space that should be
reserved for the quiet Bildung of artists and intellectuals who are most typically
German when they are most European. Mann feels the erotic pull of war, but
retains an ironic detachment from his own enthusiasm, knowing that some-
one who has long espoused a "feminine cultural and artistic ideal" cannot, and
ultimately does not want to, transform himself into a Nietzschean superman.
With characteristic hubris, Mann then elevates his self-analysis into a diagnosis
of the German nation: however much the Germans may welcome the war as
a chance to prove their manhood, they remain a nation of thinkers and poets
at the cosmopolitan center of Europe. The erotic attraction to blond boys and
blond beasts remains essential to Mann's creative and political thought, but
so does the ironic self-awareness that prohibits complete identification with
either, and, indeed, transforms this apparent necessity into an artistic and cos-
mopolitan virtue.

Masculinity on the Magic Mountain

In a speech to students at Princeton University in 1938, Thomas Mann aligned The

MaBic Mountain with the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman, the genre that typ-
ically portrays the maturation of a young man through a series of adventures,
romantic and otherwise, toward adulthood, marriage, and a profession that
allows him to contribute productively to society,,1 Mann's reworking of the
genre differs Significantly from this pattern, for we first meet Hans Castorp at
the point where the protagonist of the Bildungsroman usually ends: he has weath-
ered some early childhood trauma, chosen his future profeSSion, and is about
to enter the working world after a brief visit to his ailing cousin. The planned
 82 Todd Konrje

three-vvoeek vacation turns into a stay of seven years, however, during which
Castorp loses all sense of time and forgets his plans to become a ship's engineer.
Instead of finding a wife and starting his career, Castorp has an affair \>.:ith a
married woman who reminds him of a boy and drifts into a world of feverish
speculation divorced from the concerns of the flatlands. Like Hermann Hesse's
Demian, The MaH'c Mountain concludes in the chaos of World War I, yet the signifi-
cance of this conflict has become considerably less clear; whereas Demian pro-
claims with oracular certainty that war will lead to the birth of a new society,
Mann's narrator offers only an unanswered question: "Wird auch aus diesem
Weltfest des Todes, auch aus der schlimmen Fieberbrunst, die rings den regn-
erischen Abendhimmel entziindet, einmal die I.iebe steigen?,,42
Mann thus subverts an intrinsically patriarchal genre about the solidifica-
tion of male heterosexual identity into a story about ambiguous desires and
inconclusive debates. Flirtation with same-sex desire itself is not unusual in the
German Blidun8sroman. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for instance, recalls his fond-
ness for a fisher boy with whom he had exchanged "the most passionate kisses"
in his youth. As Robert Tobin argues, however, successful BildunH requires that
the hero discipline his wayward desires into socially acceptable heterosexual-
ity.43 Meister succeeds in a development crowned by marriage, although at a
considerable cost of personal renunciation; his counterpart Anton Reiser does
not, however, and suffers crippling insecurity and self-hatred as a result. H The
Bildun8sroman thus offered a literary model with which authors could explore
the promises and pitfalls of a historically specific model of male maturation
into patriarchal society, defined as a world in which men solidify their rela-
tions with one another through the exchange and control of women. Eve
Kosofsky SedgWick introduces the term homosocial to describe such male-male
bonds in modern European society.45 As she is careful to point out, homosocial
ties between men are not necessarily homosexual. In fact, the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century heterosexual males who formed homosocial bonds in the
public sphere were profoundly homophobIc as well as misogynistic. 46 Strict bor-
ders needed to be maintained between men and women, between mandatory
heterosexuality and forbidden homosexuality. Mann's first novel both reflects
this nineteenth-century norm and diagnoses its demise; the successive patri-
archs of the Buddenbrook family attempt to solidify their social and economic
standing through a series of strategic marriages, but find it increasingly dif-
ficult to maintain the fas:ade of successful bourgeoiS masculinity.4 7 In the end,
Hanno Buddenbrook represents everything a man was not supposed to be:
sickly, hypersensitive, effeminate, and probably homosexual.
Jf Ruddenbrooks records the decline of a family and the erosion of patriarchal
power, the MagiC Mountain explores the resulting crisis of modern masculinity.
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain 83

The novel's distance from the nineteenth-century Bildunwroman hecomes most

ohvious in the protagonist's relationship with Clavdia Cham,hat. Although a
fully realized character in her own right, Cham'hat is also a walking catalog
of everything that was associated with Woman and the feminine in modern
European society. Her bad hahits of chewing her fingernails and slamming
doors contrast with Castorp's impeccahle tahle manners and associate her with
the lower classes, and as an indirect result of her corrupting intluence, Cas-
torp ends up at the tahle for "bad Russians" in the final months of his stay
at the sanatorium. Chauchat's independence from her husband and apparent
sexual promiscuity associate her with modern feminism. At the same time,
repeated references to her high cheekbones and Kirghiz eyes give her a touch
of Oriental exoticism that evokes an ancient realm of Dionysian rapture of the
sort discussed in Bachofen's Mutterrecht and Nietzsche's Birth of Trawdy. Castorp's
repeated association of Chauchat with Pribislav Hippe, finally, blurs the distinc-
tion between homo- and heterosexuality. Instead of maturing toward marriage,
Castorp remains suspended between youthful memories and present desires,
just as Chauchat's associations with both modernity and antiquity disrupt
time's linear progress and open a window on the nunc stans of primal passion.
Castorp's relations with other men also oscillate between the hard mascu-
linity characteristic of homosocial bonding in patriarchal society and a gentler
form of friendship and even love. We find an example of the former in the
chapter entitled "Humaniora," in which Castorp admires Hofrat Behrens's
painting of Madame Chauchat. The configuration of two clothed men and
the painted image of a scantily clad woman recalls Edouard Manet's DeJeuner sur
l'herbe, a work that Sedgwick chose for the cover of Between Men and that serves
as a visual representation of her basic unit of analysis, the erotic triangle. is
Castorp strongly suspects that Behrens has interests in Chauchat that extend
beyond the realm of art, and he is indiscreet enough to ask Chauchat directly
about her relationship with the doctor during the Walpurgisnacht celebra-
tion. As Kenneth Weisinger noted, the personal rivalry between Behrens and
Castorp over Chauchat also hints strongly at the national rivalries between
European powers for control of oil in the Middle East; Chauchat's husband is
French, not Russian, hut he spends most of his time in Daghestan, an Islamic
colony of Russia that was a central Oil-prodUcing region. 19 The link between
France and Russia, with further references to Great Britain, foreshadows the
Triple Entente of powers allied against Germany during World War I. Thus
the pseudo-Oriental trappings of Behrens's smoking alcove not only under-
score C:hauchat's association with ancient myth, but also her ties to a part of
the contemporary world subject to fierce competition between the imperial-
istic nations of modern Europe.
 84 Todd Kontje

Even in this primal scene of male bonding and international rivalries we

nevertheless find hints of an alternative masculinity. The image of Castorp
carrying Chauchat's picture with him around Behrens's apartment before the
eyes of his astonished cousin lends an air of grotesque comedy to the scene
that undermines the potential seriousness of an encounter between the two
rivals. Moreover, hints of homosexual desire repeatedly complicate the osten-
sibly heterosexual erotic triangle: as noted, Castorp's interest in Chauchat is
strongly colored by his memories of Hippe, a youthful tenderness that Castorp
now extends to his beloved cousin. Castorp's relationship with Behrens also
has an element of what Mann termed the "quasi-erotic pedagogical rivalry"
between Settembrini and Naphta for their young pupil.") The exchange of
cigars between Behrens and Castorp nicely captures the complexity of their
relationship: on the one hand, the scene parodies the heterosexual rivalry,
as the two men exchange slender-bodied cigars and examine their irregular
surfaces, with tiny pores and little veins that almost seem to throb like a liv-
ing, organic being, etwas orsamsch Lebendises (384). The packaging of Castorp's
darling Maria Mancini in beautiful enameled boxes "mit einem Globus, vielen
Medaillen und einem von Fahnen umflatterten Ausstellungsgebaude in Gold
geschmlickt" (383) (with gilt depictions of a globe, lots of medallions, and an
exposition hall with banners flying [248]) also provides another reminder of
the relationship between "masculine" European nations and the "feminine"
resources of colonized lands, whether oil or tobacco. On the other hand,
however, one does not need to be an expert in Freudian analysis to realize that
cigars are classic phallic symbols, an association that adds more than a little
ambivalence to the scene in which Castorp and Behrens fondle each other's
throbbing cylinders.
Castorp's subsequent relationship with Mynheer Peeperkorn functions as a
reprise of the erotic triangle between himself, Behrens, and Chauchat. In some
ways, the rivalry is actually more open, for Castorp could only guess that Beh-
rens might have had sexual relations with Chauchat, whereas now Castorp's
former lover appears with a traveling companion with whom she is clearly
involved. The association of this "Kolonial-Hollander, ein Mann von Java, ein
Kaffeepflanzer" (827) (colonial Dutchman, a man from lava, a coffee-planter
15381) with European imperialism also makes obvious what was only implicit
in the earlier male rivalry. Yet Castorp's interaction with Peeperkorn deviates
markedly from the open competition one might expect: unlike his literary
predecessor Parzival, who defeats a series of rivals while entranced by drops of
blood on the snow, Castorp seals a bond of friendship with Peeperkorn while
staring at drops of red wine on the white sheets of the bed, just after confess-
ing that he had had an affair with the older man's lover. Peeperkorn, in turn,
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mounlain 85

confesses that he is impotent, whereupon Castorp goes so far as to deny his

own masculinity, at least in a certain sense: "Ich bin gar nieht mannlieh auf
die Art, daB ich im Manne nur das nebenbuhlende Mitmannehen erblicke,-
ich hin es vielleicht liberhaupt nicht. aber bestimmt nicht auf diese Art. die
ich unwillklirlich 'gesellschaftlieh' nenne, ich weil) nicht, warum" (886).51 In
the end the former colonial master commits suicide with cobra venom, thus
completing his slide from imperial masculinity into the "feminine" realm of
Dionysian passion and physical dissolution.
Mann's play with the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman points toward
two hroad tendencies within the fictional world of the Ma8'c Mountaln: first,
sexual identities are precarious and intrinsically unstahle. As in his essays, Mann
estahlishes a series of oppositions-hetween male and female, heterosexual
and homosexual-only to undermine the distinctions or to invert them into
their opposites. Second, assigning a clear pol.itical significance to sexual catego-
ries becomes equally impossible: what from one perspective seems progressive
turns reactionary when viewed from another angle. Settembrini's commit-
ment to the fraternal order of the Freemasons is a clear case in point. As a rep-
resentative of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Settembrini believes in
progress, rationality, democracy, and the essential goodness of humankind;
he works to eliminate suffering, class conflict, and war, and to foster inter-
national law. He would thus seem at first glance to be the perfect spokesman
for Thomas Mann's newfound commitment to democracy and reason against
the growing threat of right-wing ideologies in Weimar Germany. Naphta, in
contrast, represents everything Mann might be expected to oppose: medieval
mysticism, blood sacrifice, irrational violence, and a society ruled by dictato-
rial authority. In the course of their seemingly endless discussions, however,
it becomes clear that Naphta can expose unexpected limitations in Settembri-
ni's point of view. 52 From Settembrini's perspective, the Freemasons exemplify
the liberal values of an enlightened society, but Naphta contends that Free-
masonry had its origins in the Oriental mysticism of the "eleusischen Mys-
terien und der aphrodisischen Geheimnisse" (772-773) (Eleusinian mysteries
and the secrets of Aphrodite [503]), and that it is, therefore, "terroristisch, das
heiBt, anti-liberal" (767) (terroristic-that is, antiliberal (499]) in its essence,
even though it has degenerated into its modern form as "bourgeoise Misere in
Kluhgestalt" (773) (bourgeOiS misery organized as a club (503]). What initially
seems a clear opposition hetween reaction and progress turns into a politically
ambiguous dialectic: the band ofhrothers may represent an enlightened alter-
native to aristocratic rule, as in the case of Whitman's defense of democracy,
or they may point toward the authoritarian world of Spengler's "socialism"
or Bltiher's antidemocratic and anti-Semitic understanding of the Miinnerbund.
 86 Todd KOl1tje

The significance of Castorp's protracted stay on the mountain becomes

equally uncertain. From Settembrini's perspective, Castorp's willingness to
abrogate his tlatland responsibilities is reprehensible. Instead of taking up
his manly role as a productive member of society, Castorp sinks into obscu-
rantism and eventually refuses even to read the newspapers about events
beyond the sanatorium. Yet Castorp's neglect of his patriarchal duties in
favor of submersion into the "uterine realm" of the mountain;1 brings with
it certain advantages as well: the mountain awakens his unbounded intel-
lectual curiosity and sensitizes him to his body and its appetites. He eats five
times a day, takes his temperature at least as often, and obsesses over his sex-
ual desire for Chauchat-all of which Mann portrays with a sense of humor
that infuses a welcome element of comedy into a sometimes turgid novel of
intellectual debate. As in the case of Goethe's Faust, however, there is a deeper
seriousness to the jokes on the MaHic Mountmn. Castofp'S allegOrical vision in
the snow suggests that the body and its desires are a part of life that must
be acknowledged if one is to move beyond a superfiCial rationalism. In other
words, Mann has not reversed course completely in favor of the Zil'llisationslit-
erat that he had rejected so bitterly in the BetrachtunHen, but advocates dialectical
progress toward a synthesiS that combines mind and body, the Enlightenment
and Romanticism, but in a way in which goodness and love do not succumb
to the powers of darkness and death. From this perspective, it is Settembrini
who appears "politically suspect," for he not only denies the extent of his
own illness but also falls prey to the shortcomings of the Imperium der Zivilisa-
tion that Mann criticizes in the BetrachtunBen: despite his talk of international
understanding, Settembrini is an Italian nationalist who is fiercely hostile to
Austria. 51 His repeatedly expressed abhorrence of filthy Russians goes hand
in hand with his fear of racial degeneration within Europe:]] The point is not
that Settembrini suffers occasional lapses from the path of virtue, but that
militarism and racism are an intrinsic component of his liberal humanism. By
the same token, Castorp's "feminine" receptivity and potentially irresponsible
irrationalism also inspire an intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitan generos-
ity of the sort Mann praises in the Retrachtungen. The magic mountain itself is an
apolitical realm of illness and unchecked appetites, yet it is also a democracy
of sorts, inhabited by people from around the world who share a common
mortality.
These reflections about modern masculinity in the Magic Mountain lead us
to a final comment ahout the novel's notorious ambivalence. According to
Mann's British commentators, rumors of the work's ambivalence have in fact
heen greatly exaggerated. In commenting on Castorp's vision in the snow, for
instance, T. J. Reed insists that "for all his subtlet\, Thomas Mann is simpler
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain 87

here than his critics are sometimes prepared to helieve. The dear-cut allegory
was meant to he read as a dear-cut allegory."'" Michael Beddow goes still fur-
ther, accusing Mann's critics of suffering from "a def~rmatlOn professil'nelie which
places ahsolute value on pervasive amhivalence" that renders them hlind to
"any political message" the text may have to offer. 57 One must distinguish,
however, between political intent and artistic amhivalence. Although one
may argue ahout the timing of Mann's conversion to democracy and find fault
with his occasional lapses into racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes, his defend-
ers are quite right to ohserve that he was one of the first German intellectuals
to speak out puhlicly against the far right and for the Weimar Repuhlic, and
that he continued to denounce Germany's descent into barharism for the rest
of his life.'x The question regarding the relationship het\veen Mann's political
ideals and The Ma81c Mountain, however, has always turned on the question of
context. 59 The heartfelt pieties ahout grantlng death no dominion over our
thoughts that Castorp gleans from his vision in the snow are no douht sin-
cere and an accurate reflection of Mann \ newfound commitment to more
progressive politics, hut they are also notahly vague, and, in the context of the
novel, soon forgotten. Castorp draws no lasting henefit from his experience,
and the novel ends not with a ringing reaffirmation of political liberalism, but
with a tentatively expressed hope amidst the chaos of battle.
My own focus in this essay has been on ambivalence of a different sort: the
multiple, even contradictory political implications of unstable sexual iden-
tities, As I have argued, one cannot reduce a given form of sexual desire or
sexual identity to a Single, uneqUivocal meaning, Homosexuality, for instance,
may function as a sign of decadence or democracy in different contexts or
from different perspectives in Mann's work, and the same is true for phe-
nomena such as Dionysian passion or homosocial bonding between men, Nor
can one describe the evolution of Mann's reflections on masculinity solely in
terms of his movement from militarized machismo in 1914 to his embrace
of androgyny in the 1925 essay "erber die Ehe." Traces of a softer masculin-
ity are present from the beginning of Mann's career, and continue to play
an essential role in the complex argumentative structure of the BetTachtun8en.
Mann's development can be better described in terms of a shifting emphasis
on ditferent sides of a constant dialectic, or, as Mann would say, his thoughts
may change but his meaning remains the same. Fluctuating desires within The
Ma81c Mountam also challenge the neat distinction hetween homosexuality and
heterosexuality, even as that distinction was being solidified in the medical
and psychoanalytical discourses of the day.OII Hans Castorp is neither a hetero-
sexual adult who has grown beyond his adolescent homosexuality, nor a gay
man who pretends he is straight. The "quicksilver of sex""1 shimmers more
 88 Todd KOl1rje

. illusively in the hermetic world of Mann's fiction and in the life of its mercu-
rial protagonist.
Finally, although Mann is centrally concerned with questions of modern
masculinity in his work, he is not particularly interested in women, and The
MaBie Mountalll is by no means a feminist novel.° 2 Here as elsewhere in his fic-
tion, female characters tend to be either of relatively minor importance or,
as in the case of Chauchat, closely associated with men.!>1 While Mann is
willing to queer masculine identity into something that escapes stable categories,
Woman remains a mystery and a threat. At the heart of darkness we find a ter-
rible vision of half-naked witches tearing apart a little blond child and devour-
ing the bloody pieces. Hans Castorp stands riveted in horror hy the gruesome
spectacle until the women see him, shake their bloody fists at him, and curse
him in his native dialect. Upon awakening from his trance, Castorp momen-
tarily grasps the meaning of life: "Der Mensch .loll um der C;iite und Liebe willen dem Tode
keine Herrschafi elnriiumen iiber seine Gedanken" (748).04 Death is a woman in The MaBie
Mountain; it is up to men to escape her clutches and find a realm of "goodness
and love" that leads beyond "Bosheit und finstere Wollust und Menschenfeind-
schafr" (748) (wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind [487]). Whether
or not Castorp finds that path remains an open question in The MaRl( Mountain;
Joseph's struggles with Potiphar's wife and Adrian Leverkiihn's dangerous liai-
son with the demonic figure of Haetera Esmeralda suggest that the threat of
Woman will continue to loom large in Mann's subsequent work.

Notes

1. Thomas Mann, TaBebiicher 1918-1921, edited by Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt

am Main: Fischer, 1979),453. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TB plus page
number.
2. Mann's recent biographers have seen his repressed homosexuality as a key to
understanding his life and works. See in particular Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros
and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), but also Klaus Harpprecht,
Thomas Mann: Eine Biowaphle (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995), and Hermann
Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art. A BLOwap~y, translated by Leslie Willson (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
3. On the concept of "representative publicness," see JUrgen Habermas, The Struc-
tural Transformation of the Public Sphere An lnquirv into a CateBory of /louraeois Sonety, translated
by Thomas Burger and frederick I.awrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),5-1''1.
4. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Puhlic Sphere In the Aae of" the French Revolution (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
 Modern Masculinicies on che Magic Mouncain 8<)

S. Thomas Laqueur, Mukin!l Sex. Rodv mid C;ender Fom the (;reeks to Frftul (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
6. Lvnn Hum, The Family Romance of the French Re\'olutioll (Bcrkelev: liniversitv of
California Press, 1992).
7. Kirsten Belgum, l't'pularlZlnll the Nallon.· AudIence. RepreSI'1ltutlOll. und the ProductIOn 0/"
Identity in ··Dle (;urtenlauhe" 1853-1900 (Lincoln: II niv"Crsity of Nebraska Press, 1(98). For
good broad oven·iews of the history of gender roles in general and masculinity in par-
ticular, see Ceorgc L. Mosse, Nationalism and Snuahtr: Respectahilitv and Ahnormal Se\ualltv in
Modern Europe (New York: ~ertig, 1(85), and Mosst:', The Imaw 0( Man: He Creation of Modern
MasculInity (New York: Uxf()rd University Press, 1996).
II. On this alliance, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The Gmnun Emplr(" 1871-1918, trans-
lated by Kim TraYllll[ (Oxford: Berg, 1985).
9. Robert Tobin, Waml Ilrothm: Queer Theorl' In the AW of (;oethe (Philadelphia: 11 niver-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2000),194-210.
10. Steven E. Aschheim, The Niet:sd,e Lellac\, i~ Gcrmany 1890-1900 (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1992).
11. Nietzsche, Werke, ed, Karl Schlechta, vo\. 2 (Munich: Hanser, 1(56),460.
12. Kevin McAleer, Duelmil' The Cult '1· Honor In Fin-de-Slecle (;ermany (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994). "Die Gesellschaft insgesamt war in Jener Epoche
zweifellos 'maskuliner' .. , jene des kaiserlichen Deutschland in besonderem Malle,
das sich einem wahren Mannlichkeitskult hingab--und Thomas Mann war dabei"
(Harpprecht, Thomas Mann, 334).
13. On the overlapping prejudices against blacks, Jews, and the lower classes, see
Sander L. Gilman, Difference and PatholoBY: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender,
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995),
14. Aschheim, The Nietzsche LeBacy, 82.
IS. On Bachofen, see Lionel Gossman, Basel in the AW of Burckhardt: A Study In Unseason-
able Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 20(0), 109-200.
16. On Cermany's rivalry with Great Britain, see Nicolaus Sombart, DIe deutschen
Miinner und Ihre Felllde: Carl Schmltt-ein deutsches Schicksal zwischen Miinnerbund und Matrlar-
chatsmythos (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997); on Germany's role in provoking World War I, see
Fritz Fischer, Germany 5 A,ms III the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967).
17. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Leaacy, 128-16.1.
III. Klaus Tht'weleit, Male Fantasies, translated by Erica Carter, Stephen Conway,
and Chris Turner, 2 vols, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987-1989). On
"explosions" in battle, see 2: 176-191.
19. Jeffrey Herf, ReactlOnarv Modernism. Tec'hnol(8)'. Culture. and Polltlo in Welmur and the Thll·d
ReIch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),74. Ernst JUnger, Der Kampfals inneres
Erlebnis, 5th ed. (Herlin: Mittler, 1936).
 90 Todd KOnlje

20. Hermann Hesse, Demian, translated by Mi,hael Roloff and Michael Lebeck
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 135.
21. For a scathing critique of the more questionable aspects of Hesse's work, see
Jeffrey L. Sammons, "Hermann Hesse and the Over-Thirty Cermanist," in Theodore
Ziolkowski, ed., Hesse: A Co/lectlOn of Critl(~1 Essays (Englewood Cliff5, N): Prentice-Hall,
1973), 112--133; on Denllan, 132-133.
22. Armin Mohler, Der konservatlve Revolution In Deutschland 1918-1932, 2nd revised ed.
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972),5-9.
23. Heilbut, Thomas Mann, 371-388.
24. Martin Creen, MountaIn o[Truth' the Counterculture lleBlns, Ascana 190(1-1 920 (Hanover,
NH: 1Iniversity Press of New England, 1986).
25. Thomas Mann, Essays, edited by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski,
voL 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993),343. further references to this edition are
included with volume and page numher in the text. Hernd Widdig argues that Mann's
decisive move toward defense of democracy actually postdates the "Repuhlik" essay
in "Mann unter Mannern: Mannerhilnde und die Angst vor der Masse in der Rede Von
deutscher Repuhlik," German Quarterly 66 (1993): 524-536.
26. Gerald N. Izenberg, Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky throu!Jh World
War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 20(0), 145--155; also Harpprecht, Thomas Mann,
380--386,408,481; Heilbut, Thomas Mann, 293--297; and Kurzke, Thomas Mann, 214, 217.
27. Heilbut, Thomas Mann, 278.
28. Mann, Essays 1: 225. In deference to Wilhelminian decorum, Mann did not
actually write the word Scheide (meaning both "sheath" and "vagina" in German),
leaving only a suggestive hyphen in its place. See Harpprecht, Thomas Mann, 385.
29. Nietzsche, Werle3: 119.
30. Aschheim, The Nietzsche LeBacy, 77.
31. Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer MytholoBie (Berlin: Bondi, 1920),50.
32. For praise of Spengler'S works, see TB 283, 349. As Mann's politics became
more liberal, he quickly distanced himself from Spengler. See, for instance, "Brief aus
Deutschland" (1922), in Essays 2: 167-178.
33. Oswald Spengler, Preuj3entum und Sozialismus (Munich: Beck, 1920),72,74. On this work,
see Peter Gay, WeImar Culture: The Outsider as InSIder (New York: Harper & Row, 1970),85-86.
34. Heilhut, Thomas Mann, 313. For a succinct overview of Mann's relationship to
these and other thinkers of Germany's "Conservative Revolution," see Hermann
Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche-Werk-Wirkunfj (Munich: Beck, 1985), 171-182.
35. Hans BlUher, J)eutsches ReIch, Judentum und Sozialismus: eine Rede an d,e Freideutsche
JU!Jend (Prien: Anthropos, 1920),22.
36. Harpprecht repeatedly underscores Mann's seeming indifference to the actual
suffering caused hy the war (Thomas Mann, 389, 398, 413). See also Kurzke, Thomas Mann:
Epoche- Werk- Wlrkun,q, 138.
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain 91

37. Thomas Mann, Betraehtunwn eines llnpolitisrhen (frankfurt am Main: Fischer,

1983), 14,75. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation BU.
38. On this paradoxical notion of(;erman identity and the self-deconstructing logic
of the Betruchtunwn, see Olker Gi>kberk, "War as Mentor: Thomas Mann and Cermanness,"
in A Companion to 'l1romas Mann's 'The Ma8ie Mountain," edited by Stephen 1). Dowden (Roch-
ester, NY: Camden House, 1999),53-79.
39. Mann's relationship to the "Jewish question" is complex has inspired con-
Hiding critical commentaries. Mann's harshest critks include Ruth Angress-KlUgcr,
"Jewish Characters in Thomas Mann's !'inion," Horizonte: festschrififiir Herbert Lehnert :um
65. Geburtstag, edited by H. Mundt, Egon S('hwarz, and William J. Lillyman (TUbingen:
Niemeyer, 19(0), 161···172; Harpprecht, 'lhomas Mann; and Michael Ihenner, "Beyond
Naphta: Thomas Mann's Jews and Cerman-Jewish Writing." in A Companion til Thomas
Mann's 'The Ma8ie Mountain." edited by Stephen D. Dowdt~1l (Rochester. NY: Camden
House. 1(98). 141-157. Kurzke offers an impassi~)J1ed refutation of the charge of anti-
Semitism in Mann's life or works (Thomas Mann. 187-214). Mann acwmpanied the
anti-French rhetoric of his wartim(~ journalism with repeated racist comments about
soldiers from Senegal-"ein Tier mit Lippen so dick wie Kissen"--whom the French
stationed on German soil (Essays 1: 269; see also 1: 204). On Mann's racism at this time
and subsequent change. see Heilbut. Thomas Mann. 280. On May 5, 1919. Mann records in
his diary a conversation with Ernst Bertram about saving "das Abendland ... vor den
Greueln der V6lkerwanderung von unten" (TB 227). On racism within the George Cir-
cle, see Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan GeoT8e and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2(02), 547-548.
40. Kurzke, Thomas Mann, 230-231. See also Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche-Werl--Wirkunfl,
165-170.
41. Thomas Mann. "Einfiihrung in den 'Zauberberg': Fur Studenten der Uni-
versitat Princeton," Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1965), 615-617. Early
scholarship on the novel tended to stress its relation to the genre of the Bildunasroman. See
Hermann J. Weigand, Thomas Mann:~ Novel "Der ZauberberE/": A Study (New York: Appleton-
Century. 1933). Further references to this strand of the novel's reception in Kurzke,
Thomas Mann: Epoche-Werk-WirkunE/, 183.
42. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberherw Roman, edited by Michael Neumann (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer. 2002), \085. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text with English
translations in the notes: "And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly
rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all TOund-willlove someday rise
up out of this, tool" Thomas Mann, The MaE/ie Mountain, translated hy John E. Woods
(New York: Vintage, 19(6). 706. Translation of brief quotations are included in paren-
theses in the text.
43. Tobin, Warm /lrothers, 113-115.
44. Ibid .. 79-88.
 {)Z Todd KOnlje

4S. Eve Kosofskv Sedgwick, Between Men. Enali.\!J Litel"tlture <lnd Male H~mo'<"flal f)e.\ire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 19X5), I~S. Andrew J. Webber draws on the
work of both Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler in his essay nn "Mann's Man's World:
Cender and Sexuality," in The Camlmdw Comp"nlon to Thama.\ Mann, edited Lw Ritchie Rob-
ertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2(02), 64~83.
46. Sedgwick, Between Men, 20.
47. Elizabeth Boa, "lluddenbrooks: Bourgeois Patriarchy andfin-de-slhle Eros," in Thoma.\
Mann, edited h, Michael Minden (London: Longman. 1995), 12.5--142.
4X. SedgWick, Between Men, 21-27.
49. Kenneth Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs and Other Erections," in .f\. Companion to
'lhoml15 Mann', "The Ma81l Mountain," edited by Stephen D.Dowden (Columbia, SC: Cam-
den House, 1999), 177-220.
SO. Mann writes in his diaries about the duel between Naphta and Settembrini,
"das nicht nur geistigen Hal~, snndern Padagogen-llivalitat (quasi erotisch) zum Moth;
hat'· (Til )78) ('"that has as its motive not only intellectual hostility but also pedagogical
rivalrv [quasi erotici").
51. "I am not at all manly in the sense that I regard other men as mv rivals in
courting-perhaps I am not masculine at all, but most certainly not in the sense that
J automatically termed 'social,' although I don't really know why" (576).
52. Gokberk, "War as Mentor," 66.
53. Frederick A. Lubich, "Thomas Manns Der ZauberberB: Spukschlofl der Groflen
Mutter oder Die Mannerdammerung des Abendlandes," Deutsche VierteljahrsschriJt 67
(1993): 729-763.
5-4. Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoehe-Werk--WirkunB, 202.
55. Stephen D. Dowden, "Mann's Ethical Style," in A Companion to Thomas Mann's
"The MaBie MountaIn," edited by Stephen D. Dowden (Columbia, SC: Camden House,
1999), 14--40, esp. 28-29.
56. T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann. The Uses of TraditIOn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974),254.
57. Michael Beddow, "The Magic Mountain," in The Cambridse Companion to Thomas
Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge Universitv Press, 2002),
140.
58. See, for example, ibid., 139.
59. Kurzke, Thoma.l Mann. Epoche-Werk-Wirkunfi, lin, 210.
60. On the emergence of the homosexual as a stable category around 1900, see
Michel foucault, The History o{Sexulllily, \'01. I: An Introdurtion, translated by Robert Hur-
ley (New York: Vintage, 1978). See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, EpistemaloiLV of the Closet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1--63.
61. Sedgwick, /letween MeIl, 26.
62. Boa comes to a similar conclusion about Mann's first novel: "lluddenbrooks may
be a feminine text, then, but it is not feminist" (139).
 Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mounrain 93

63. Karl Werner Bijhm. "Die homosexuellen Elemente in Thomas Manns 'Der
Zauberberg.'" In Statianen der Thomus-Mann-Fo",-hunW Aujsiit:e seit 1970, edited by Hermann
Kurzke (Wiirzburg: Ki:inigshausen & Neumann, 1985), 145-165.
64. ''''or the sake of guodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over
his thoughts" (487; italics in the original).
 Projections on Blank Space
Landscape, Nationality, and Identity in Der Zauberberg
NANCY P. NENNO

• • •

B LAN K SPA CEO N A MAP represents a region of the globe that has remained
unreached, untouched, unclaimed. As such, it is also a challenge, some-
thing to be conquered and possessed, as well as something to be feared. Not
merely placeholders, words to fill the empty space on a map, "terra incognita"
are also the articulation of a challenge to fill that space with words, with nar-
ratives. More specifically, they are a challenge to fill that empty space with
proper names claiming it. As an aporia to be assigned meaning, the blank
space functions as a site for the inscription of identity. In this respect, the his-
tory of cartography is also always a history of exploration and colonization. I
The landscape of the uncharted region becomes a mirror image of desires
and needs, modeled on the known, yet defamiliarized and distanced as the
unknown.
By the early twentieth century, the polar regions of the Arctic and the
Antarctic were the sole remaining uncharted territories on the world map.
In the nineteenth century it was Africa, the "dark continent," whose mystery
drove the European colonial race, and whose landscape functioned as a dis-
torted mirror of individual and national aspirations. And, in a similar manner,
beginning with their "discovery" in the eighteenth century, the European Alps
provided a site of desire within the European continent proper. It is precisely

95
 ()6 Nancy P Nenno

because of the ways in which these terrae incognitae became imbricated in nar-
ratives of exploration and identity formation that it is significant that Hans Cas-
torp's synthetic vision in the subchapter entitled "Snow" of Thomas Mann's
epic novel, The Maillc Mountain, is projected on a blank space in the Alpine land-
scape. The white wall of snow that blinds Hans Castorp is transformed into a
screen on which the conflict of his identity is played out and resolved-if only
temporarily.

German Geographies
During his second winter at the International BerghofSanatorium, the novel's
protagonist, Hans Castorp, designs and executes a plan to come into contact
with the mountains that he has observed from a distance since his first dav
at Davos. His interest in the Alps evolves over the course of his discussions
with the inmates of the sanatorium, conversations that revolve around death,
disease, and a fascination with nature. Underlying this interest. however, is
also a discourse that had long constructed the Alpine region as a symbolically
laden extraterritorial space within the European continent. As Mann's narra-
tor puts it, "Born a stranger to remote, wild nature, the child of civilization
is much more open to her grandeur than are her own coarse sons, who have
been at her mercy from infancy and whose intimacy with her is more level-
headed"(467).2 Both their distance and their unfamiliarity heightens Hans
Castorp's yearning for intimate contact with the mountains. In his attempt to
establish contact with this unreachable Other, these "uncharted and danger-
ous regions" (468)-a project that he perceives to be a challenge-Hans Cas-
torp becomes an explorer, setting off on an expedition in search of identity.
Under the watchful eye of his humanist mentor, Lodovico Settembrini,
Castorp teaches himself the basics of skiing, and one day he sets out for the
slopes alone in order to experience nature in all its wildness. Lost and caught
unawares by a sudden snovistorm, he returns to the mountain hut, where,
his courage reinforced with port wine, Hans Castorp then gives himself over
to mental perambulations through life and death. His initial meditation on
the grandeur of death, represented by Settembrini's rival at the Berghof. Leo
Naphta, is interrupted by the image of the "organ-grinder" himself bearing
horn and hand organ, a vision that subsequently metamorphoses into the
image of Clavdia Chauchat. Resisting the invisible pull of hands, his conscious-
ness drops to the plateau of life, where he hallucinates a Mediterranean idyll
peopled v,'ith beautiful youths and maternal figures, a scenario inspired by
Goethe and seemingly borrowed from images by Ludwig von Hofmann.; But
 Projections on Blank Space 97

the idyll is shattered by a vision of two old \\omen \'iolentlv dismembering

a child: "I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous,
reasonable, and respectful community of men-while the ghastly bloody
feast went on in the temple behind them" (486), Not merely a dream, the
vision is also a memory, one for which Hans Castorp is merely the conduit:
"The great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us so to
speak, dreams in our many different ways its own eternal secret dream" (485),
And like a dream, soon after his safe return to the sanatorium, the vision
fades, until it is barely a memory.
Over the eight decades since the publication of The MaBic Mountain in
November 1924, critics such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Walter Jens, and hied-
rich Kittler have accorded this section a privileged position in the interpreta-
tion of the nove\.4 Originally conceived as the novel's closing scene, the chapter
constitutes the summa of the preceding chapters, indeed of the entire novel
up to this point, as Hans Castorp's "snow vision" synthesizes the esoteric dis-
cussions between the representatives of Western humanism and Eastern irra-
tionalism embodied in the tubercular figures of Lodovico Settembrini and Leo
Naphta,5 Beginning with Naphta's arrival in the chapter entitled "Someone
Else," Hans Castorp plays the spectator to the rivals' often emotional verbal
duels, with his attempts at active participation brusquely rebuffed by Settem-
brini. "How often have I told you that a man must know who he is and think
thoughts befitting him?" intones the Italian humanist (371). From this first
discussion about the value of nations, freedom, and war, Hans Castorp is
positioned between these two figures-sometimes even literally-as their
mediator, their battleground, and their audience." However, with the con-
clusion of "Snow," Hans Castorp appears to acquire substance.
The ideological battles that situate Hans Castorp as "the man of the middle")
acquire symboliC solidity once they are mapped onto the geographical coor-
dinates of the European continent. Mimicking early twentieth-century geo-
political discourses, Settembrini attempts to position Castorp, and with him
his nation, Germany, as solidly Western, heir to a tradition of rationalism and
humanism: "and as a son of the West, of the divine West, hold sacred those
things that by both nature and heritage are sacred to you" (239). At the same
time, the "organ-grinder" also acknowledges and repeatedly cautions against
Hans Castorp's attraction to the East, his fascination with the novel's personi-
fication of the Orient, the French- Russian Clavdia Chauchat, and his curiosity
about the mystical irrationalism represented by Leo Naphta. Echoing Oswald
Spengler'S Decline of the West, Mann gestures toward Germany's central position
on the European map, transforming that nation, geographically, metaphori-
cally, and cartographically into a battleground on which the ideological forces
 <)8 Nallcy P Nellllo

of East and West confront each other.' As one of the three Cerman nationals
residing at the sanatorium, along with his cousin Joachim Ziemssen and the
head physician, Hofrat Behrens, Hans Castorp stands in for Cermany in these
discussions, seeking, as Mann had described in "Von deutscher Repuhlik," a
third path that negotiates between the two extremes." In this way, personified
national identities occupy abstract positions in a complicated game that takes
the prewar map of Europe as its board.
Like the all-encompassing aerial view of space that properly belongs to the
map, the geographies that dominate the space of 'lhr MUHic Mountain are imagi-
nary insofar as they too are constructed from an elevated position far above
the flatland. The international atmosphere of The MUHic Mountain, peopled with
characters that serve as metonymic, alheit atypical, representatives of national
cultures, thus gestures toward the centrality of national identity in the
novel. 10 When considered from the abstracted perspective of these imaginary
geographies, Hans Castorp's vision in the snow becomes more than simply a
stop on his BildunflSreise. Rather, the literal Alpine landscape expands his role
symbolically, from that of an individual character to the metonymic repre-
sentative of Germany. It is not only Hans Castorp's identity as an autonomous
individual that is at stake in the snow vision; his embrace of life over death
also becomes effectively tied to Germany's ideological choices and identity.
The conflict of identity that Hans Castorp experiences in the "Snow Episode"
becomes inflected as intrinsically German, both within the narrative of The
MaBie Mountain and by contemporary critics of the novel.
The classification of the themes and structure of The MaBie Mountain as
intrinSically German has been a common motif in the reception of the novel
since its publication, a classification that the author himself helped to orches-
trate. In a letter to Andre Gide dated August 22, 1924, Mann declared The MaBie
Mountain "a highly problematical and 'German' work, and of such monstrous
dimensions that I know perfectly well it won't do for the rest of Europe."]]
The question remains: what precisely is the nature of this "Germanness"l Is it
German, as Mann suggests, because of its aesthetic structure, its denSity, the
invocation of esoteric discourses and philosophical traditions! Does this intrinsic
Germanness lie in the metaphysical quality of its content, which Curti us, in his
discussion of the novel the year following its puhlication, declared to be the
innermost nature of German literaturel 12 Possibly its German character resides
in its form, as Wolfgang von Einsiedel suggested in his 1928 review of the novel,
in which he claimed the Bildun8sroman as a quintessentially German genre. Jl Or
perhaps this national appellation derives from the contlicts surrounding the
position of the "Mensch der Mitte" (man of the middle) as he strives to define
his own identity against the West and East, the cartographic Left and Right.
 Projections 011 Blank Space 99

It is not only the novel's protagonist who is situated between Settembrini

and Naphta in The MaHi,- Mountam. The position of Germany is also formulated
as that of the middle ground, hoth geographically and ideologically. Hans Cas-
torp himself explicitly imagines the philosophical and ideological skirmishes
between the two rivals in spatial terms as he chooses "to see his own poor soul
as the chief object of their dialectic rivalry" (497). As Settemhrini says to Cas-
torp in their first extended discussion following the snow vision, "Decisions
must be made-----decisions of incalculable significance for the future happiness
of Europe, and your country will have to make them, they must come to frui-
tion within its soul. Positioned hetween East and West, it will have to choose,
will have conSCiously to decide, once and for all, hetween the two spheres vying
for its heart" (507-508). The parallels between Germany and Hans Castorp, and
their location hetween East and West, Naphta and Settembrini, coalesce in this
passage as Germany's central position within the European landscape is attrih-
uted hoth spiritual and geographiC significance. As the object of desire in the
word duels between Settembrini and Naphta, Hans Castorp's soul doubles for
that of his nation, a nascent identity in which the momentous decision regard-
ing the direction Germany will go has yet to be taken. Settembrini underscores
the metonymic relationship between Hans Castorp and Germany as he equates
Castorp's taciturn spectatorship of these discussions with the silence of his
nation: "You are silent .... You and your country allow unconditional silence
to reign, a silence so opaque that no one can judge its depths" (508).
Over the decades, the symbolic function of Hans Castorp as Germany's
stand-in on the magic mountain has become an accepted truth. In his canoni-
cal study of The MaBie Mountain, Hermann J. Weigand characterizes Hans Cas-
torp as the "representative of things German," whose struggles to establish his
own identity coincide with those of Germany. 14 Although putatively a record
of, and commentary on, prewar culture, the novel also implicitly charts the
struggle of the Weimar Republic to define itself in the newly reconstituted
map of Europe following World War I at the same time as it registers the shift-
ing political position of its author. 15 The conclusion of "Snow" finds Hans
Castorp chOOSing life over his romanticized conception of death, mirroring
Mann's own conversion from a Romantic version of German identity, most
explicitly stated in Reflections of an Nonpolitical Man (1918) to his outspoken sup-
port for the new Weimar RepubliC in "Von deutscher Republik" (1922).'6
Written in the early summer of 1923, "Snow" represents a turning point
in Mann's attitude toward the new German nation, coming shortly on the
heels of his speech "Von deutscher Republik." But rather than maintaining
the conservative monarchist position of the ReflectIOns, here Mann seemed to
be channeling his representative of the Western European Enlightenment
 100 Nancy P Nenno

tradition, Settembrini. To the surprise of his audience. the former opponent

of Western democracy explicitly argued for the embrace of democracy as an
integral part of the German intellectual tradition. rather than its rejection
as a foreign concept being imposed by external forces. Although the choice
that Hans Castorp makes at the conclusion of "Snow" escapes becoming an
overtly political one. representing instead a kind of ideological game within
the context of the Weimar Republic and the modification of Mann's political
stance. Hans Castorp's decision nonetheless acquires political overtones that
link his decision to the very real conflicts besetting the construction of a new
German democratic state. 17
The symbolic quality that critics accord the novel extends beyond the
hermetic boundaries of the text to intersect with the specific historical and
cultural context in which The MaRIe Mountain was written and on which it com-
ments. Anthony Grenville's critique of the tendency of many critics to "seal
the characterlsl off from contemporary history within the hermetic frame-
work of the text"IK points to the need to examine other aspects of the novel in
an historical context. In the last ten vears. there have been multiple attempts
to do just this. as the historical specificity of Davos has become a focus of
recent scholarship.IY At the same time that the culture ofDavos has become a
new area of investigation, what has remained neglected is the role that geogra-
phy, and specifically the cultural meanings of the Alpine landscape on which
Hans Castorp's synthetic vision is projected, plays in the construction, and the
reception, of the novel. Why is it that the character transcends his status as
individual and assumes the role of representative of things German in the Alpi-
nescape? What cultural inscriptions of the Alps in the early Weimar Republic
made this region amenable to such symbolic encoding? What lends the Alpine
landscape validity as the locus of competing discourses about German identity
so that Hans Castorp's choice of life over death, humanism over irrationalism,
parallels Mann's own reception and eventual embrace of the Weimar Repub-
lic over the defunct monarchy? In the follOWing. I explore the geographic
imagination in The MaRie Mountain through the metaphor of the cartographic
blank space. I suggest that the Al pinescape served a similar function within the
European continent as the polar regions did globally, namely, as a screen on
which individual and national desires and conflicts could be projected, thereby
becoming a locus for the construction and performance of identity.
Although numerous critics have addressed the function of space as a meta-
phor in The MaB;e Mountain, until recently few ha\'e examined the role that
geography, and speCifically the historical and ontological speCificity of the
Alpine landscape, plays in the noyel. Ewn as many read the text as a roman a
clef. seeking thinly disgUised autobiographical indices and commentaries on
well-knmvn personalities. most have maintained that the Alpine landscape
 Projeclions on Blank Space 101

fulfills a purely symbolic function in the novel. 211 Indeed, most critics of The
MaBie Mountain have read the Alpine setting as an elaborate metaphor, a read-
ing that the text itself encourages. The climb from the flatland to Davos and
the rarefied atmosphere of the Alps mirror the heightened level of discourse
and experience that take place on the magic mountain. Abstracted from the
mundane world of the flatland, the characters acquire symbolic functions
so that the erudite discussions in which Hans Castorp, "life's problem child"
(486), engages with his mentors hover above the material, addressing the life
of the mind. Set in an enchanted landscape ",. here time and space seem sus-
pended, and in which the conventions of the fairy tale replace the quotidian
perception of life, these discussions seem only obliquely to touch on reality.
At the same time, within the historical context of the early Weimar Repub-
lic, the landscape of the Alps serves as more than mereh a backdrop, more
than an imaginary and mythical realm abstracted from the practical, every-
day life of the flatland. The choice of the Alps as setting is not arbitrary but
rather invokes the place that these geological formations occupied in the
repertoire of German national images. In this "vay, their actual existence and
the network of metaphors that define and obscure them contributes to our
understanding of the conflicts surrounding the repositioning of German
identity in the early years of the Weimar Republic and the symbolic function
of this discourseY Not merely a passive setting for Hans Castorp's revelation
and conversion, the landscape and climate of the Alps become a primary actor
in the drama. In "Snow," the Alps represent the antagonist to Hans Castorp's
protagonist, and the confrontation between them, as I will suggest, consti-
tutes a turning point in the process of his identity formation.
Rather than providing another "new" reading of the most famous chap-
ter in Mann's novel, in what follows I will offer a recontextualization of the
"Snow" chapter in terms of the symbolic functions popularly attributed to
the Alpine regions during the early part of the twentieth century. By recon-
structing some of the cultural vocabulary associated with the Alpine land-
scape, the Berllfilm [mountain film I, and the polar expeditions, associations that
were firmly rooted in the European imaginary when The MaBie Mountain was
published in 1924, I hope to remind readers today of the diverse associations
with the Alps that informed contemporary readings of the novel.

Alpine Topographies

Several competing discourses informed Thomas Mann's choice of the alpine

slope as the site of Hans Castorp's self-assertion and identity formation. On
the one hand, since Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336, the Alps had
 102 Nancy P Nenno

heen accorded metaphysical qualities, sites of "the suhlinw and holy," to quote
Hans Castorp (462). 22 Philosophical discourses had constructed the Alpine
regions as the locus for the experience of the transcendental since they had
first hecome an ohject of scientific interest in the eighteenth century. A pri-
mary setting ofhoth literary and visual texts in the Romantic period, the Alps
represented a site of self-discovery and transcendental revelation as demon-
strated, for example, in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. This Roman-
tic treatment of the Alps deeply informs Mann's treatment of the landscape
in his noveL thus ensuring that the Alpine region retains a mystique as "terra
incognita" at the same time that it anchors Hans Castorp's Rilduntwei.le in a
European tradition of education and trave1. 2 ; The sheer immensity of the
mountain formations, the freedom of the peaks extending into the open skies,
seemed to resist hoth possession and expression either in language or in visual
representation, and their pedagogical function ensured their becoming a nec-
essary stop on the Rddungsreise of the educated European man.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel descrihed the experi-
ence of the Alpine vastness, its seeming formlessness and abstraction from
usual perceptions of time and space. For him, the Alps "are not the symhol of
the negation oflife-since this helongs to the flatland and under the condition
of life---but rather its absolute other, untouched by time's turhulence which
is life's form. The expanse of fir-trees is, so to speak, the quintessential 'unhis-
torical' landscape."24 Simmel's description of the ahistorical nature of the
Alpine landscape anticipates the mythological qualities invoked in The MaBie
Mountain. In the novel, the Alpinescape stands in absolute opposition to the
flatland. Pristine and detached, this terrain resists historicization, making it a
perfect site for self-discovery. "Losing oneself" and "finding oneself" become
one and the same gesture in the vastness of the Alpinescape---a double move-
ment that echoes throughout the annals of mountaineering from Benedict
de Saussure's VoyaBes dans les alpes (1779-1796) to Pope Pius lX's Climbs on Alpine
Peaks (1923) and beyondY This is not to say that such discourses ignored the
phYSical aspect of an encounter with the Alps. Indeed, the sheer physical exer-
tion on the part of the mountain climher as he attempted to scale the Alps
refocused the desire for the metaphysical onto the physical experience. In this
manner, the mountain climber's hody hecame hoth the locus and the symhol
of a synthesis between spiritual aspirations and material realities.
By the early twentieth century, the pedagogical and metaphysical mystique
surrounding the Alps was changing, increasingly hecoming ahsorbed into the
hroader consumer culture of modernity. "Today the Alps are appropriated pos-
sessions and no longer demand the same interest as during the period in which
they were discovered and conquered" declared Richard Weiss in 1933. 20 To some
 Projections on Blank Space 10)

extent, this discursive conquest of the Alps had originated in the late eighteenth
century, beginning with landscape painter Carl Hackert's copper engravings of
Alpine scenes, which had established the Alps as a visual icon of German cul-
tural identity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the mountains also
became the destination of numerous patients suffering from tuberculosis. Fol-
lowing the success of Hermann Brehmer's open-air treatment for consumption
at his institute in Silesia, health resorts and sanatoria began to proliferate in the
Alpsz7 Not only for the sick, the sanitaria were also intended for the healthy who
sought an escape from modern urban life. In the words ofJ.eslie Stephen, "The
Alps ... are places of refuge from ourselves and from our neighbors," thus ges-
turing to the explicitly anti-urban yearnings projected onto the Alpinescape.2~
Over the years, the curative properties attributed to the Alpine air combined
with the popularization of sports such as skiing and mountain climbing to con-
struct the Alps as Europe's "playground." In IR95, Simmel criticized what he
perceived to be the confusion of the egoistic enjoyment of alpine sports with
the moral education the Alps had once symbolized, mourning their demo-
tion from a site of faustian experience to that of mundane tourist attraction. 29
The seismic shift from metaphysical to restorative discourse as a defining
characteristic the Alpine regions in the first decades of the twentieth century
becomes evident in the opening pages of The MaBie Mountain, for, from his first
hours at the Berghof, Hans Castorp exhibits what one might term a touristic
appreciation of the Alps. He is fascinated by the landscape, the panoramic view
of the Alps; and yet, as he remarks to his cousin, he is disappointed. Follow-
ing his pronouncement that the mountains are "magnificent"~a response
that seems to flow from his tongue like a slogan from a travel brochure-he
amends this evaluation with the following observation.

"No, to be quite frank, I don't find it that overwhelming," Hans Castorp

said. "Where are the glaciers and snowcapped, towering peaks? Seems to
me, the ones here aren't all that high."
"Oh, they're high all right," Joachim replied. "You can see the tree line
almost everywhere, it's really quite clearly defined; the pines come to an end,
then everything else-the end then rocks, as you can see. And over there,
to the right of the Schwarzhofl1, on that jagged peak there, is a glacier for
you~can you still see the blue? It's not that big, hut it's a texthook glacier, the
Scaletta Clacier. And there's l'iz Michel and Tinzenhorn in that gap-you
can't see them from here, hut they're always snowcovered, year-round." (8)

In this first encounter with the mountains, both Hans Castorp and the reader
learn how to read the terrain with what John Uny has termed the "tourist
 104 Nalley P Nellllo

gaze."') Each formation is named and located on a panoramic map. The sub-
limity and the mystique of the Alps is subsumed into the descriptive language
of this passage, which deftly catalogues the formations of the Alpine scenery
according to an abstract visual chart, and, in this naming, also possesses them.
By his second winter, Hans Castorp himself displavs disdain for the "fresh-air
dandies and rakish athletes," declaring himself "anything but a tourist" as he
sets out to learn to ski (465). At the same time, Hans Castorp's encounter with
the mountain illustrates that the holv (heillR) function of the Alps has not been
completelv lost to, or engulfed by, the restorative (hfllend) or the touristic"
Mann, whose impetus for the novel came from his experience of visiting
his wife, Katia, at Davos in 1912, plays with the multiple associations that the
Alps held for the contemporary reading puhlic. The MaHie Mountain explicitly
invokes the privileged position occupied by the Alpine regions within Ger-
man philosophical and aesthetic traditions, its cultural meaning as a health
spa for the bourgeOisie and the upper strata of European society, as well as the
mountain region's evolving role as tourist attraction and fashionable destina-
tion. Moreover, the multivalence of the Alps in Mann's novel recognizes and
invokes the historical landscape as a political and politicized landscape, the
origins of which lie in the eighteenth century, when the Alps began to acquire
explicitly political associations. From Albrecht von Haller's epic poem "Die
Alpen" (The Alps, 1729) to Rousseau's panegyric to the heights in his Confes-
sions, alpine topography had been shaped and marked by political decisions
and national desires, coming to symbolize political freedom, and in particu-
lar Swiss democracy.32 Much as political discourse tends to abstract landscape
into a set of projections, Mann's novel invokes and deploys the palimpsest
of Alpine symbolism to contextualize and inflect his character's identity
formation.
In many respects, the political symbolism that Mann invokes in his
novel finds a counterpart in the mountain films of the German geologist-
turned-filmmaker Dr. Arnold Fanck. In the same year that The MaBie Mountain
was published, Fanck released his third narrative mountain film, Peak of Fate. 'l
Fanck had made four previous films set in the mountain landscape, and this
was his third to portray a first-ascent scenario, this time of the Cuglia del dia-
volo:'i Writing in D,e Weltbiihlle, reviewer Frank Anschau perceptively identi-
fied the theme and the subject of the film as "the world of the mountains,
the heroic struggle to conquer the mountains, the mountain as centerpoint
of fates."" Fanck's mountain films rely on a master narrative tied to the fig-
ure of the mountain climber who, both narratively and cinematically, belongs
to the natural landscape. In each of his mountain films, Fanck valorizes one
male figure who, in both his speech and his actions, is sharply distingUished
 Projections on Blank Space 105

from the feminized urban man .;n Peak o( Fate starred Luis Trenker, an architect
and professional mountain climber who became the epitome of the mountain
climber in the interwar era of German cinema, and who later wrote, directed,
and starred in his own films set in the .A Ips, several about the Tyrolean war for
independence . .As in "Snow," the .Alps in Peak o( Fate are not merely a backdrop
but rather an antagonist, an actor alongSide the human figures. Moreover,
the Alpine terrain in the mountain film constitutes a "reservoir of specific
imagery"\' through which the metaphorical terrain regains its physical reality,
only to have that physical reality reinscribed with metaphorical meaning . .As
with all of Fanck's mountain films, in the case of Peak ofF,'le th<: confrontation
with the mountains is overtly coded as a masculine project. The prologu<: to
Peak of Fate introduces the obsession that one man had had for one particular
peak and from which he had fallen to his death. The son, played by Trenker.
promises his mother never to undertake the ascent, hut he ultimatelv must do
so nonetheless in order to save his betrothed. Thus it is that the mountaineer
son tests himself against the mountain that killed his father. The topography
of the Alps becomes a screen for the enactment and recuperation of identity,
as the son accomplishes what his father could not, thereby establishing a lin-
eage, and supercession, of patriarchal inheritance as an inheritance of con-
quest in the context of the Alpine regions, a narrative that in turn becomes a
template for this reconstruction and assertion of the self.
The subtext that unifies all of Fanck's dramatic mountain films is without
a doubt Germany's defeat in World War I. From 1m Kampf mit dem Bers (Struggle
with the Mountain, 1921) to his final mountain film, Der ewise Traum (The Eter-
nal Dream, 1934), the landscape of the Alps stands in for the battlefield. Male
camaraderie and bonding form the central focus of the narratives, and the
female characters are few and ineffectual, serving primarily as catalysts and
spectators of the action. The dramatic mountain rescues-performed on film
either by teams of mountain climbers or, as in Fanck's later films, by World War
I ace Ernst Udet-lend a military subtext to the dramas, focusing as they do
on the necessity of order and diScipline, community and homosocial bonding.
The Alpinescape serves as a stage on which the drama of the war is replayed,
and the primary scene of trauma is dominated-and surmounted-by the
figure of the mountain climber. In these films, Cerman national identity and
masculine identity become intimately entwined and connected to the land-
scape of the .Alpine regions.
Although the mountain film had been created by the Swiss tourist
industry, it has been described as a specifically German film genre, due in
part to the conflicts it thematizes, as well its settings and the conceptualiza-
tion of vertical space.\l\ FollOWing the dismemberment of the Reich in 1919,
 106 Nancy P Nenno

geography reasserted itself as a crucial aspect of the construction of German

identity, and the blank space of the movie screen hecame a privileged site for
the (re)construction of a national sense of self. In the same year as The MagIC
Mmmtuin was puhlished, fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou released Die Nibelungen
(The Nibelungs). "Dem deutschen Yolk zu eigen" (dedicated to the German
people), the two-part film (Siellfned's Death and KriemhIid's Revenge) represented
an attempt on the part of the German film industry to recast the war in myth-
ological terms. Similarly, the four-part Fridericus Rex series (1922-1923) rein-
scribed the terms of national identity through a mythologization of German
history. Fur many postwar commentators, such films seem to display a proto-
fascist inscription of German identity.\<} When one considers the political and
historical links between National Socialist propaganda films like Triumph of the
Will (1935) and the mountain film in the person ofLeni Riefenstahl. such asso-
ciations are not unfounded. 411 At the same time, the mountain film's recasting
of Cennan identity should be contextualized within the v,;idespread tendency
to replav the war in various narrative iterations in the phantasmagoric space
of the cinema.
The cinema as an imaginary space in which the conflicts surrounding the
construction of national identity could be articulated also appears in Mann's
novel. The blank space of the movie screen makes a short but Significant
appearance in The MaBic Mountain in the chapter entitled "Danse macabre."
As was the case in its early history, in the novel, cinema is associated with
lower-class tastes, such as those embodied in the novel by Frau Stohr, whom
Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen unexpectedly encounter at the Bioskop-
Theater in Davos PlatzY The film the cousins watch is overflowing with life:
love and death, exotic foreign locales, subservient naked women, power and
desire-"In short, it had been produced with a sympathetic understanding
of its international audience and catered to that civilization's secret wishes"
(311)-for the cinema is a space in which these secret desires can safely be
played out.'2 Following the main feature come the newsreels, the "pictures
from all over the world":

the top-hatted president of the French republic reviewing a long cordon,

then sitting in his landau to reply to a welcoming speech; the viceroy of
India at the wedding of a rajah: the Cerman crown prince on a barracks
drill field in Potsdam. They observed the life and customs of an aboriginal
village in New Mecklenburg, a cockfight on Borneo, naked savages blow-
ing on nose flutes, the capture of wild elephants, a ceremony at the Sia-
mese roval coun, a street of brothels in Japan with geishas sitting caged
hehind wooden lattices. They watched Samoyeds bundled in furs driving
 Projectiolls 011 Bialik Space 107

sleds pulled bv reindeer across the snowy \vastes of northern Asia, Russian
pilgrims praving at Hebron, a Persian criminal being bastinadoed. They
were present at each event-space was negated, time turned back, "then
and there" transformed by music into a skittering, phantasmagoric "here
and now." (311-312)

In this passage, the cinematic space echoes the mythical terrain of the magic
mountain to draw an explicit connection between the phantasmatic illu-
sions of reality in the newsreels and the imaginary vision in "Snow." The
white screen becomes the locus of an extended parade of national icons--
the crown prince; the French president; ethnographic images of primitives,
both exotic and familiar-in silent black and white. As in the heights, in the
realm of the cinema time and space are suspended, and the reality that is
screened is both as real and as illusory as the conversations that take place at
the Berghof Sanatorium. When the reel ends, the narrator observes: "Then
the phantom vanished. A bright void filled the screen, the word FinIS was
projected on it, this cycle of entertainments was over" (312). Significantly,
the end of the cinematic illusion is marked by the reappearance of empty
white space,
Like the white screen of the cinema, the Alpine landscape is itself a blank
screen on which both personal and communal conflicts are projected in the
"Snow" episode. The "dream" from which Hans Castorp awakens bears a
striking resemblance to the experience of the film spectator for whom the
movie theater functions as an ersatz psychiatrist's couch. The fantasy image
is projected on the white wall of snow, and Hans Castorp moves through the
various scenes as a camera eye, recording mise-en-scene, gesture, and com-
positionY This cinematic quality of the Alpine landscape, which dominates
"Snow" where it serves as a screen across which Hans Castorp's visions and
desires play, is signaled from the chapter's opening pages. From the comfort
of his loge at the Sanatorium Berghof, Hans CastorI' watches as "the con-
tours of the peaks merged, were lost in fog and mist, Expanses of snow suf-
fused with soft light rose in layers, one behind another, leading your gaze
into insubstantiality. And what was probahly a weakly illumined cloud dung
to a cliff, motionless, like an elongated tatter of smoke" (462). The image of
the Alps dances and plays across his field of vision, the material reality of the
peaks appearing and reappearing as if through dissolves. "You had to pay close
attention to catch each stealthy change in the misty phantasmagoria. Freed
of clouds, a huge, primitive segment of mountain, lacking top and bottom,
would suddenly appear. But if you took your eye off it for only a minute, it
had vanished again" (463).
 108 Nancy P. Nenno

It is in part this distanced, veiled spectators hip of the Alpine slopes from
the hotel that galvanizes Hans Castorp into action. Much as the mountain
film was designed to bring the beauty of the mountains to the urban popula-
tion, thereby promoting tourism to the Alps, Hans Castorp is drawn to the
vision of the mountains out of a desire t()r proximity to them." "His other
wish, however, bound up with the first, was to enjoy a freer, more active,
more intense experience of the snowy mountain wilderness, for which he
felt great affinity; but as long as he remained a mere unarmed, uncharioted
pedestrian, his wish could never be fulfilled" (464). Although "Snow" is not
his first encounter with the mountains, it represents a much more intense
emotional bonding to the challenge he perceives in them. If his first experi-
ence in "Hippe" depends on a touristic appreciation of the Alps as a source of
health and healing, this second encounter comes about as the result of his rec-
ognizing the sacred qualities of the mountains, so that his intensely personal
conl1icts are projected onto this relationship between himself and the Alps.
It is in this terrain that he can acquire "courage ... -if courage before the
elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a
conscious abandonment to them, the mastering of a fear of death out of sym-
pathy with them" (467-468). In his confrontation with death, Hans Castorp
is cast as a mountain climber, at once feeling kinship with the elements and
facing the challenge of this immensity with humility and awe. Much like the
Romantic sacralization of the mountain climber as the figure that represents
the synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical, in "Snow" the phantas-
matic and the real, the transcendent and the corporeal, merge and transform
Hans Castorp-as-mountain-climber into an unwitting point of convergence
between abstract desire and material reality.
This combination of scientific curiosity and hubris, daring and self-abnegation
had been constitutive qualities of the European fascination with mountain
climbing since the eighteenth century. At the same time that the Alps inspired
"the sense of being released" from the contradictions of life, they also repre-
sented an arena for the testing of personal limits. <~ In this respect, the history
of mountaineering also reads as a narrative of self-discovery and challenge.
The Alps became a site of desire in a competition in which individual (men's)
abilities were pitted against the natural landscape, an indifferent but superior
opponent. The first in a series of these competitions was instigated by the Swiss
geologist Horace-Benedict de Saussure who, after descending from Chamonix,
offered prize money in 1783 to the first person to attain the summit of Mont
Blanc-at 15,771 feet/4,S07 meters, Europe's highest peak. Three years later, the
prize was claimed by Michel-Gahriel Paccard and his porter, Jacques Balmat. A
century later, all the major Alpine peaks had been conquered, and mountain
 ProjecLiolls 011 Bialik Space IO<}

climbers redirected their energies into discovering more difficult routes of

ascent. At the same time that the mountain climber acquired a privileged posi-
tion as hero from the Romantic period on, over the course of the nineteenth
century the characterization of this figure underwent an ideological shift. The
self-renunciation and individuality of the solitary mountain climber as iconized
by Romantic artists and philosophers gave way to a "muscular, quaSi-military
determination" embodied by mountain-climbing teams.'"
This revision of the cultural meaning assigned to the mountain climber
realigned this figure away from the poet and toward the soldier, positioning
him associatively with the image of the expeditioner in foreign terrain. In this
manner, Europe's Alpine regions acquired the aura of the exotic and the dan-
gerous, aligned with the desert and poles as loci ofidentitv testing and identity
formation.

If our youth reads descriptions of polar- and desert-travels for both plea-
sure and purpose, why not also travel stories that draw them into the
snow- and ice-worlds of the high Alps) In the glacier region of the heights,
the individual is also as good as cut off from the aid of civilization, he is also
completely self-dependent and must deploy his entire personality in order
to meet the obstacles that besiege him with every move and to conquer a
hostile natureY

In this text from 1874, A. W. Grube casts a wide net in his search for role models,
expliCitly linking the explOits of the explorer in the tropics, the Sahara, and the
polar regions to those of the mountain climber, whereby the "courage," "pru-
dence," and "strength of will" of the former are mirrored in the latter. Such
parallels highlight the quasi-imperialistic impulse underlying the conquest of
both the self and the foreign. The pedagogical value of such tales resided in the
worth accorded physical hardship and the confrontation with an unconquer-
able opponent in the formation of Persiinln'hkelt (personality), so that the con-
struction of both individual and national identity merge in the figure of the
intrepid explorer. Grube's text directs our attention to a quasi Doppelf/iinlW of the
hypermasculine Alpinist, which Fanck constructs in his mountain films, and
which Mann effectively undercuts: namelv, that of the polar explorer.

Arctic Visions

Ry the beginning of the twentieth century, fe\\-' regions of the earth remained
that had not been claimed, conquered, charted, and named. Indeed, by the
 110 Nancy P Nenno

turn of the century, the only blank spaces remaining on the world map were
the polar regions, and by 1913, when Thomas Mann began formulating The
MaB'c Mountain, both the North and South Poles had been attained. However,
the mystique accorded these expeditions-which had begun in the eighteenth
century in the search for the Northwest Passage-maintained a strong hold
on the European imagination throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s." Simi-
lar to the functions accorded the European Alps over the course of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, the empty spaces of the Arctic and Antarctic
became stages on which the construction of identity-both individual and
national-cou ld be enacted.'~ The poles acquired the status of a phantasm, an
abstract concept, and were often represented as a mythical landscape of the
unfamiliar and the monstrous, inspiring horror fantasies from Mary Shelley's
FrankensteIN (1818) to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains 0{ Madness (1931).'0
Public interest in these expeditions was engaged and fed by the numer-
ous narratives told by and about polar explorers. The Norwegian Roald
Amundsen (1872-1928), who set his sights on Antarctica after the American
Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole in 1909, described the influence that
the story of Sir John franklin, whose search for the Northwest Passage in 1845
had ended in the loss of the entire expedition, had had on his own life. In his
1927 autobiography, Amundsen claimed that what had appealed to him most
about Franklin's story were "the sufferings he and his men [had] endured."51
Like Hans Castorp, whose initial fascination with the danger of the moun-
tainside in "Snow" drives him to continue his expedition, the testing of per-
sonal endurance occupies a central position in these narratives of exploration.
As the history of mountain climbing is more about the attempt to climb the
peaks than about the mountains themselves, the story of polar expedition is
more a metanarrative of adventure and conquest than one about the pole
per se. This is evident in the fact that most of the polar explorers exhibited an
often inexplicable tenacity in their desire to reach the unreachable and their
determination to conquer and possess it. Having finally attained his cher-
ished destination after two previous failed attempts, Peary's diary entry from
April 6, 1909, reads: 'The Pole at last. The prize of three centuries. My dream
and goal for twenty years. Mine at last."s2
Not merely a focal point for quaSi-imperialist desire, the polar regions also
acquired a transcendental significance similar to that of the Alps. Two paint-
ings by Caspar David Friedrich, who is best known for his Romantic Alpine
landscapes, demonstrate the similarities between the iconography and ideol-
ogy of the two landscapes, as well as the topicality of polar expedition. One
painting, Wrecked Ship ,'0' the Coast of Greenland under the May Moon (1822), depicts
the ruins of a ship named Hope, an image undoubtedly inspired by newspaper
 Projections on Blank Space III

reports depicting polar explorations, particularly the discovery of the North-

west Passage in 1819-11120:'; In the same year that Friedrich executed this
painting, Johan n Carl Einstein's panoramic study Winter C:ump of the North Pole
Expedition was displayed in Friedrich's hometown of Dresden. In the following
year, Friedrich continued to thematize the polar region in his painting /)us Eis-
mea (Sea of Ice), which again depicted a wrecked ship, this one t'ncased in ict',
as a small, almost insignificant element in the totality of the frame. In these
works, Friedrich captures less the reality of the landscape than the phantas-
matic functions accorded it in the popular imagination.
In contrast to those narratives that imagine the colonization of the Ameri-
can West as a "fantasy of erotic discoverv and possession,"" the narratives of
polar possession reveal both a de-eroticization of the landscape and its rein-
scription in homoerotic terms. In this respect, polar narratives deviate from
the nexus of associations attendant on the mountain film and which inform
Fanck films. On the one hand, Fanck's mountain world is overlaid with a
veneer of masculinity, while on the other, Leni Rkfenstah I's romanticized
and mythologized Alpinescape in The Blue LiH"t is strongly associated \vith
eroticized feminine imagery. Within this metadiscursive frame, the "Snow"
chapter seemingly provides the missing link between the two extremes as
the alpine terrain in The MaBie Mountain vacillates between gendered identifica-
tions. The siren song of the seductive, and deadly, mountains is presaged by
the "blue light" that Hans Castorp encounters in the snowscape, and which is
explicitly linked to those twin figures of his erotic imagination, Clavdia Chau-
chat and Pribislav Hippe: "It was such a peculiar, delicate greenish-blue light,
icy clear and yet dusky, from the heights and from the depths, mysterious and
seductive. It reminded him of the light and color of a certain pair of eyes ...
Hippe's and Clavdia Chauchat's eyes" (469). In The MaHi( Mountuin, Mann dis-
rupts the overt masculinization of the mountain world by projecting the fig-
ure of Clavdia Chauchat onto the snowy landscape, thus transforming it, as
Frederick A. I.ubich has suggested, into a paysaw sexualise rather than a field of
military operations. 55 Little wonder, then, that Castorp's desire drives him to
an encounter with the "bride of the wind" (4110). At the same time, the homo-
erotic overtones of the Hofmannesque idyll neutralizes some of the hetero-
sexual coding of the "Snow" vision.
In the discourse of polar exploration, the Arctic is also de-eroticized. The
landscape was not a virgin to he ravished hut rather an "ice maiden" who
served as an adversary, combat with whom would establish the identity of the
explorer and his team.'" 'The spirit gains power hy looking into the coldness of
negativity and lingering there."'7 Helmut Lethen's description of the "cold per-
sonality" that emhraces the metaphorical "cold" of modernity and celehrates
 III Nancy P. Nenno

confrontation as an identity-forming experience takes on figural form. Set in

snow and ice, the narratives of polar exploration mythologize this encounter
with frozen terrain and physical hardship as an act of self-construction.
Much as Hans Castorp's foray into the snowy world of the Alps solidifies
his identification as a representative of Germany within the larger context
of the novel, so too did the polar explorer carry not only personal but also
national signification. On the one hand, the drive to reach and encounter the
arctic regions provided an opportunity for self-assertion and self-definition
by the individual. On the other hand, the polar explorer was also elevated
to an international figure, a national icon in the arena of world exploration
and conquest." Such identification of the polar explorer and his nation is evi-
dent in the symbolic gestures performed by numerous explorers. When Peary,
the American Lincoln Ellsworth, and the Italian Umberto Nobile crossed the
Areric. they threw their national flags out of the ship as symbolic gestures of
their claim. Similarly, on his mapping expeditions to the Antarctic in 1928 and
1929, Richard E. Byrd claimed preViously uncharted regions of the South for
the United States, christening them with names that dearly denoted national
origin, such as the "Rockefeller Mountains" (after one of his financial sup-
porters) and "Little America." Moreover, the imbrication of national agenda
with masculinity is showcased by Peary, who planted an American flag-right
next to the flag of his college fraternity.
A Single, but Significant, reference to the figure of the polar explorer
appears in The MaBie Mountain, an ironic slight aimed at the casting of Hans Cas-
torp as intrepid expeditioner. And yet it is not unreasonable to assume that,
although this reference may be lost to us almost a century later, it would have
been comprehensible to Mann's contemporaries for whom narratives of polar
exploration were an integral part of the discursive landscape. Significantly,
the reference appears in the novel's final chapter, "The Thunderbolt," directly
preceding the outbreak of World War I. and at the point in the novel where
the twin issues of masculinity and national identity promise to resurface in a
hostile landscape.

In truth, in the recent past of which we speak, there had been a total abroga-
tion of every emotional bond between him and the flatlands. He wrote and
received no letters. He no longer ordered his Maria Mancinis from there.
He had found another brand up here, one that suited him, and to which he
was now as faithful as he once heen to his ti)rmer girlfriend-a hrand that
would eyen have helped polar explorers get over their worst hardships in
the ice and that when you smoked it made you feci as if you were lying on
a beach and would he able to carryon. (698)
 ProjeC!iolls 011 BIalik Space II:)

Like the Alpinist and the polar explorer, Hans Castorp is cut off from the
civilization of the "flatland" and yet he is a degenerate figure in comparison. By
the final chapter of The MaHI( Mountam, Hans Castorp has deteriorated from the
hright young hourgeois who came to the Berghof seven years previously on a
short visit into a dissolu te figure of passivity who has given himself over to the
atmosphere oflethargy and apathy on the magic mountain. He no longer cares
for his personal appearance as he once had, and he has systematically worked
his way down the social roster of the dining-room seating arrangements and
no\v belongs to the "bad" Russian table. Tn this context, the reference to the
polar explorer as a privileged representative of Western masculine identity
seems a cruel joke. And yet, Hans Castorp's choice of a new Cigar, "Oath of
RUtli"-the mythical oath sworn hy the first three Swiss confederates-
seems to presage the role that national identity and communal honds will
once again assume in his life. If Hans Castorp's degeneration mirrors that of
prewar European culture, it is the war that promises rejuYenation, a return
to strength and identity.
With the thunderbolt that opens World War I, Hans Castorp recuperates
this national signification by joining up and returning to the flatland. The
final scene of the novel aligns the trope of the soldier with those of the polar
explorer and the Alpinist as navigators and conquerors of hostile landscapes.
The community of soldiers on the battlefield echoes the teams of mountain
climbers and polar explorers whose only hope for survival lies in bonds of
loyalty and trust among men and in physical stamina. As with the mountains
and the poles, here the landscape itself appears as the opponent, a faceless and
illegible enemy.

There is a wood spewing drab hordes that run, stumble, jump. There is a
line of hills, dark against the distant conflagration whose glow sometimes
gathers into fluttering flames. Around us is rolling farmland, gouged and
battered to sludge. And there is a road covered with muck and splintered
branches, much like the wood itself; branching off from the road, a country
lane, a rutted quagmire, winds up the hill; tree trunks jut into the cold rain,
naked and stripped of branches. Here is a signpost-no point in asking, the
twilight would cloak its message if it had not been riddled and ripped to
jagged shreds. East or west~ It is the flatlands-this is war. (703)

The novel's concluding, apocalyptiC battlescape, reminiscent of postwar paint-

ings by Otto Dix, such as Der Krieg (The War), and Ernst Friedrich's volume
of photographs KrieH dem Krirge (War on War), both of which also appeared in
1924, forms a stark contrast to the images of the magic mountain. The narrator,
 114 Nancy P Nenno

whose view of the scene mimics that of an aerial camera-itself an invention for
military reconnaissance during World War I-describes the unforgiving nature
of the terrain in which Hans Castorp and his countrymen find themselves with
a quasi-objective eye.
Unlike the "Snow" chapter, in which Hans Castorp's personal vision accrues
a larger symbolic function in the reception of the narrative, the closing scene
of The MaBie Mountain subsumes Hans Castorp's presence into the larger body of
Cerman wldiers. The song he hums, "The Linden Tree," marks the battlefield
as an overtly national space, and yet it is the moderate bourgeois individual to
whom this confrontation is entrusted.'o As Settembrini remarks when Cas-
torp hoards the train to the flatland: "My Cod, you are the one to go, and not
our lieutenant. The tricks life plays" (702). It is not to Joachim Ziemssen, the
representative of Prussian conservatism and mili tarism, to whom Cermany's
future is tied. As Mann attempted to convince the students in 1922, it is to
the Cerman who has confronted and conquered his Romantic notions of self,
who seeks a "third," synthetic and distinctly Cerman path, that the future of
the nation helongs.
Thus it is that, in The MaBie Mountain, geography functions as another order-
ing element alongside those of time and space. The Alpine regions, overlaid
with a web of metaphysical associations and metanarratives, serve as a test-
ing ground for identity, both Hans Castorp's own and that of Germany. As
the contemporaneous narratives of polar exploration illustrate, it is the spe-
cifically hostile terrain and unknown regions-Alpine snowscapes, Arctic
regions, and war zones60-in effect, the contested and "blank" spaces on the
map, that provide a screen on which conflicts surrounding identity, both indi-
vidual and national, are projected and, if only temporarily, resolved.

Notes

1. Cartography-as both an art and a science--found its impetus in the age of

exploration and commerce after Gerardus Mercator of Flanders published the first
map of the world based on a cylindrical projection in 1569. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, the topographical mapping of European nation-states was undertaken explicitly
for military purposes. See Graham Huggan, "Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonial-
ism, Pmt-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection," A rie/20. 4 (1989): 115-131;
Denis Wood, "Cultural Symbols/Thoughts on the Cultural Context of Cartographic
Symbols," Cartowaphicu 21.4 (1984): 9-37; and Denis Wood and John Fels, "Designs on
Signs/Myth and Meanings in Maps," CartoBraphica 2.1.3 (1986): 54-103. Alfred Hiatt has
followed a similar trajectory in his recent "Black Spaces on the Earth," Yal~ Journal of
 Projections on Blank Space 115

Criti<:ism 1.).2 (2002): 22J-2.'10, which examines the medieval origins of cartographic
imagination.
2. Thomas Mann, The MalJl<' Mountain, translated by John E Woods (New York:
Knopf, 1995), 467. Subsequent references to the novel will be given parenthetically.
References to the Cerman text are based on the C",!ie kommentlerte Frankfurter Ausgabe
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer) and will subseLjuently appear as CKFA.
J. Heinz Saueressig, "Die Entstehung des Romans Drr i':allberberll'" Besicluillunll des
I':auberberw (Hibcrach an der Riss: Wege lind Cestalten, 1974), .'1-.'1.'\, here :\4-J7; and
Heinz SaLieressig, [)ie Bi/dwelt von Hans Castorps Frosttraum (Ribo:rach an der Riss: Wege Lind
Cestalten, 1967), 1-1.'1. Saucressig names Hofmann's painting "Die (Luelle," which
Mann had bought in 1914, and in the latter essay, includes two images of Hofmann's, in
which the author perceives influences on Mann's imagery. ()n the Coethean sources
of the "Snow" vision, see also Herbert Lehnert, Hans Castorps ViSIOn: ('ine Studle zum Aufbau
von Thomas Manns Roman Dcr Zauberberg, Rice Institute Pamphlet 47.1 (Houston: Rice
Institute, 1960).
4. Ernst Robert Curtius, "Thomas Manns Zauberberg" (1925), reprinted in Die Ent-
stehunll des Romans "Der Zauberberg," edited by Heinz Saueressig (Biberach an der Riss:
Wege und Gestalten, 1965),51-55; Walter Jens, "Der Cott der Diebe und der Dichter:
Thomas Mann und die Welt der Antike," in Statt einer L,teraturi/e.lchichte (Pfullingen: Neske,
1957),87-107; Gottfried Fischer and Friedrich A. Kittler, "Zur Zergliederungsphantasie
im Schneekapitel des 'Zauberberg,''' in Perspektiven psyehoanalytiseher Literaturkritik, edited by
Sebastian Goeppert (Freiburg: Rombach, 1978),23-41.
5. Thomas Mann, "Foreword," The MaB,e Mountain; and "Fragment tiber das
Religiose," in Reden und AuJsiitze, 2 vols (Berlin: Fischer, 1965), 1: 644---M6, here 644. Ter-
ence J. Reed has argued that "it is simultaneously the brilliance and the aesthetically
questionable aspect of the conception of The MaRie Mountain that allows for the history
of the European spirit to shrivel into the dispute between two sickly intellectuals."
Terence J. Reed, "Von Deutschland nach Europa," in Auf dem WeB zum "ZauberberB": Die
Davoser L,teraturtaBe 1996, edited by Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1997), 2~JI8, here 304. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are
my own.
o. For example, on their first meeting with Naphta, the cousins take a walk with
their two mentors, Settembrini on the right, Naphta on the left; The MaRie Mountain 367.
The visualization of Germany as the "intellectual battleground of Europe" is a central
argument in Mann's 1918 polemic, ReflectIOns ofa NonpolitIcal Man, where he claims: "In
Cermany's soul, Europe's intellectual antitheses are carried to the end .... This truly
is her real national destiny. No longer physically-she has recently learned how to
prevent this-but intellectually, Germany is still the battlefield of Europe"; Reflec-
tions, translated by Walter D. Morris (New York: Ungar, 198J), .10. CJlker Gokberk has
productively traced the ambivalences in Mann's thought about the positionality of
 110 Nancy P Nenno

Cermany in the map of Europe in "War as Mentor: Thomas Mann and Cermanness," in
A Companion to Thomas Mann's "The MaR'c Mountain," edited bv Stephen D. Duwden
(Columbia, S.c.: Camden House, 1999),53-79.
7. This term, applied descriptively to Hans CastOfp by Hermann ). Weigand,
alludes to Adam MUller's thesis of the Germans as das Volk dfr Mille (the Volk of the
middle) that Mann also invokes in ReflectIOns of a Nonpolitical Man: Hermann J. Weigand,
The MaRie MounU/in. A Study ofT/lOmas Mann's Novel "Der Zauberberg" ([19331 Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 107.
8. Mann's interest in, and ultimate rejection of, Oswald Spengler's Der UllterilanR
des Ahendlandes (Decline of the West), 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1918, 1920) is evident not
only in "Von deutscher Republik" ([19221 in Thomas Mann, Essays II 1914-1926, edited
by Hermann Kurzke, vol. 15.1 of Thomas Mann, CKFA ]Z002], 514-559), but also in
other texts such as his article, "Clber die Lehre Spenglers," which first appeared in Du.'
TaRe-Bu(h, March IS, 1924,341-346, and is reprinted in GKl'A 15.1: 735-744.
9. Thomas Mann, "Von deutscher Republik," 3(}-31. GKl'A vol. 15.1: 559.
W. Erwin Koppen, "Nationalitat und Internationalitat im 'Zauberberg,'" in Thomas
Mann 1875-1975: Vortriiw In Miinchen, Ziinch. Liiherk, edited by Beatrix Bludau. Eckhard
Heftrich, and Helmut Koopmann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1977), 120-134. On the
prevalence of, and diverse (colonial) associations with, international geography in the
novel, see Kenneth Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs and Other Erections," in A Companion
to Thomas Mann's "The MaBie Mountain," edited by Stephen D. Dowden (Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 1999), 177-220.
11. Thomas Mann, "To Andre Gide," August 22, 1924, in Letters of Thomas Mann,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1971), 127.
12. Curtius, "Thomas Manns ZauberberB," 53.
13. Wolfgang von Einsiedel, "Thomas Manns 'Zauberberg'--ein Bildungsromanl"
Zeitschrift fiir Deutschkunde 42.3 (1928): 241-253.
14. Weigand, The MaBie Mountain, 105.
IS. Anthony Grenville, "'Linke Leute von rechts': Thomas Mann's Naphta and the
Ideological Confluence of Radical Right and Radical Left in the Early Years of the Wei-
mar Republic," Deutsche ViertelJahrmhr1i 59.4 (1985): 651-675. Reprinted in the present
volume, pp. 143-170.
16. Heinz Saueressig has demonstrated the way in which the conclusions of both
the "Snow" chapter and "Von deutscher Republic" are identical, save for a fev\, minor
deviations; "Entstehung," 36.
17. This struggle for Germanv's self-definition and its literary corollarv in Hans
Castorp forms the crux of a letter to Julius Bab in which Mann invokes his protagonist
in his commentary on the elections of 1925. After agreeing that Hans Castorp is indeed
"a prototype and forerunner, a little prewar Cerman who bv 'intensification' is brought
to the point of anticipating the future." he then explicitly names that future as a
 Projections on Blank Space 117

distinctly anti-romantic one: "The candidacv of Hindenburg is 'Linden Tree'-to put

it mildly. An article of mine in the Neue Frele Presse denounces this shameful exploi-
tation of the (;erman people's romantic impulses. In it 1 say that I 'shall be proud of
our nation's political discipline and instinct for life and tiJr the future if on Sunday it
refrains from electing an antediluyian valiant as its chief of state.' Little Hans has come
that far'" Thomas Mann, "To Julius Bab," April 23. 1925. in i.ellers, 14.'\--144, here 144.
Terence J. Reed has further suggested that the "mediocrity" of Mann's protagonist is
not necessarily derogatory, but rather a description of the average citizen of the new
Republic; Reed, "fler /.aul>erhrrw Leitenwandel und Bedeutungswandel." in StutlOnen der
Thoma.\-Mann-Forsehunw Au/siit:e .Ielt 197IJ, edited by Hermann Kurzke (Wlirzhurg: Ktinig-
shausen & Neumann. 1985).92-134, here III.
18. Crenville, "Linke Leute von rechts." 652.
19. In his commentary on Der ZauheriJerg, Michael Neumann cites the importance
of Mann's Da\'os experiences as the source for many of the novel's details. Der Zau-
"erherg Kommentar, GKFA 5,2 (2002): 66. See, for example, the conference proceedings
of the "Zauberherg-symposia" held in [)avos: Das "Zauherher!l·'-.'l~vmposium 1994 in Davos,
edited hy Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995); and Auf dem
Well :um "Zauherberg" Die Davoser LlteraturtaBe 1996, edited by Thomas Sprecher (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 1997). Furthermore, the reaction of many doctors and of
the Davos population to the novel suggests a more lively engagement with the world
above the flatland than has been heretofore acknowledged.
20. For example, Helmut Koopmann insists that "Snow" be interpreted as taking
place in a symbolic Grenzenlandschaji. R. D. Muller and R. P. Blackmur maintain the dream-
status of the chapter, which by extension renders the landscape that of an imaginary
dream-space. Borge Kristiansen, whose reading of the landscape in "Snow" suggests
that it continues the motif of the Reise from the flatland, follows the tradition of read-
ing this snowscape as symbolic instead of as an actual Alpine slope. Helmut Koopmann,
"Philosophischer Roman oder romanhafte Philosophie: Zu Thomas Manns Lebensphi-
losophischer Orientierung in den 20er Jahren," in Thomas Mann: Aujsiitze zum ZauberberB,
edited by Rudolf WoltI (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988),61-88. here 74; R. D. Miller, The Two Faces
afHermes A Stud} of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountam" (Harrogate: Duchy, 1962).68-78;
R. P. Slackmur, "The Lord of Small Counterpositions: Mann's The Magic Mountain" (1%4),
in Crlt/(:al Essays on Thomas Mann. edited hy Inta M. Ezergailis (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988),78-93,
here 88; Borge Kristiansen, Thomas Mann.< Zauherherg und Schopenhauers Mystlk, 2nd ed. (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1986).42-47. Hugh Ridley offers a comprehensive view orthe scholarship on the
"Snow" episode in his book The rrob/ematlc Bourwois: TwentIeth-Century Criticism on Thomas Mann's
"Buddenrrooks" and "The MaBie Mountaln"(Columbia, SC: Camden, 1994), 108-120.
21. Leslie Stephen. longtime president of the British Alpine Club, declared that John
Ruskin had "cO\'ered the Matterhorn, for example. with a whole web of poetic associa-
tions." Leslie Stephen, The rlayground ,if' Europe (London: Longmans. Creen, 1871).268.
 J 18 Nancy P Nenno

22. See also Walter Woodburn Hvde, '"Die Entwicklung der Wcrtschatzung von
Cebirgslandschafter in der Neuzeit" (1917). translated by Klaus-Dieter Hartig in
(;eowaphie des Frmeit- und Fremdenverkehr.l. edited by Burkhard Hofmeister and Albrecht
Steinecke (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche I)uchgesellschaft, 191i4), 2111-290, here 2112.
23. Petra Raymond, \lim der Landschaji im Kop(zur Landschafi <Jus Sprache. Die RomantlslerunH
der Alpen in den Rmeschilderunsen und die LiterarisierunH des Gebirw.\ in der ErziihlprosQ der Coethezeit
(Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 1. Further examples of Romantic imagery of the
Alps can he found in Peter f'aessler, ed., llodrnsel' und Alpen Dw Entdr,kunH einer Landschufi 1M
der J.iterutur (Sigmaringen: Ian Thorbekke. 1985).
24. Ceorg SimmeL "Die Alpen," in Phllosophis,he Kultur Ober das Ahenteurer. die Geschlechter
und die Kri.\e der ModemI'. (;esammelte [sSaI.\ eBerlin: Klaus Wagenbach. 1986), 125-130. here 128.
25. More recent literature in which this tendency is evident inrludes Jon Krakau-
er's well-received autobiographical noveL Into Thin Air: A Personal Account o( the Mount
Everest Disaster (New York: Villard, 1997).
26. Richard Weiss, Vas Alpenerlehnis in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Horgen-
ZUrich: Verlag der Munster-Presse. 1933), 150.
27. Linda Bryder. Below the MaHie: Mountain.' A SOCIal Hl>tory '1" Tuberculosis in Twentieth
Century BritaIn (Oxford: Clarendon. 1988),24-25. For an analysis of the complex social
interactions, and the overtly patriarchal structure, of the post-World War II cul-
ture of the sanatorium, which also offers insight into the culture of the Berghof, see
Flurin Condrau, "'Who is the Captain of These Men of Death': The Social Structure
of a Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Postwar Germany," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.2
(2001): 243-262.
28. Stephen, PIaYBround of Europe, 67.
29. Georg Simmel, "The Alpine Journey," translated by Sam Whimster, Theory. Cul-
ture and Society 8 (1991): 95-98.
30. John Urry, "The Tourist Gaze and the 'Environment,'" Theory. Culture and Society
9 (1992): 1-26.
31. Another way of conceptualizing the shift that attended mass tourism in the
Alps is that the sacred function of the mountains shifted from a personal experience.
it la Romanticism, to a more communal, even national, experience of memory and
sacralization. See. for example, Nelson Graburn, "Tourism: The Sacred Journey," in
Hosts and Guests. The Anthropolosy o(TouT/sm, edited by Valerie Smith (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 17-32.
32. Martin Warnke, Political Landscupe. The Art History o( Nature, translated by David
Mcl.intock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1994), 121. See also Timothy
F. Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Paintins 1770-18411 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1993),66. See also Willi Wolfradt. Cuspar DaVId Friedrich und die l,undschaji der Romantik (Berlin:
Mauritius. 1924).94, and Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995).
3." BerH des Schicbals. Eln Druma ails der Natur (directed by I\rnold Fanck. 1924).
 Projections on Blank Space 1 H}

34. ranck's previous films included a 1913 documentary about the first ascent of
Monte Rosa, the two-part [he Wunder des Schneeschuhs (The Miracle of Skis) (1919/20,
1921/22), and 1m Kumpf mit dem Ber!J (Struggle with the Mountain) (1921). Two years
later, he made Der heillW Ber!J (The Holy MountUln, 1926), a film that explicitly contrasts
the metaphysical sublim nity of the mountains with tourist consumption, and the title
of which also evokes the duality of the semantic unit heil as central to both "sacred"
(heiIiR) and "restorative" (heilend).
35. frank Anschau, "Dt'[ Berg des Schicksals," Die Welrhiihne 20.25 (1924): 857-858,
here 858.
36. See Nenno, "'Postcards from the Edge': Education to Tourism in the Cerman
Mountain film," in Li!Jht Motive.l: German Popular Film in Per.lpec/ive, edited by Randall Halle
and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univt:rsity Press, 20(3), 61-84.
37. Thomas Jacobs, "Ocr Bergfilm als Heimatfilm: Clberlegungen zu einem Film-
genre," AU!Jen-Bllck 5 (1988): 19-30, here 22.
38. Anton Kaes, "film in der Weimarer Republik: Motor der Moderne," in (;eschlchte
des deut.lchen Films, edited by Wolfgang lacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler
(Stuttgart: I. B. Metzler, 19(3),38-100, here 76.
39. In his canonical study of Weimar cinema, Siegfried Kracauer established the
dominant line of thought on the mountain film, arguing that "the surge of pro-Nazi
tendencies during the pre-Hitler period could not better be confirmed than by the
increase and speCific evolution of the mountain films." His interpretation can be traced
through the work of other prominent scholars including Susan Sontag and Eric Rent-
schler. Siegfried Kracauer, Fram CaliBari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1947), here 257; Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," in Under the SiRn of Saturn (New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1980),73-105; and Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion:
Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),34-37.
40. A dancer who began her film career as an actress in numerous Fanck produc-
tions, Riefenstahl herself co-wrote (with Bela Balazs), directed, and acted in the most
famous mountain film of the Weimar Republic, Das bl£lue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932).
41. Anton Kaes, "The Debate about German Cinema: Charting a Controversy
(1909-1929)," translated by David J. Levin, New German Critique 40 (19S7): 7-33; Heide
Schli.ipmann, "Melodrama and Social Drama in the Early German Cinema," trans-
lated by lamie Owen Daniel, Camera Ohscura 22 (1990): 73-89.
42. Christoph Schmidt has pointed out that thc narrative of the film the cousins
watch bears a striking resemblance to that of Ernst l.ubitsch's 1920 feature Sumurun. See
Christoph Schmidt, '''Gejagte Vorgange volll'racht und Nachtheit': Eine unbekannte
kinematographische Quelle zu Thomas Manns Roman 'Der Zauberberg,'" Wirkendes
Wort 1 (1988): 1-5. The GKfA also reprints Mann's essay from luly 3, 1923, "Dec Film,
die demokratische Macht," voL 15.1: 697-698, which presents the image repertoire of
this scenc.
 120 Natlcy P. Netltlo

43. Mann himself pointed out the cinematic' 'luality of this passage in a surwy
conducted by Schiinemanns Monat$he)ie in Inx: "Was \vare allein zu machen aus dem
Kapitel 'Schnee' und jenem mittelmeerischen Traumgedicht \'om Menschen, das es
einschlief)t!" IWhat l'Ould be made out of the chapter "Snow" and its incorporation of
its Mediterranean dream-poem of man?1 Quoted in Thomas Mann, "Clber den Him,"
Miszellen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Blicherei, 196X), 149-151, here 151.
44. Arnold Fanck, letter to Klaus Kreimeier, April 24, 1972, in Fanck- Trenker-Rlefen-
sta/,[. /Jer deuts,h" llerHfilm and seine Folllfn, edited by Klaus Kreimeier (Berlin: Stiftung
Deutsche Kinemathck, 1972), AI. Eric Rentschler, the foremost American scholar 0['
the mountain film, has examined the modern foundations of the genre in "Mountains
and Modernity," Ne\\' German Critique 51 (1990): 137-145. See also Christian Rapp, Hiihen-
rau$ch. lJer deutsehe IlerHfilm (Vienna: Sondnzahl, 1997).
45. The phrase is from Simmel, "Die .'\Ipen," 130.
46, Schama, l.andscape and Memorv, 494, In the context of sport and national identity,
it is perhaps noteworthy that the first winter Ol\'mpics, staged in 1924, were held in
Chamonix. Mary l.. Barker, "Traditional Landscape and Mass Tourism in the Alps,"
Ge('waph"ul Rel'iew 72.4 (October 19X2): 395-415, here ,197, Karen Wigen has also argued
that "the heyday of imperialism and geographical science was also the heyday of group
climbs ... all the major imperial metropoles saw movements exhorting young people
to take up hiking" as training for imperial rule. Karen Wigen, "Discovering the Japa-
nese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment,"
Journal ofjaparrese Studies 31.1 (2005): 1-26, here 3-4.
47. A. W. Grube, Alpenwanderun8en: Fahrtenaufhoheund hiichste Alpenspitzen(Leipzig: Eduard
Kummer, 1874), i-ii. Similarly, Thomas Sprecher compares the Italian ocean, the
alpinescape, and the desert as "metaphysical landscapes," a comparison supported by
the novel as Hans Castorp meditates on the consonance between life in the snowy
heights and "life at the shore: a primal monotony was common to both landscapes"
(463). Sprecher, "Davos in der Weltliteratur: Zur Entstehung des ZauberberIl5," in Das
"Zauberbera"-Svmposium 1994 in Davos, 9-42, here 16,
48. German participation in the "race to the poles" was limited compared to that
of the United States and Britain. Erich von Drygalski led the first German expedition
to the South Pole from 1901 to 1903, Wilhelm filchner the second from 1911 to 1913,
The German public'S fascination with the theme of polar exploration and the figure
of the polar explorer is evidenced by the prompt translations of memoirs by Nansen,
Peary, and Amundsen, Within the (;erman context, numerous literary reworkings of
polar expeditions appeared during the InOs, including Arnolt Bronnen's drama Ost-
po1zull (Berlin: Ro\\'ohlt, 1926); Arno Schirokauer's radio play "Magnet Pol" (1930), in
Friihe Hiirsple/e, edited by Wolfgang Paulsen (Kronberg, Czechoslovak,ia: Scriptor, 1976),
69-88; and Schimkauer's 1936 stud" Der Well zum Pol. Sehnsudrt, Ofper und Erobmmg, edited by
Karl-Heinz Christ and Helmut Heinze (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1989).
 Projections on Blank Space III

49. Barry Pegg addresses the impart of nationalism on polar exploration from the
nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries in "Nature and Nation in Popular
Scientific I'arratives of Polar Exploration," in The Literature or Science: l'mpeaives on Popu-
lar SCientific \\'l'r/tina, edited by Murdo William McRae (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1993),213-229. In a different vein, Mariano Siskind offers a provocative read-
ing of the historical perception of Antarctica as a crisis point, indeed "the ultimate
nightmare," of modernity in "Captain Cook and the Discovery of Antarctica's Mod-
ern Specificity: Towards a Critiliue of Globalization," Comparative Literature Studies 42.1
(2()()5): 1-2.1, here 19.
50. Karl Kraus, "Die Entdel'kung des Nordpnls" (The DiscoH'ry of the North Pole,
1909), in O,e chinesische Mauer, edited by Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987),263-274, here 273. The phantasmatic quality of the polarscape is fur-
ther underscored by the plural nature of the pole: the geographic North I'ole--the
point that receives equal amounts of complete sunlight and complete darkness-is
distinct from both the magnetic and the geomagnetic North I'ole(s).
5t. Roald Amundsen. M,v L!ti:- as an bplorer(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927),2.
52. Robert E. I'eary, The North Pole (London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1910),257.
53. joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar Oal'iJ friedrich and the Suhlect 4 Landscape (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 199(), 14(). See also the American Romantic landscape
painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) whose masterpiece, "Icebergs" (1861) was
rediscovered in 1979.
54. Annette Kolodny, The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers
1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984),4.
55. Frederick A. Lubich, "Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg: SpukschoB der GroBen
Mutter oder Die Mannerdammerung des Abendlandes," Deutsche Vierteijahrsschrift 4
(1993): 729-763, here 740.
56. Linda S. Bergmann, "Woman against a Background of White: The Represen-
tation of Self and Nature in Women's Arctic Narratives," American Studies 34.2 (1993):
53--{i8, here 55. This image of the Arctic "ice maiden" also resonates with the char-
acterization of the iceberg that doomed the Titanic in 1912. See Hinrich C. Seeba,
"Der lIntergang der Utopie: Ein Schiffbruch in der Gegenwartsliteratur," German Stud-
ies Review 4.2 (1981): 281-298. See also Robert von Dassanowsky's thought-provoking
essay, "A Mountain of a Ship: Locating the 'Bergfilm' in James Cameron's Titanic,'"
Cinema Journal40A (Summer 2001): 18-35.
57. Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehre der Kiilte: Lebensl'ersuche zwischen den Kriewn (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 12. The introduction to the German edition is not
present in the American translation, Cool Condu(/: The Culture ~rOistance in Illeimar German)"
translated by Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2(02).
58. The function of the polar explorer as national icon is best exemplified by U.S.
naval officer Richard Evelyn Byrd, whose Hight over the North Pole on May 9, 1926,
 112 Nancy P. Nenno

in a Fokker trimotor airplane captured the hearts and minds of the American public.
Byrd, who aided Lindbergh on his transatlantic tlight in May 1927, flew over the Atlan-
tic in the same year, for which he was made a commandant in the French Legion of
Honor, and received the Medal for Valor from the mayor of New York City. The politi-
cal nature of Byrd's function became transparent when he was named director ofll.S.
government expeditions and then the head of the short-lived U.S. Antarctic service.
A national hero, fashioned as a representative of American imperialism, Byrd was bur-
ied with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery in 1957. See Lisa Bloom,
Gender on Ice: American IdeoloBies of P,.lar ExploratIOn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).79-81.
59. Willy Schumann has argued that the choice of "The Linden Tree" rather than
"Deutschland. Deutschland tiber alles" as the musical motif in this concluding scene
in fact contradicts the reading of Hans Castorp as "de-individualized" in this war
scenario. Rather, he argues that, as a highly artificial artform. the Kunst-Volkslied
"expresses belief in a new, better future." Willy Schumann, " 'Deutschland, Deutsch-
land tiber alles' und 'Der Lindenbaum': Hetrachtungen zur Schlussszene von Thomas
Manns 'Der Lauberberg: " German Stud,es Review 9.1 (february 1986): 29-44, here 40.
60. Ridley offers support for the interpretation of the snow scene as belonging
to the tradition of the war novel (Ridley, Problematif BourBeois, 118-119). See also Kurt
Lewin, "Kriegslandschaft," Zeitschrift fiir anBewandte PsycholoBie 12 (1917): 440-447, and Ann
P. Linder, "Landscape and Symbol in the British and German Literature of World War 1,"
Comparative Literature Studies 31.4 (1994): 351-369.
 "Politically Suspect"
Music on the Magic Mountain
HANS RUDOLF VAGET

• • •

F AR TOO MANY READINGS of The MaBie Mountain fail to pay sufficient atten-
tion to the crucial role played by music in Mann's larger thesis about the
decline and fall of Europe before World War I. Most commentators duly take
note of "Fullness of Harmony," the rightly celebrated section of the novel's
huge seventh chapter. In it, yet another obsession of the novel's "perfectly ordi-
nary" hero, Hans Castorp, is revealed: his infinite susceptibility to music.) We
are made to listen with Castorp as he repeatedly plays a handful of his favorite
records on the brand-new gramophone freshly acquired by the Berghof sana-
torium for the diversion ofits moribund guests. That subchapter, sandwiched
by "The Great Stupor" on the one side and by "Highly Questionable" and
"The Great Petulance" on the other, is usually viewed as merely additional
illustration of the pervasive stupor that settled over the Magic Mountain
in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Great War. In Her-
mann Weigand's pioneering study of the novel, for instance, first published
in 1933 and reprinted in 1964, music never comes into focus as a major the-
matic concern. 1 More recent studies tend to treat "Fullness of Harmony" as a
set piece, punctuating the inexorable deterioration of life in the sanatorium. 1
What is lacking is a comprehensive assessment of the novel's statement about
music and of Mann's ingenious use of that art as a diagnostic tool for the

12 3
 1.l4 Hans Rudo!fVaget

illumination of a mentality that led to what is now commonly regarded as the

Urkatastrophe of the twentieth century.~
The inability fully to come to grips with the novel's musical code can hardly
be attributed to the failings of any particular commentator. The reasons for
such failure are rather to be sought in factors of a historical and cultural sort.
Mann's novel inhabits a cultural space that is much farther removed from
the world we inhabit than is suggested by the time lapse since its publication
offour score years ago. Classical music, to take an obvious example. no longer
occupies the elevated place it enjoyed in the world of Thomas Mann. who
came to think of himself a~ the literary heir not only of Nietzsche but also of
Richard Wagner. and who could count on contemporary readers to decode
\vithout difficulty the musical subtext nfhis work. Today. in Europe and to an
even greater degree in America. cultural literacy no longer requires a famil-
iarity with the canon of Western music. Today, in America. talk of the decline
of classical music is everywhere. 5
Mann himself witnessed the beginnings of the decline when he observed
with dismay the respectful puzzlement that greeted his great novel about
German music, Doctor Faustus. when it first appeared in America in 1948. The
reviewer for the New York Times. speaking for many. declared that those without
a degree from the Juilliard School of Music would never be able to follow the
novel's demanding discourse on music.6 Had this reviewer known that Mann
had himself excised three pages of musical description in order to lessen the
weight of the musical passages in the English version, he would have expressed
his criticism with even greater force. In fact, Mann's muting of the musi-
cal passages reflects an awareness of a cultural difference that he had been
careful to inscribe in the novel itself. Referring to the very historical period
in which The MaBie Mountain is set, the narrator of Doctor Faustus observes, "In
Germany music enjoys the same high popular regard accorded literature in
France, and no one is surprised, intimidated. made uneasy, or provoked to
disdain or scorn by the fact that someone might be a musician."7 By and large.
the French privileging of literature is a defining feature of cultural life in the
English-speaking world as well.
Students of Mann have been slow to realize the extent to which Doctor Faustus
can, and should, be read as a continuation of The MaBie Mountain. Indeed, the
argument could be made that the later novel merely (but mightily) fleshes
out a thought that surfaces in the ruminations that bring the gramophone
chapter to a close. There. the narrator suggests that German music exerts a
Seelenzauber mit )insteren Konsequenzen--an "enchantment of the soul with dark
consequences" (634). By the time Mann began to write Doctor Faustus. in 1943,
those consequences-the rise of Nazism and the unleashing by his native
 "Politically Suspect" 115

country of yet another war for world domination-had become far darker
than he could ever have imagined in 1924.
As an analyst of mentalite.I, Mann considered it his task to uncover in the
cultural texts preceding the two catastrophes some of the hidden factors that
helped bring about World Wars I and 11. Looking far beyond what the naked eye
saw as the catalysts of catastrophe-nationalism, militarism, capitalism, anti-
Semitism-Mann was led to focus on what Germans and almost everyone
else considered to be the most enchanting flower of German culture: music.
Could someone in his right mind, especially a music lover, actually suppose
that so improbable a thing as music could actually have unimaginably dark
and sinister consequences in the political arena? But this is precisely what
Mann does, following the single most important intellectual gUide in his early
years, Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Story of a Novel, Mann observed that "music
has always been suspect, most suspect to those who loved it most deeply, like
Nietzsche."" This notion-that music is politically suspect-runs completely
counter to the common wisdom and requires close inspection if Mann's larger
argument about the nefarious consequences of that art, which include the
two most destructive wars of history, is to hold water. Where to begin? No bet-
ter place than that little episode presented in chapter 3 of The MaBie Mountain
and expressly entitled "Politically Suspect"-"Politisch verdachtig."

The notion of music as a politically suspect art form strikes most people as
far-fetched, even absurd. This is precisely Hans Castorp's reaction when he first
hears Settembrini voice his misgivings about music. He "could not help slap-
ping his knee and exclaiming that he had never heard anything like that in all
his life" (Ill). This exchange occurs a few days after Ca~torp's arrival in Davos
on the sunlit terrace of the Berghof sanatorium, where a band of musicians has
taken up position to play, as they do every other Sunday, a series of concert
favorites. None of the pieces played is identified. The only information we are
given is of a very general kind: the band is alternating lively and slow numbers.
However, the Sunday morning band concert was such a familiar institution
in the German-speaking lands that every reader would have been able to fill
in the blanks in Mann's painting of that scene, since the music played on such
occasions would typically include a waltz by Lehar or Waldteufel, a march by
Johann Strauss or Julius Fucik, a polka by one of the Strausses, and a couple
of medleys from the popular operas and operettas of the day. Nothing taxing,
in other words, nothing dangerous, nothing that could put the listeners in an
agitated state of mind. Quite the contrary; everybody, young and old, appears
to be in a fine, relaxed mood and minding his or her own business. Ca~torp and
his cousin Joachim Ziemssen have secured for themselves a little white table.
 126 Hails RudoU-Vagel

Hans is smoking one his fine cigars as he sips "the dark heer he had brought
out with him from hreakfast." Even the two resident physicians of the Rerghof
jovially mingle with their patients and encourage them to enjoy themselves.
[t seems that this sort of musical entertainment is very much part of their
therapeutic efforts. Mann jokingly draws on the double meaning of the term
Kurmusik, which is band music, hut which literally means "music that cures,"
or heals. It goes without saying that this sort of music cures nothing. Rut the
assumption seems to be that music helps the Berghof patients forget for a fleet-
ing while their inexorable inner decay.
Only Settemhrini, casually strolling over to Hans's and Joachim's table,
is putting up an inner resistance to the well-meaning efIorts of the Berghof
management. He refuses on principle to enjoy himself like everyone else
when music comes "with a pharmaceutical odor and is prescrihed from on
high" (110), which has the reader wondering what might prompt him to play
the role of sourpuss and spoiler.
Ludovico Settembrini, Italian intellectual and proud advocate of the
Western humanist tradition, is a man with a pronounced pedagogical hent.
Immediately upon laying eyes on the young German, he assumes the role of
mentor and intellectual guide, chiding Castorp for his fascination with the
East and his tendency to let himself go. The figure ofSettembrini does not fare
well with the novel's commentators, most of whom side with Castorp's initial,
uncharitable view of the loquacious Italian as a "windbag" (60) and an "organ-
grinder" (83). But in retrospect, a good case could be made that in the end
Settembrini emerges as the most commonsensical and humanly affecting of
all of Castorp's mentors. When Peeperkorn, the larger-than-life embodiment
of the great personality, commits suicide, and when Naphta, the frightening
intellectual powerhouse, shoots and kills himself in his duel with his Italian
counterpart, Settembrini is, literally, the only one of Castorp's mentors left
standing. When war breaks out he bids fond farewell to his young German
friend, embracing him warmly and addreSSing him for the first time by infor-
mal pronouns: "Addio, Giovanni mio ... [ hoped to send you off to your work,
and now you will be fighting alongside your fellows .... Fight bravely out there
where hlood joins men together. No one can do more than that now. Forgive
me if I use what little energy I have left to rouse my own country to battle, on
the side to which intellect and sacred egoism direct it" (702-703). This senti-
mental adieu at the Davos train station represents more than an example of
old-world chivalry, it also evokes Castorp's "dream of love" (706) that Mann
has woven into the concluding cadences of the novel and that hark hack to
the chapter "Snow" with its allegorical tahleau and vision of the nobility of the
human species. One cannot help hut wonder, then, what role, if any, is played
 .. Politically Suspect" 127

by Settembrini's provocative stand on music in his emergence as a beacon of

hope for the postwar world.
Conversing with the two German cousins during the Sunday morning band
concert, Settembrini states that he is a lover (Llehhaher) of music, but he does
so with various caveats and deep-seated misgivings. He does acknowledge the
power of music to inspire and uplift: "Music is invaluable as the ultimate means
for awaking our zeal, a power that draws the mind trained for its effects forward
and upward." However, more than music, Settembrini values the written word,
because it is "the bearer of the human intellect" and "the shining plow of prog-
ress." For even when music strikes "its most high-minded pose," it is capable
merely of inflaming our emotions, when in the name of progress, it should
"inflame our reason." What further trouhles this man of logic is the profoundly
equivocal nature of music: it would appear to be "movement for its own sake,"
hut in fact it furthers "Quietism," that is, passive contemplation and the extinc-
tion of the will. And while music appears to lend "awareness ... to the tlow of
time," in reality it numbs us and thus "counteract[s] all activity and progress"
(112). Settembrini is convinced that "literature must precede music," by which
he seems to mean that verbal discourse would have a prophylactic and chan-
neling function. Without the preparatory and clarifying role of the word, music
"by itself ... cannot draw the world forward." And since emotions inflamed
by music can easily be channeled toward patriotic, religiOUS, or supposedly
therapeutic ends, Settembrini quite cogently regards music as "dangerous" and,
indeed, as "politically suspect." It is worth noting that this indictment of music
is motivated not by any statement a particular work of music might make, but
rather by what music in general fails to effect-namely, enlightenment and
progress. The sins of music, then, are sins not of commission hut of omission.
We would miss an essential ingredient of this discourse on music if we did not
take into account its specifically German flavor-something that becomes evi-
dent from the Italian's jovial conversation opener: "Beer, tobacco, and music"-
three narcotics that sum up the "Fatherland." Settembrini's witticism echoes
Nietzsche, who in Twilisht of the Idols adds "our constipated and constipating
German music" as the third and most recent addition to the two great Euro-
pean Narwtlw of alcohol and Christianity,9 and who in Ecce Homo (commenting
on the Bayreuth Festival) includes deutsches B,er among the indispensable ele-
ments of the cult of deutsche Kunst and deutsche Me!5ter. 'o Settembrini's wariness of
music's numbing effect also derives from Nietzsche, who spoke of Wagner's as
a "narcotic art." In fact, Nietzsche asserted that young Germans in the recently
founded Reich needed "Wagner as an opiate" because they are "condemned to
choosing vocations too early, and then to waste away under a burden they can
no longer shake off."11 This may explain Settembrini's remark to Castorp that
 128 Hans Rudol{Vager

"for you in particular, my good engineer, it Imusic] is absolutely dangerous.

I read that at once from your face as 1 arrived just now." Hans Castorp. who
hails from Hamburg, is indeed a typical denizen of the ~ismarckian Reich who,
having chosen his vocation too early, finds its demands burdensome. In the
long run he shakes off his burdens, but at the cost of falling victim to the mor-
bid enticements of the Magic Mountain. He turns his back on the "Hatland,"
where he had begun preparing himself for a career as an engineer and ship
builder, where he had passed his "first final exam" (though "without fanfare")
but where he had become so exhausted by that "long period of concentrated
work" (35) that his physician insisted on a change of air. This, then. is what led
to his fateful decision to travel to Davos and pay his cousin what he assumed
would be a mere three-\veek visit.
Settembrini's provocative comments about music clearly hit a nerve, as
becomes evident from Castorp's increasing resentment of the Italian "wind-
bag." In a dream Castorp says to him what good manners prewnted him from
saying out loud: "Go away! You are only an organ-grinder. and you are in my
way here" (89). Equally revealing is Castorp's "hostility" to "Settembrini's opin-
ions about music" (161). In fact, whenever he hears the band music, far or near,
he particularly resents "Settembrini's babblings about music being 'politically
suspect'" (184).
It is through a Nietzschean lens, then, that Settembrini diagnoses Castorp's
highly revealing "narcotic" dependency on music-a fact that is doubly ironic
in that Settembrini is precisely the type of "progressive" intellectual for whom
the later Nietzsche felt nothing but scorn. Mann, however, makes him the
mouthpiece of Nietzsche's most disturbing glosses on the music of Wagner!
And this a propos a band concert at which no music by Wagner is played.
Mann's take on the mentality and culture of the second Reich arises from a
limited set of Nietzschean inSights into Wagner and into the psychology of the
adherents of the ascetic ideal. Beginning with Buddenhrooks, Mann spins out these
insights, including the narcotic effect of Wagnerian music on overextended
German burghers, and applies them to his portrait of the entire epoch. To the
young writer casting about for an enlightening view of the age and its ailments,
Nietzsche's eXcitingly subversive thoughts offered the most plausible explana-
tion for the German idolatry, including his own, of both Wagner and the art
of music itself.
During the long interval of almost seven years between Castorp's arrival in
Davos and the outbreak of the \var, music as a thematic strand unobtrusively
accompanies the action until it takes center stage again in "Fullness of
Harmony." Band concerts at the Berghof or at another sanatorium are a reg-
ular feature of Castofp's life on the Magic Mountain. On one such occasion,
 "Politically Suspect" 129

we are pointedly reminded of the deeper reasons fi>r his love of this "narcotic
art." Lying on his comfortable balcony lounge chair and listlessly reading in his
textbook on ocean steamships, Castorp suddenly hears the sounds of a distant
band concert, whereupon he puts dmvn the book and listens "with ardent
interest" to the music of Carmen, 11 'from/ore, and Der Freischiitz, "gazing with con-
tentment into the transparent depths of its structure and taking ... genuine
delight and inspiration in each melodic invention" (161). Even in Davos, far
from the strenuous demands of bourgeois life in the flatlands, music's primary
function remains to soothe.
Aside from regular band concerts, the Berghof management sporadically
offers Lieder recitals. On one occasion a professional singer, herself a patient,
offers, among others, a song by Richard Strauss: "Jeh trage meine Minne"-"I
bear the song of my love in my heart" (Opus 32, Nr. I). The song's relevance to
Castorp's own "Minne" for Clavdia Chauchat could not be more obvious. Here
again, music offers a refuge from the inner turmoil caused by the presence
at the concert of both Settembrini and Clavdia. Only after the intermission,
when, much to his relief. neither Clavdia nor Settembrini has returned for the
second half of the recital, is Castorp able to listen "With a peaceful heart, read-
ing the text printed in the program as each song was sung." "Truth to tell,"
the narrator remarks, "Hans Castorp was relieved that the two of them-the
narrow-eyed woman and the pedagogue-were gone, and he was free to
devote his full attention to the songs" (285-286). Aside from offering us another
glimpse into Castorp's problematical passion for Clavdia, this episode prepares
the reader for the crucial meditation on Franz Schubert's DeT Lindenbaum, at the
culmination of the chapter on the gramophone.

Musical references even seep into Castorp's conversations with the medical
director of the Berghof sanatorium, Hofrat Behrens, who is both an amateur
painter and a music lover, though one with somewhat questionable taste. On
one occasion they discuss goose bumps and the human skin as an erogenous
zone. Castorp is quite familiar with the phenomenon of goose bumps, which,
he says, can "suddenly appear at the sound of especially beautiful music. And
when I first took communion at my confirmation, it came in waves" (260).
This casual conjunction of music and the numinous on the prerational, vis-
cerallevel speaks for itself.
From other scattered allusions we may gather that Castorp is familiar
with some of the most popular operas of the day, such as Die Zaube~fliite,
Der FTeischiitz, Tannhiiuser, Faust, Aida, Carmen, Les ConIes d'H~ffmann, and La Boheme.
And as he embarks on his nightly music orgies in front of the gramophone.
we are told that as a result of his educational background. though without
 130 Hans RudoU"Vagel

any technical or scholarly training, he has a general knowledge of the basic

canon, as might be expected from those who grew up in a major musical
center such as Hamburg, where, in the fictitious period of Castorp's early
teenage years, no less a figure than Custav Mahler was in charge of the city's
musical life for some six years (1891-1897). This is tantamount to saying that
music was part of young Castorp's education and remained an integral part
of his identity.
Soon after the Berghofacquiresa new state-of-the-art gramophone, Castorp
realizes that his fellow patients are mistreating the recordings-"they might
be ill, but they were crude"-and if not prevented from doing so "would have
ruined" them. He thus appoints himself the "administrator and custodian of
this public facility," he summarily pockets "the key to the cupboard contain-
ing the albums and the needles" (632-633), and in effect becomes the savior of
music on the Magic Mountain. He carefully watches over the twelve albums,
each of them containing twelve heavy disks, the bulk of them featuring "opera
in every shape and form" (631). The fact that the operatic recordings make
such an impression on him is due in no small measure to the technical inno-
vation of the electrically driven turntable, which marked a quantum leap in
terms of the quality and fidelity of sound reproduction, especially as concerns
the human voice. The particular model at Castorp's disposal is said to produce
an "overflowing cornucopia of artistic pleasure" (627).
In the course of Castorp's listening sessions, five musical numbers emerge
as his favorites: the final scene of Verdi's Aida; Debussy's Prelude to an Afternoon
of a Faun; the scene in Lilias Pastia's tavern in Act 2 of Bizet's Carmen; Valentin's
prayer in Act 2 of Gounod's Faust, and Schubert's song Der Lindenbaum. This is a
strange and motley collection of favorites, given Mann's well-known prefer-
ence for Wagner, consisting as it does of one Italian grand opera, two popular
French operas, a signature piece of French symphonic art, and a single Ger-
man Lied. Indeed, the Schubert, as a counterweight to the French and Italian
excerpts, is accorded by its Singularity extraordinary weight. But what may at
first appear to correspond to Wagner's notorious distinction, familiar from DIe
Meistersin8er, between heili8e deutsche Kunst (holy German art) and we/scher Dunst
und we/scher rand (French and Italian frill) does nothing of the sort, for nowhere
here do we find the Germano-centric perspective and negative characteriza-
tions of "foreign" music common in Cermany in the post-Wagnerian era. On
the contrary, what is remarkable about Castorp's favorite selections is rather
their transnational, emphatically cosmopolitan character. After seven years
in the hermetic realm of the Magic Mountain, Castorp has come to possess,
in addition to a heightened awareness of his German identity, the psychic
and intellectual wherewithal to empathize with and appreciate the beauty
 "Politically Suspect" 1)1

and humanity of non-Germanic music. In the process, he has acquired the

disposition to become what Nietzsche envisioned-a "good European."12
"Fullness of Harmony" takes us inside Castorp's mimi for some highly reveal-
ing perspectives on his thoughts and emotions as he repeatedly contemplates
the music he loves, for it is via music that he is at last able to come to terms
with some of the unresolved issues of his personal identity. His solitary sittings
in front of the gramophone, absent the customary social appurtenances of
evenings at the opera or at the symphony, bring to light what Castorp him-
self brings to listening. Here there prevails a neat division of labor: engaging
with French and Italian music, CastOfp projects himself as a sexual being onto
various operatic characters. Listening to Der Lindenhaum, he contemplates his
position as a Cerman, or to be precise, as heir to German Romanticism. Thus,
by immersing himself in his favorite music, he is finally able to give free rein to
the conflicting impulses of his subconscious. Music proves to be as revealing as
a dream.
Mann himself regarded the concluding scene of Aida as Verdi's version of
a Wagnerian Liebestod (love death), and it is in this mode that CastOfp empa-
thizes with Aida and Amneris. 1.1They both love Radames, the Egyptian officer,
who is viewed here as a kind of a stand-in for Joachim: both men brought
about their death through an act of disobedience. Aside from this unabashedly
subjective take on the concluding melodrama of Aida, Verdi's score serves as
a superb example of the "consoling power of music" to transfigure terrible
things, such as "two people ... being buried alive" (636) with all the grisly
details of their slow decay and demise. With people dying of tuberculosis all
around him, Castorp's own need for the consoling power of beautiful music
requires no further elaboration.
Listening to Carmen, Hans becomes Jose to Clavdia's Carmen. Jose's betrayal
of his military duties throws into relief the treason implicit in Hans's love for
Clavdia-a love that betrays his homoerotic feelings for Joachim. And in the
theater of Castorp's mind, Valentin's prayer to God to protect his sister, Mar-
guerite, is imagined to be a prayer by Joachim to protect his cousin Hans, who
will soon be a soldier himself--like Valentin, like Jose, like Radames. When
Castorp listens to his favorite records-of course, they are his favorites for
good reasons-his entire history as a sexual being is brought to bear on the
act. That history is shaped by the gender-transcending nature of his desire.
When he first comes to suspect, in a dream, that his obsession with Clavdia is
identical to his boyhood infatuation with Pribislav, a schoolmate, he is trou-
bled by this sudden unmasking of the true nature of his desire. Rut listening
to music, identifying with operatic characters, and drinking deeply of the con-
soling and transformative power of music, he becomes reconciled to the dual
 132 Hans Rudo/{Vager

nature of his love; here as elsewhere, opera provides, as Robert Donington

has suggested, "the royal road into the unconscious." I~ In The Maijlc Mountain,
opera further serves Hans Castorp as the medium through which he is able to
recognize and accept the ambiguous nature of his sexuality. IS
The function of recognition and acceptance must likewise be accorded to
Castorp's engagement with Der Lindenhaum. More important, his meditation on
Schubert's popular Lied returns us to the larger question raised much earlier in
the novel regarding music's politically problematical role. The song about the
linden tree is part of Schubert's great song cycle Winterreise, based on poems by
Wilhelm Muller. Strangely, the relation to the cycle is completely ignored in
the novel, so that this single work may stand for something much more com-
prehensive, namely German music itself. and through it the entire phenom-
enon of (~erman Romanticism. Once again a highly subjective perspective
prevails, as Castorp interprets the linden tree's promise of rest as a projection
of the fictitious wanderer's desire for death. But since the textual and musi-
cal evidence for such a reading is shaky at best, we have to conclude that it is
Castorp himself who projects onto Schubert's Lied his own, deep "sympathy
with death" (642).
All of this obviously has troubling implications with respect to Castorp's
purported spiritual progress or, rather, his lack thereof. His obsession with
this "simultaneously simple and sublime" (640) work clearly indicates that he
has relapsed into a mentality that he is supposed to have overcome and left
behind with the utopian vision he had had as he found shelter during the
snow storm in the section entitled "Snow." At that juncture he appeared to
have resolved once and for all that "for the sake of goodness and love, man
shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts" (487). The finality of this
sentence, though reinforced by being italicized, turns out to be deceptive, It
even seems nullified by our hero's unshakable attraction to the Lindenbaum Lied.
This is not simply a matter of personal preference, because we are expressly
told that Castorp's love of this song turns out to be literally fateful: "his fate
migh t have been different if his disposition had not been so highly susceptible
to the charms and the emotional sphere, to the universal state of mind that
this song epitomized so intensely, so mysteriously" (642).
What do the closing pages of Mann's novel suggest v,'ith regard to Cas-
torp's ultimate fate? Here, on the Western Front, we catch a glimpse of him
in a "final push in a battle that lasted all day." We see him fling himself on the
ground, leap up again, and, stumbling over fallen comrades, rush on toward
what we have to conclude will be his certain death. He is with a "regiment of
volunteers ... students mostly," all of them "feverish lads ... with bound-
less fear and unutterable longing for home"-a characterization that would
 "Politically Suspect"· 133

conjure up in every German reader's mind the name of Langemarck, a vil-

lage in Flanders, where on November 10, 1914, a very large numher of poorly
trained volunteers were killed. They \vere mostly students, compensating for
their lack of preparedness with death-defying idealism,'" According to hoth
official and pri\ate reports, they fell while singing "Deutschland, Deutsch-
land tiher alles" and "Die Wacht am Rhein" (made famous by Casablanca), the
two most popular nationalist anthems at the time. Mann, like everyone in
Germany, was familiar \vith the Langemarck saga; hut he also observed with
growing concern how, after the war, "Langemarck" was heing exploited for
nationalist purposes. By the time he set down the last pages of the novel, in
September of 1924, he had hecome a vocal supporter of the unpopular Wei-
mar Republic and of German reconciliation with France and the West.
To reflect these changes in his political outlook, Mann inserted two highly
significant elements into the novel's conclusion and thereby added an alto-
gether fitting coda to its pervasive musical discourse. First, replacing the
nationalist hymns with Schuhert's song, Mann has Castorp sing fragments of
his beloved Lindenhaum "the way a man sings to himself in moments of dazed,
thoughtless excitement, without even knowing" (705). As he "stumhles
forward" he mutters to himself two simple verses: "Und seine Zweige rau-
uschten, I Als rie-fen sie mir zu" (And all his branches ru-ustled, I As if they
called to me). All German readers would have silently heard the next two
verses: "Komm her zu mir, Geselle, I Hier findst du deine Ruh" (Come to me,
friend, I Here you will find rest). Surely it is significant that Mann has Castorp
quote not from the song's last stanza, in which the linden tree's promise of rest
appears in the subjunctive mode, "Du fandest Ruhe dort!" but rather from
the song's fourth stanza, where the same promise appears in the indicative:
"Hier findst du deine Ruh!" This lends Castorp's last utterance an additional
note of finality. For him, the song has indeed become the ultimate symbol of
death, just as he had intuited when listening to it on the gramophone.
Second, Mann has the word Diimmerun8 set the mood of the novel's final
scene, therehy alluding directly to the final cataclysm of Wagner's Giitterdiim-
merun8. The German word denotes both dusk and dawn. In The MaBie Mountain,
as in Wagner's great music drama, it is employed to mark the historical hour.
Like the concluding scene of GO'tterdiimmerun8, where "a red glow breaks out with
increasing brigh tness," so, too, in the novel, is the final fire of battle "redden-
ing a murky sky" (703). It is crucial to realize that both works point beyond the
present catastrophe. In the symphoniC conclusion of Der Rin8 des Nibe[un8en, the
reemergence in the high violins of a momentous motif that has been sounded
only once before-Sieglinde's "0 hehrstes Wunder"-signals the hope for
a new age in which Sieglinde's compassionate love will rule. Mann's novel
 134 Hans RudoU"Vaget

concludes similarly with a recollection of the "dream of love" that Castorp

envisioned in the snow, and with a leading question: "And out of this world-
wide festival of death ... will love someday rise up out of this, tool"
It should be noted here that Mann's decision to have Castorp die with the
Schubert song on his lips, rather than "Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles,"
was anything but arbitrary. As from the 1830s, only a few years after the com-
poser's death, Schubert's Der Lindenbaum began to enjoy what became a rapidly
growing popularity and \vas subject to numerous arrangements of various
sorts. 17 If onc had to select a Single cultural artifact to epitomizc "Germany,"
or Cerman Romanticism, one could find no better, no more representative
example than this particular song.
Mann's attribution of dubious political overtones to this Llcd is likewise
grounded in the cultural mainstream of the second Reich. That era saw a
mushrooming of men's choral societies and an cver-growing idolatry of the art
of music, which came to be widely regarded as indisputable proof of Cerman
cultural superiority. Bismarck himself provided illustrations of that charac-
teristically German alliance of music and politics. Though himself unmusical,
he clearly recognized the political potential of the widespread veneration of
music, in particular of the MiinnerchorbeweBunB (the men's choral society move-
ment) with its openly nationalist agenda. IX Two examples suffice to make the
point. AddreSSing one such society, the Liedertafel of Dresden in 1892, he stated
emphatically what most Germans had come to believe, that "the unification
of Germany would not have been possible without German art, without Ger-
man science, and without German music-the German Lied in particular."19
The follOwing year, the Iron Chancellor went so far as to attribute the military
victory over France in 1870 to the idealism and enthusiasm engendered by,
among other such works, Die Wacht am Rhein. In the same vein, he concluded
his speech with thanks to the choral movement for aiding his own political
work by upholding the idea and the ideals of the German nation. And with
a view toward future military conflict he added: "Let no one underestimate
the power of 'das deutsche Lied' as a 'Kriegsverbundeter'''-that is, as a mili-
tary ally.211 The story of Langemarck and many similar military engagements
would bear him out. Thomas Mann, by the time he penned "Fullness of Har-
mony," was fully aware of the ideological explOitation of music, having him-
self contributed to it in no small measure in his nationalist disquisition of 1915,
Rejleetions of a Nonpolitical Man. In The Mawe Mountain, then-and this must be
regarded as one of its most profound insights into the mentality of pre-World
War I Germany-Mann did not underestimate the political potential of the
Cerman Lied, nor did he fail to provide a compelling psychological analysis of
the underlying reasons for its might.
 "Politically SuspecL" 135

We may now return to the issue that drives this reading of Mann's great novel:
Settemhrini's assertion that music is politically suspect. As we have seen,
Settemhrini hases his charge on the essential amhiguity of music and on its
intrimic indifference to the idea of progress. Particularly worrisome to him
is the relationship of music to language. As he sees it, literature must "pre-
cede" music in order for music to he meaningful (111), which is to say that
the "word" must provide guidance in order that the listener he ahle to com-
prehend. Settemhrini knows that music is a powerful means of enkindling
passion. hut the real question is: passion for what) He knows that music can
he put to less than high-minded purposes and serve reactionary ends. These
rather sinister possibilities are addressed in the concluding page and a half of
"Fullness of Harmony"-a highly self-reflexive passage that must be regarded
as central in particular to the novel's musical argument hut also central in
general to Mann's understanding of the larger nexus of music and politics.
Those reflections are triggered by Castorp's deep, irrational love of the
Schubert song: they turn on the notion of backsliding (RiickneI8ung)-a kind of
regression on the level of mentalities. For we wish to know if Castorp 's love of
the Lindenhaum, euphemistically referred to as "sympathy with death," Signals
a more broadly based backsliding to the morbid mentality epitomized by this
song. At this point in his ruminations, Castorp recalls "a certain lecture" on
precisely this subject of Riickneigung delivered by Settembrini, who character-
ized the inclination to backslide as a "sickness." It seems significant that now
the Italian humanist is remembered not as a "windbag" but as a "clear-minded
mentor" (642), as we are about to be treated to a vindication of Settembrini's
politically founded suspicions. At this point, the narrator's reflections seem to
focus not on France and Italy but rather on the case of Germany alone.
The notion of backsliding must be predicated on a clear distinction between
what is timely and what is untimely. The whole point of probing deeply into
Castorp's love of music is to suggest that his infatuation with Der Lindenbaum
has he come untimely-that 1914 is not the right time for identifying with
a Schubert song, no matter how lovable that song may be. In order to drive
home the pOint, the narrator introduces an analogy that likens Schubert's art
song to a delicate fruit. Enjoyed "at the right moment," such a fruit will pro-
vide "the purest regalement of the spirit" with no harmful side effects what-
soever. Rut eaten later-past its expiration date, as it were--that fruit will
"spread rot and decay among those who partook of it" (643).
Was the year 1914 such an untimely moment in the sense of marking a
collective backsliding to Romanticism 1In the course of the war, Mann himself
changed his mind about this critical question of German mentality. In his arti-
cles of 1914. in which he welcomed the war. and particularly in his massive essay
 136 Hans RudoljVager

mentioned earlier, ReflectIOns of a NonpolItIcal Man (begun in 1915 and published in

1918), he defended Germany's ostensibly eternal Romanticism as the hasis for
its unique music-centered culture. However, when he wrote "Fullness ofHar-
mony," as a result of a painful learning process, Mann had come to regard the
Germans' emotional attachment to Romanticism as anachronistic-as a case
of "forbidden love" (642), as a case, finally, of mental hacksliding. He realized
that in the intervening hundred years something drastic had happened to this
"pure masterpiece" and "miracle of the soul" that is Drr Lindenbaum, something
tinged with deformation, rot, decay, and poison. But how is it possible that the
innocent and charming Seelenzauber of a mere Schubert Lied could lead to the
kind of "dark consequences" at which the narrator hints so inSistently?
At this point, the narrator waxes strangely oracular, refUSing to name names
or to designate specific events and historical developments, presumably because
this would presuppose a historical understanding beyond Castorp's pUl"viev,·.
And yet, when he speaks of the dark consequences of Der Llndenhaum, there can be
no doubt about what, or rather who, is on the narrator's mind. He is thinking of
Wagner and Bismarck, as we can deduce from other statements by Mann, con-
cerning these figures' impact on the German mentality. Wagner, having given
the simple German art song the "vast dimensions" of the music drama, was able
to conquer, even to "subjugate" the world. And Bismarck, himself inspired and
in a sense empowered by the success of German music, had been able to unify
the German lands and to found a new Reich. These particular speculations
concerning Wagner's musical lineage and the origins of the second Reich can-
not stand up to critical scrutiny in light of current scholarship, but once again,
Mann was taking his cues from Nietzsche and subscribing to the dim view the
philosopher came to take both of Wagner and of the Bismarckian Reich. In Ecce
Homo, Nietzsche draws an analogy between the spirit of Bismarck's political
project and Wagner's Bayreuth, his point being that the new Reich was infected
from the start with the spirit of the late, "decadent," and "bad" Wagner. Mann
is leaning here on the very passage that provided the underpinning for Settem-
brini's position on music: "Really, for the instruction of posterity one ought to
stuff a genuine Bayreuther or, better yet, preserve him in spirits, for spirits are
lacking-with the label: the 'spirit' on which the Reich wa~ founded looked like
this.,,21 Like Nietzsche's, then, Mann's view of the second Reich is unflattering:
it is an "earthly, all-too-earthly" empire, "very coarse, very progressive, and not
in the least nostalgic" for the culture from which it descended (643). Compared
to the spiritual and artistic heights of the period of German Romanticism, the
thoroughly materialistic second Reich marks an era of decline.
"fullness of Harmony" thus ends on a note of both affirmation and rejec-
tion. What is being affirmed is the magical power of the music of German
 "Politically Suspec(' 137

Romanticism; \vhat is rejected, paradoxically, is the lure of its song. Concerning

that song, the narrator observes that "we were all its sons," bv \'\'hom he means
not onl\, Hans Castorp, not only the narrator but also the readers of The Mat/I,
Mountam. True, the narrator seems to be saying, that "we" Cl'fmans han' been
shaped by "our" music-centered culture, for it enabled us, bv sening it, to
"accomplish mighty things on earth" (643). However, the "song's best son" was
a certain heroic figure who had loved more than anyone the Serien:Llllili'r of ( ;er-
man Romanticism, especially its culmination in Wagner, but who then l'alllC
to understand the necessity of resisting and overcoming it. In doing so he was
"triumphing over himself." That hero was none other than Nietzsche himself.
ror several years Wagner's most passionate advocate, Nietzsche later on made
the heroic attempt to tear himself awav from that love. No\\', in the novel we
are not told what prompted Nietzsche to turn awav from Wagner. However,
from the context of "Fullness of Harmon\''' . we mav. surmise that that reversal
was driven by Nietzsche's awareness that the time for the kind of addictive Selen-
zauner such as that emanating from Tnstan und isolde had passed, that the inclina-
tion to "intellectual backsliding," in Settembrini's sense, was a "sickness."
These ruminations of the narrator clearly move beyond Castorp's intellec-
tual horizons. But, to his credit, he does have a premonition that his love of
the Lindenbaum ought to be "regarded with mistrust," especially by a graduate
from the mind-opening school of the Magic Mountain, by one "who affirmed
life and loved its organic wholeness" (643). It is precisely on account of such
a premonition that little Hans Castorp may be said to tread in the colossal
footsteps of Nietzsche the Hero as he stumbles toward his death in Flanders
fields. To be sure, he dies with the Lindenbaum on his lips, but in his heart he
carries at least an "intimation of a dream of love" (706). Ultimately he, too,
like Nietzsche, dies for something new-"for the new word of love and for
the future in his heart."
We know that this is how Mann himself wanted his sly hero-this "perfectly
ordinary" young man from Hamburg-to be perceived. Writing to a friendly
critic of the novel, who had characterized Castorp as a "prototvpe and precur-
sor" of a post- Romantic mentality, Mann endorsed that view, adding that Hans
is "a little prewar German who by 'intensification' (Steltjertlnt/) is brought to the
point of anticipating the future."ll Does this affirmative reading of Castorp's
long journey revoke, or invalidate, the earlier indictment of music-of the
German cult of music, to be precise-as dangerous and politically suspect~
I do not believe that the evidence bears this out. Shortly after publication of
Der Zaunerbert/, Paul Hindenburg, the "Victor of Tannenberg" and a popular
war hero, ran for the office of President of the (Weimar) Republic. 'The candi-
dacy of Hindenburg," Mann wrote in the letter cited abme, "is 'Lindenbaum:
 qS Hans Rlldolj'Vagel

allover again"; it represents a "shameful exploitation of the Cerman people's

romantic impulses." In a ne\vspaper article, he continued, he had urged his
fellmv Cermans to refrain from electing an "antediluyian valiant as its chief of
state." He added playfully: "That's hmv far little Hans has come!"
Hindcnburg was elected president; in 1933 he appointed Adolf Hitler to
the Chancellorship of Cermany. Der Lindenbaum continued to cast its uncanny
spell.

Notes

I. The MaH'e Mountuin. translated by John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995). xi.
Henceforth retlTcIKe:; to this edition will be given in the main body of the text. On a
few occasions, indicated in each ,·ast'. I have taken the liberty of adjusting the Woods
translation.
2. Weigand's concise comments on the topic" of music are to the point, but he fails
to recognizc the centrality of the matter not only here but in Mann's work as a whole.
Hermann Weigand, "Tire MaH,e Mountuin". A Study of Mann's Novel "Del' LauherherH" (119,"\.11
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1(85).
3. See, for example, Henry Hatfield, From the "MaBie: MountaIn": Mann's Later Master-
pieces (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Terrence James Reed, Thomas Mann:
The Uses of Tradition, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Martin Swales, Mann: "Del'
ZauberberB" (London: Grant & Cutler, 2000); Rodney Symington, "Music in Mann's
'Magic Mountain': 'Hille des Wohllauts' and Hans Castorp's 'Selbstiiberwindung,'" in
Echoes and Influences of German Romanticism: Essays in Honor of Hans Eichner, edited by Michael
S. Batts et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 155-182.
4. The notion of Urkatastrophe is usually credited to George F. Kennan, who in his
Decline of Bismarck's European Order. Franco-Prussian Relations. 1875-1890 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979),3--4, speaks of World War I as "the seminal catastrophe of this
century-the event, which, more than any others, excepting only. perhaps the dis-
covery of nuclear weaponry and the development of the population-environmental
crisis, lay at the heart of the failure and decline ofthis Western civilization." Cf. also the
chapter "Urkatastrophe" in Fberhard Fickel. Das deutscheJahrhundert Eine historisehe Bilan:
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 19(6), jackel, Das deu/.,chefahrhundert: 69-102.5.
5. (:f.cspecially the two alarming books by Norman Lebrecht and Joseph Horowitz:
I.l+>n.'l'ht, Who Killed Cluss/wl Music? Maestms, Munagm, und Corporate I'olitics (Secaucus, NJ:
Carol Publishing Croup, 1997): and Horowitz, Classical MUSIC In America. A History of 1ts
R,se tlnd Fall (Ncw York: Norton. 200.'l).
6. Orville Prescott: "Mr. Mann's knowledge llfmusic is fabulous and his ability to
make the imaginar\' compositions of his hero .seem works of genius is phenomenal.
 "Politically Suspect" 139

Howe\'er, anyone who has not been graduated from the Juilliard School of Music,
written a symphony or conducted the New York Philharmonic is certain to tind the
musical sections of Porror Fau,tus nearly impenetrable." Review ofTholllas Mann, /)oet",
Faultus, in the Nell' York Times, October 29, 1941),23.
7. Ooclor Fuustus, translated by John E. Woods (New York: Knopf. 1997), 1.\6. Trans-
lation adjusted.
1l. Thomas Mann, 'Iile Stor} of a Novel. The (;ene'I' of "Doctor Fuu.ltu.I," trallsiall'd h\
Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf. 19(1), 11lX.
9. See friedrich Nietzsche, TlI'iliahl of til<' Ido/' The Anti-Christ, translated hy R. J. 1101
hngdale (london: I'enguin, 1961l), 61.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the (;rnell/oIlV of Morals fl'c!' liomt" Iranslated by WalllT
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 21l4.
11. Ibid .. 21l7.
12. I'riedrich Nietzsche, Bevond (;ooJ anJ Evil. l'reluJe to II l'hilosophy 0( the Future, trans-
lated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 19X9), 174.
13. In his diary entrY of February 10, 1920, Mann describes his own sessions with a
new electric gramophone at a friend's country house in Feldating to which he with-
drew in order to work on his novel. 'The highlight of the visit: Richter's superlative
Gramophone, which I put to continuous use, either alone or with Katia or Richter.
The Tannhiiuser Overture. La Boheme. The tinale of Aida (an Italian Liebestod). Caruso,
Battistini, Madame Melba, Titta Ruffo, etc. A new theme for The Magic Mountain, a rich
find both for its intellectual possibilities and its narrative value." Thomas Mann, Dia-
ries 1918-1939, selection and foreword by Hermann Kesten; translated by Richard and
Clara Winston (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982),84.
14. Robert Donington, Opera and Its S}mbols: The Unit} of Words, Music, and Sta!!ln!! (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990),9.
15. Mann's most explicit statement about recent changes in gender roles and
the relations between the sexes can be found in his 1925 essay, Die fhe 1m iihl'r!!ana. An
English version of this essay can be found in Hermann Craf von Kl'ywrling, Tht' Book 01
M,miage: A New InterpretatIOn h} Twent}-Four Leaders <1' Contemporary rhouHht (New York: lIar-
court, Brace, 1926),244-262.
16. For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see Willy Schulllanll, " '\leutsch-
land, Deutschland liber alles' und 'Der I.indenbaum': Betrachtullgen lur Srhlussszene
von Thomas Mann's 'Der Zauherberg,'" errman Studies Review I (19X6): 29 44; and Stefan
Bodo Wlirffel, "Vom 'Lindenbaum' zu 'Dr. I'austi Weheklag': Th()l11as Mann uml die
deutsche Krankheit zum Tode," in Yom "Zauberber!!" zum "))oklor i'tmstl/,I ": I lie {)avoser Literatur-
taw 1998, edited by Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: K\osll'rl1lann, 2000), 157-lil4.
17. See the highly revealing essay about the afterlife ofSchuh..-rt\ song and its politi-
cal instrumentalization lw Reinhold Brinkmann, Franz S(hubert. i.mJenMiume unJ dmh(!.
nationale IJentitiit: Tnterpretatlon ellles Liedes (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2()()4), espeCially 35-43.
 140 Hans Rudolj'Vagel

Iii. See Brinkmann's chapter, "Der eiserne Kanzler und das deutsche Chorlied,"
ibid., 53-59.
19. Otto von Bismarck, Die ilesammelten Wake. vol. 13, Reden. hearheitet von Wtlhelm
SchUfiler (Berlin: O. Stollberg, 1930).437.
20. Die Ansprachen des FUrsten Bismarck lM8-1894, edited by Heinrich von Poschinger
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895),294.
21. Ecre Homo, 285.
22. Letter to Julius Bab, March 23, 1925; Lrtters of Thoma.1 Mann, 188l}-1955, selected
and translated bv Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf. 1971), 143-144. Trans-
lation adjusted.

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Betrachtungen zur Schlussszene von Thomas Mann's "Der Zauberberg.'" German
StudIes Review 1 (1986): 29-44.
Swales, Martin. Mann: "Der Zauberber8." London: Grant & Cutler, 2000.
Symington, Rodney. "Music in Mann's 'Magic Mountain': 'Ftille des Wohllauts' and
Hans Castorp's 'Selbsttiberwindung.'" In Echoes and injluences of German Romanticism:
Essays in Honor of Hans Eichner, edited by Michael S. Batts et a\., 155-182. New York:
Peter Lang, 1987.
Weigand, Hermann. "The MaHle Mountarn": A Study of Mann 's NOI,e/ "Der Zauherherg" Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 19115 (first published in 193]).
Wtirffd, Stefan Bodo: "Vom 'Lindenbaum' zu 'Dr. fausti Weheklag': Thomas Mann
und die deutsche Krankheit zum Tode." In \/mn "Zauherherl/" :um "noktor Fuustus"
Die Davoser L,teraturtaw 1998, hg. Thomas Sprecher, 157-1114. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2000.
 "Linke Leute von rechts"
Thomas Mann's Naphta and the Ideological
Conflu.ence of Radical Right and Radical Left in the
Early Years of the Weimar Repu.blic
ANTHONY GRENVILLE

• • •

T HE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER is taken from Otto-Ernst Schiiddekopf's Linke

Leute von rechts,l a study of the attempts by some extreme right-wing Ger-
man nationalists, radicalized by Germany's defeat in 1918, to forge a politi-
cal alliance with the newly founded German Communist Party. on the ba~is
of a common hatred of the victorious Western bourgeois democracies who
had imposed the yoke of "Versailles capitalism" on Germany. Thomas Mann
became aware of this threat from the two extremes of the political spectrum
to the liberal-democratic center, the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar
Republic. That awareness led Mann to create the figure ofNaphta, who stands
opposed to Settembrini, the representative of the tradition of nineteenth-
century liberal humanism, the creed of the German republicans, This is to
assert plainly that, at least as far as Naphta is concerned, Urr Zauberbers draws
directly on contemporary political and ideological developments. specifically
on the rise of revolutionary Leninist Communist parties after the Bolshevik
Revolution and on the emergence of a new totalitarian right in Germany very
different from the traditional conservatism of the Wilhelmine Empire.
For all the disagreement among critics about the classification of the novel
as a Zeitroman,2 it is clearly possible to relate the genesis and dew,lopment of
Naphta, who replaced the figure of Pastor Bunge in Mann's original plan as

143
 144 AllIhony Grenville

Settembrini's antagonist, to the years 1917-1924, to the impact of historic

events like the Bolshe\'ik Revolution, defeat and revolution in Germany, the
chaotic instahility of the early years of the Weimar Republic, and its gradual
stabilization as Vernunfirepuhlikaner like Mann rallied to its support. Yet research
on the links bet\\een ;\Iaphta and contemporary ideological developments is
so scanty that a critical bibliography of Der Zlluherher8 instances its inadequacy
as a serious ohstacle to the understanding of the figu re:

Thomas ~1anns geniale Lusammenfassung \'erschiedenster Ideologeme

in del' von Naphta \'orgetragencn Theorie ware schliefllich nicht nur auf
Finzc\pcrsonl'n, sondern auf herrschende Ideologiekomplexl' der frlihen
zwanzigcr Jahre :tu beziehen. insbesondere auf die Strlimungen der
Konscfvati\cn Rc\·o]ution. Erst dann wiirc da, Thema flir cine idco]o-
giekritische Rdlexion del' f'unktion dieses Denkens im Kontext der gesell-
schaftlichen Verhaltnisse nach 1911l wirklich aulbereitet.'

AImost all the many studies of the novel contain sections on Naphta, hut
they mostly fail to give a detailed analysis of his political and ideological stand-
pOint; some simply interpret his ideas in the context of their relation to the
internal structure of the novel, sealing the character otf from contemporary
history within the hermetic framework of the text: "The ideologies within
the book are merely intellectual pawns, to be pushed abou t for the sake of the
composition."4
Among recent studies devoted specifically to Naphta, Herbert Lehnert
concentrates less on analyzing Naphta's ideological and political views than
on relating him to Mann's own ideas and artistic concerns, as developed already
in his early works. 5 Claude David's view of Naphta as devil's advocate is marred
hy short-comings precisely in the area of political analysis, in a manner typical
of critics who seek to tailor history to suit their interpretation of the text:

Als Thomas Mann gegen 1924 die letzten Seiten seines Romans nieder-
schrieb, konnten die "Volkischen" als endgliltig besiegt betrachtet werden;
in Thomas Manns Dar·;tellung soil ten die Marxisten, mit kaum verander-
tern Vorzeichen, als ihre Nachfolger erscheinen."

In fact, whereas the radical right only seemed to have been defeated by
1924-and Mann's awareness that it posed a continuing threat is evident in
his reaction to Hindenburg's election as president in 1925---the threat from
the left had in reality receded for good after the failed uprising of October
192:\: it is therefore \\'holly impermissible to speak of "the Marxists" as the
 "Linke Leule von rechlS" 14'5

revolutionary successors to the radical right, and it is ahsurd to see Naphta,

who switches from Marxism to reaction, as representative of a nonexistent
development in precisely the opposite direction. This approach marks little
adnnce on the many critics who simply label Naphta a totalitarian, a reac-
tionary or fascist, or a bizarre combination of reaction and Marxist revolution,
and make no attempt at detailed ideological investigation. A recent article
examplifies the unscholarly oversimplification to which such an undifferenti-
ated approach leads: "DaB Naphta mit seinem Hang zu Terror, Chaos, Folter
und mystischem Kollektivismus ein politisch reaktionares Obskurantentum
vertritt ... ist literaturwissenschaftliches Allgemeinwissen.'"
Scholarly research on Naphta's ideological and political standpOint has
been bedeviled by the question of the external resemhlances between Naph ta
and Georg Lukacs; this has led to admirahly detailed work, like that of Judith
Marcus-Tar, which concentrates far more on Lukacs as the model for Naphta
than on Naphta's thinking in its own right.x It is above all Pierre-Paul Sagave
who has studied Naphta in relation to contemporary political and ideologi-
cal currents,9 yet far all his carefully researched insights, Sagave is not wholly
reliable: he calls Naphta a Hegelian, rather than a Marxist; he investigates
Naphta's reactionary radicalism principally in terms of his Catholicism, sig-
nificantly underestimating the degree to which extreme right-Wing ideology
is central to the character; and after an illuminating analysis of Naphta's syn-
thesis of communism and Christianity, he ends up by denying that Naphta
is a totalitarian fascist at all and ultimately fails to see that the figure stems
from Mann's perception of the twin threat posed by both right- and left-wing
radicalism. Gerhard Loose's criticism of Sagave lO does little to advance our
understanding ofNaphta: with his one-sided view of the figure as a prototype
of fascism, Loose is concerned to demonstrate that Naphta is not an ideologi-
cally correct Marxist, which, given his Catholicism, he is clearly not meant
to be. Loose posits a simple antithetical polar opposition between Naphta and
Settembrini, failing to see that Naphta emhodies both extremes as against the
moderate center.
One might have expected Marxist critics to he to the fore in illuminat-
ing Naphta's political views. That this has not heen so probably results from
the dilemma in which they are placed hy the highly unusual combination
of revolutionary Marxism with reactionary irrationalism in so unattract-
ive a character. To this they react in one of two w·ays. Those who, following
Lukacs, approve of Mann as a representative of the progressive, humanist
forces within the hourgeoisie and as a great writer, simply deny that Naphta
is in any Significant sense a Marxist; they see the character as a pointer toward
Mann's later opposition to Nazism and reject any interpretation of Naphta
 140 Anlhony Grenville

as combining elements of the radical right and the revolutionary left as an

attempt to contlate fascism and communism in the manner of the derided
"totalitarianism theory." On the other hand. those Marxist critics who take a
more radical line hostile to Mann dismiss Naphta as an ideologically miscon-
ceived figure. a politically ill-founded attempt to lump together the extremes;
in their eyes. this reflects Mann's essentially "unpolitical" defence of patrician,
bourgeois interests against the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat under
the newly stabilized Weimar Republic. Wide-spread though it is among New
Left critics hostile to Mann, this view also fails to come to terms with the full
complexity ofNaphta.
What is necessary is to examine Naphta in the light of the background
of the revolutionary and postwar confluence of ideological extremes. In his
very being, Naphta. the ex-Jewish. ex-Marxist Jesuit. is precisely a combina-
tion of antitheses who mocks at Settembrini's ideal of unitary harmony with
all the fanaticism of a convert to the faith spewing the lukewarm forth from
his dualist mouth: "Gegensatze mogen sich reimen. Ungereimt ist nur das
Halbe und Mediokre."" Similarly, in his politics Naphta brings together what
appear to be elements from irreconcilably hostile ideologies. With his concep-
tion of the violent overthrow of the bourgeOiS liberal-democratic era by the
proletarian revolution, leading through the dictatorship of the proletariat at
once to the Marxist vision of a classless society free of oppressive state institu-
tions and to the City of God, subject to the iron rule of a medieval theocracy,
Naphta oscillates bewilderingly between the totalitarian left and the reaction-
ary totalitarian right. This extraordinary ability to embody ideological contra-
dictions leads Hans Castorp to call him a "Revolutionar der Erhaltung" (636);
for this dynamic radicalism, fueled above all by antagonism toward the hated
and despised moderate center, Serenus Zeitblom will find the felicitous phrase
"eine explodierende Altertilmlichkeit."12
The historical background to the novel's composition must be considered
first. The replacement of Pastor Bunge by Naphta. who is first mentioned by
name in a letter to Ernst Bertram in June 1922,L1 reflects a fundamental change
in Mann's view of politics and of basic political antagonisms. During the First
World War, at the time of the Betrachtun8en eines Unpolllischen, he made a fairly
clear-cut division between left and right. He saw. on the one side, Western
humanism. liberalism. and democracy. as embodied in the Settembrini-like
figure of the Zivilisationsliterat, with his optimistic faith in the power of rea-
son. in progress and freedom. and in the ethical values associated with lib-
eral bourgeois democracy; and, on the other side. the conservative values of
German Kultur and Tnnerlichkeit. hostile to "Western" politics as such, seeing
men in metaphysical. metapolitical terms as sinful. unequal, and irrational
 "Linke LeUle von rechls" 147

beings, and comhining the autocratic conservatism of the Wilhelmine empire

with the reactionary revolt against reason, the Conservative Revolution led
hy thinkers like Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. The key dividing line would,
roughly speaking, have separated the conservative and hourgeois parties of
the right and center from the Left Liherals and the SPD on the left with their
attachment to Western democratic ideals and values. The logical consequence
of this in the original plan of Der Zauberberg was the opposition of Kultur and
Zlvlllsatlon, German conservatism and Western liheralism, Pastor Bunge and
Settembrini.
From 1917 onward, historical events rendered this view untenable. The
Rolshevik Revolution outtlanked the Livlhsatlon.lliterat on the left, as its Marxism
was no longer compatible with bourgeois liberalism and moderate socialism; it
made possible an entirely new strategic alliance hetween Cermany and Russia.
Mann ends the lletmchtungen with an enthusiastic evocation of this union of
extremes:

Ich schlieHe diese Aufzeichnungen an dem Tage, an dem der Beginn der
Waffenstillstandsverhandlungen zwischen Deutschland und RuHland
gemeldet wird. Wenn nicht alles tauscht, soli der lange, fast seit Beginn des
Krieges gehegte Wunsch meines Herzens sich erfiillen: Friede mit RuBiand!
Friede zuerst mit ihm! Und der Krieg, wenn er weitergeht, wird weiterge-
hen gegen den Westen allein, gegen die "trois pays libres," gegen die
"Zivilisation," die "Literatur," die "Politik," den rhetorischen Bourgeois. 11

This is the SchicksalsBemelnschaft of the Eastern peoples against the West extolled
after 1917 by Moeller van den Bruck, who classed Germans and Russians as
"young peoples," by contrast to the aging, decadent West. 15 Moeller was a Con-
servative Revolutionary who, radicalized by Germany's defeat and humiliation
at Versailles, became the inspiration behind the attempt, known in its extreme
form as National Bolshevism, to create a national-revolutionary, nationalist-
communist, German-Russian front against the West. "Oer Weltkrieg," wrote
Moeller, "hat das deutsche und das russische Yolk in eine Schicksalsgemein-
schaft gebracht."16
The curious view of Bolshevik Russia held by these extreme German nation-
alists largely ignored its reality; for them, Lenin's revolution was primarily a
revolution against alien Western ideological infiltration of Russia, a revolution
back to medieval Russian traditions, to the mystical, irrational universalism
of Russian Orthodox Christianity and to the soil-bound peasant nationalism
of Mother Russia. Germany's defeat in 1918 only increased the sense of kin-
ship with Russia, \V"hom Germany now jOined as a pariah nation. So great was
 148 AlllhollY Grellville

Thomas Mann's hostility to the victorious West and its representative, the
Z,v,lisat,onsliterat, that, writing in November 1918, he took the plunge into this
alliance of opposite extremes:

Ich entsetze mich vor der Anarchie, der Ponelherrschaft, der Proletari-
erdiktatur nenst allen ihren Begleit- und '-:olgeerscheinungen it la russe.
Aber mein HaH auf den triumphierenden Rhetor-Bourgeois muB mich
eigentlich die Holschewisierung Deutschlands und seinen AnschluH an
RuHland wUnschen lassen. 17

From here it was easy for Mann to develop a common German-Russian ide-
ology, a bizarre synthesis of revolutionary communism and radical-reactionary
nationalism, in which, very much in the totalitarian style of Naphta, a medi-
eval theocracy is the model for the communal collective where Western free-
dom and individualism will be transcended and obliterated. He wrote in 1920:
"eine Art von deutschem Kommunismus war im Mittelalter verwirklicht,
und ich glaube, daft die Dinge sich bei uns etwa in dieser Richtung entwickeln
werden ... Es bleibt eben dabei, daB das Menschliche sich nur im Nationalen
verwirklicht." 18 For Mann, Lenin was a radical medieval throwback, "ein groBer
Papst der Idee, voll vernichtenden Gotteseifers," the twentieth-century equiva-
lent oHope Gregory the Great, who had uttered the words quoted by Naphta:
"Vertlucht sei der Mensch, der sein Schwert zuriickhait vom Blute."'9
Germany's defeat in 1919, her submission to the harsh terms of the Treaty
of Versailles, and her apparent integration into the Western democratic camp
through the replacement of the imperial regime by the parliamentary democ-
racy of the Weimar Republic completely transformed the political scene. No
longer did Mann see Germany divided into a governing right and an oppo-
sitional left; instead, the governing parties of the Weimar coalition, the SPD
and the moderate bourgeois parties, stood opposed from their position at the
center to the twin onslaught from radical left and radical right. No longer
did the crucial political faultline run between right and left down the center;
instead, the violent hostility of revolutionary communists to moderate social-
ists, whom they saw as betraying the revolutionary proletarian cause, gave
birth, within the left, to one of the crucial ideological divisions of our era, a
division mirrored, on the right, by the split between traditional conservatives
and the radical, populist, viilkisch forces of the new right who sought to create
a new national socialism.
Events in the early years of the Republic served only to deepen these
divides. The Novemher Revolution of 1918 had failed to realize the aims of
revolutionary left-wing socialists. When they tried to propel Germany on
 "Linke Leule von rechls" 149

to the second stage of its revolution, as Lenin had ousted Kerensky in 1917,
they were brutally crushed, and their leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht, murdered by forces nominally under the control of an SPD gov-
ernment. The Spartakusauf~tand of January 1919 was followed by a wave of
uprisings across Cermany, culminating in the suppression of the Bavarian
Raterepublik in Munich in April 1919. Between 1918 and 1923, the radical left
made repeated attempts to overthrow the Weimar Republic by revolution.
These attempts included the Red Army in the Ruhr in 1920, the Marzaktion
in central Cermany in 1921, and the events in Saxony and Thuringia in
October 1923. Moderate socialists and revolutionary communists confronted
one another in bitter enmity.
On the right, the belief grew that liberal democracy was alien to Ger-
many. The democratic system was the more hateful for haVing, so the right
alleged, been imposed on Germany by the allies. As a result, the right's hatred
of liberalism and Weimar democracy became pathological. The Republic was
constantly threatened by political violence from the right, by the activities
of right-wing paramilitary and underground organizations, the assassination
of leading Republican politicians like Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathe-
nau, and attempted coups like the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, and Hitler's
Putsch of November 1923. Moeller's writings ring with hate-filled polemicS
against liberalism; taking as the motto for a chapter of his best-known work,
Das Dritte Reich, written in 1922, the saying "An Liberalismus gehen die Volker
zugrunde,"20 Moeller looked to a revolution to eliminate all liberalism and
parliamentary democracy: a revolution that would take Germany forward to
his millenarian vision of the Third Reich and backward into an elitist, corpora-
tive hierarchy held together by un-questioning obedience and subordination
of the individual to an authoritarian dictatorial leadership. Filled with a com-
mon desperate radicalism, right-wing extremists and left-wing revolutionar-
ies vied in their hatred of Weimar democracy. On the right, Oswald Spengler
proclaimed in his Der Untersans des Abend/andes (1918-1922Y' the inevitable
decline of Western liberalism and humanism, in accordance with the iron
determinism of his theory of the morphology of cultures. Moeller relegated
the liberal RepubliC to the lumber-room of history: "Die Revolutionsrepub-
lik wurde eine Abschrift der abgestandenen Ideen des neunzehnten Jahrhun-
derts."22 On the left, the communists proclaimed the imminent overthrow of
the bourgeois Republic by the revolutionary proletariat, to be followed by a
transitional dictatorship leading to the classless society where repressive insti-
tutions of State would "wither away." Here there was a pattern of apocalypse,
millennium, and utopia, which Mann could combine in Naphta's vision of
the future into an all-purpose, revolutionary-reaetionary eschatology.
 150 AtIlhony Grenville

Once the immediate shock of defeat and of the Versailles settlement had
worn off, Mann's enthusiasm for the extremes waned in face of fresh histori-
cal developments. The first of these was the Munich Ratercpublik of April
1919, which ended his ideological attraction to left-wing radicalism. Many of
the instigators of the first phase of the Raterepublik were of a type he cordially
loathed, Expressionist literati. among whom were many Jews. When these
utopian socialists gave way to a more tough-minded communist leadership
in the second phase of the doomed venture, Mann was faced with the alarm-
ing prospect of a direct threat to his property and even to his personal safety;
significantly, the communist leaders, Eugen Levine and Max Levien, were
Russian Jews, and the Jewish-Marxist, Eastern-radical component in Naphta
doubtless owes much to themY
flut Mann hardly shared in the hysterical right-wing backlash once
the IUterepublik was crushed. After a sense of relief at its suppression, he
deplored the White Terror and hoped that the different classes would become
reconciled, taking a position not dissimilar to that of moderate Republicans. 24
This movement away from the antirepublican extremes appears in his consid-
ered-but not initial-reaction to the ignominious failure of the right-wing
Kapp Putsch in March 1920.25 This fiasco provided the clearest evidence of the
political bankruptcy of the traditional conservatives and emphasised the gulf
that separated them from the new radical right; Naphta is obviously as far
removed from traditional conservatism as his successor in Doktor Faustus, Chaim
Breisacher, is from the bewildered conservative Herr von Riedesel. Whereas
the Kapp Putsch accentuated the antirepublican radicalism of the extreme
right, it turned moderate conservatives toward the Republic, and Mann's
criticism of the Putsch is in tune with the attitudes of Vernunftrepublikaner like
the historian Friedrich Meinecke, whose hearts might remain on the monar-
chist right, but whose heads decided for the Republic.
The way was now open for Mann's public statement of his conversion to
Republican democracy and to a francophile, pro-Western stance. He had also
become reconciled with his brother Heinrich in January 1922; Heinrich Mann
had been the model for the Zlvilisationsliterat, and the venom of Thomas Mann's
attack had been due in good measure to fraternal bitterness. Thus an impor-
tant psychological obstacle to Thomas Mann's championing of Western ideas
had heen removed. Now hatred of Settemhrini and Western liberal democ-
racy gave way to alarm at the wave of hysterically irrational, antidemocratic
nationalism that was sweeping Germany. The murder of Walther Rathenau
hy nationalist extremists June 24,1922) led Thomas Mann to speak out openly
for the Republic in his speech "Von deutscher Republik" October IS. 1922).
The last mention of Runge in his diary had come in June 1921,2' and one must
 "Lillke Leule VOII rechts" 1)1

assume that it was in late 1921 and into 1922 that Mann was developing the
figure ofNaphta. As he worked on the chapters where Naphta appears, events
conspired to make the ideological combination of extremes a menacing real-
ity. The invasion of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in January 1923
brought about a high point of National Bolshevist sentiment, as fanatical
nationalists and communists rallied together to oppose Entente imperialism
and "Versailles capitalism." The crisis-ridden Republic, its economic foun-
dations shaken by inflation, seemed on the verge of collapse in the face of
attempted revolutions by both left and right in the autumn of 1923-just
as Settembrini, the beleaguered center, faces Naphta's onslaught from the
extremes of revolutionary Marxism and theocratic absolutism.
Attempts to unite nationalist extremists of the right with the German
Communist Party against the capitalist West even caused Lenin to inveigh
against National Bolshevism in his pamphlet, Left- Wing CommUnlsm -an Infantile
Disorder (1920). The idea of Germany and Russia making common cause
against the West, which found expression in the Treaty of Rapallo (April
1922), was translated into ideological terms: the German people-the Volk for
the nationalists, the proletariat for the communists-was seen as enslaved
by Entente imperialism and exploited economically by Western capitalists
and their German republican allies. As the communists fought to defend the
proletariat against Western capitalist exploitation, so the nationalists fought
to defend the German Volk against Western imperialist aggression. A simple
mechanism enabled nationalists like Moeller and Ernst Niekisch to transfer
the class struggle of proletarian against capitalist onto the level of Germany's
national struggle against the Western oppressor; in National Bolshevist writ-
ings. Volk or Nation is substituted for Klasse.
The year 1923, when Mann was working on Naphta's debates with Settem-
brini, brought the most spectacular manifestation of National Bolshevism:
the speech by a leading Bolshevik, Karl Radek, before no less a body than the
Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International on June
20, 1923, in which he praised the German nationalist hero Leo Schlageter,
executed by the French in the Ruhr. This speech, entitled "Der Wanderer
ins Nichts" after a German nationalist novel, was a sensational appeal to
the extreme right to make common cause with the workers to throw off
the yoke of Entente capitalism. It resulted in a brief spurt of collaboration
between communists and nationalists and gave rise to an exchange of articles
between Radek and Moeller, whose journal Gewissen was the principal organ
of National Bolshevism on the right. This would have reinforced in Mann's
mind the pattern of a combined ideological alliance of extremes against the
center. His diaries reveal that he had definite contacts with the Juni-Klub, the
 152 AmhollY Grellville

group round Moeller.27 Moeller's chiliastic vision of the Third Reich, combin-
ing the proletarian utopia of a classless society with the nationalist dream of
a Volksgemeinschafi, and patterned on the Christian millennium of the City of
God, is similar in broad outline to Naphta's "Erli.isungsziel," the "staats- und
klassenlose Gotteskindschaft" (559).
The genesis of Naphta must be examined next. As Mann's drafts, plans, and
work notes for Der Zauberhers are almost all lost, we have to rely on his diaries
for 1<)18-1<)21 and his letters to reconstruct the genesis and development of
the figure of Naphta; and these bear out the pattern of a simple opposition of
right and left, Bunge and Settembrini, giving way to a combination of the two
extremes against the moderate center: Naphta and Settembrini. Mann wrote
on August 3, 1<)15 to Paul Amann of his original plan for a story "worin ein
junger Mensch ... durchdie geistigen C;egensatze von Humanitat und Roman-
tik, Fortschritt und Reaktion, Gesundheit lind Krankheit geftihrt wird,"2s and
it is again easy to recognize Settembrini and Bunge when he describes Hans
Castorp placed "zwischen einen italienischen Literaten, Humanisten, Rhetor
und Fortschrittsmann und einen etwas anrtichigen Mystiker, Reaktionar
und Advokaten der Anti-Vernunft."2" A Protestant pastor would be associated
both with the Wilhelmine political establishment and with the reactionary,
mystical "anti-politics" Mann and Naphta attribute to Protestantism (613): a
conventional German conservative.
This is not to deny that much of Bunge, of the anti-liberal, "unpolitical"
conservatism of the BetrachtunBen has gone into Naphta. But Bunge was no
longer adequate for Mann's purposes in the radicalized, polarized political
situation of the new Weimar Republic. Scattered references to Bunge appear
in the postwar diaries, but already in 1919 he looked "veraltet"'~) to his author.
He was duly replaced by a figure who could combine the two totalitarian mass
movements, fascism and Bolshevism, Mann saw sweeping Europe:

Der anti-liberale Rtickschlag ist mehr als klar, er ist krall. Er auBert sich
politisch in der tiberdruBvolien Abkehr von Demokratic und Parlamen-
tarismus, in einer mit finsteren Brauen vollzogenen Wendung zur Diktatur
und zum Terror. Der Faschismus Italiens ist das genaue Gegenstlick zum
russischen Bolschewismus."

The character of Naphta springs from the ideological conditions and

contlicts of the postwar years. That Mann borrowed certain external fea-
tures from Georg Lukacs, whom he met in January 1922,is known. But one
can still accept his repeated assurances that there was no single model for
Naphta; that the character grew out of the contemporary ideological cli-
 .. Linke Leuce von rechcs" 153

mate: "Aber das Mciste l\elll dn Figurl ist 'aus der l.uft gegriffen.' Sie war ja
voll davon."12 Naphta's Je\vish origins-his name comes from the Hebrew
\veml "Naphtali" meaning "struggle" or "fight," as \vell as being close to the
inflammable chemical naphtha-also correspond to his ideological signifi-
cance. A diary entry of April 24, 1919 makes clear Mann's identification of
communism with an "asketischen Cottesstaat"; and he sees communism
as spread by the destructive Jewish/Russian-Christian radical, "dem Tvpus
des russischen Juden ... dieser sprengstoflhaften Mischung aus jUdischem
Intellektual-Radikalismus und slawischer Christus-Schwarmerei ... Dachte
an die Miiglichkeit, die russisch-chiliastisch-kommunistischen Dinge auch
in den :Lbg. einzuheziehen."l.l This could not possihly be achieved through
Pastor Bunge. Naphta the ex-Jew is the alien intellectual; keen to discard his
Jewish faith, first for Marxism, then for Catholicism, he makes a radical break
with his roots and finally plunges into pure nihilism."4 This is shown when his
persistent, malicious undermining of Settembrini's ethical stance culminates
in his negation of all values, "der wahre Nihilismus" (961 )-whose physical
counterpart are the murderous conditions he sets for the duel and his ulti-
mate act of self-destruction.
Any consideration of Naphta's ideas in detail immediately reveals the pat-
tern of a fusion of extreme right- and extreme left-Wing elements. I shall
examine the latter first. That he had once been powerfully influenced by
Marxism is evident in his attachment to the dialectical method, in his style
of argumentation and as a tool of analysis. Just as he is himself a combination
of opposites, so he thinks in terms of antithetical opposites that are resolved
on a higher level: "Der Dualismus, die Antithese, das ist das bewegende, das
leidenschaftliche, das dialektische, das geistreiche Prinzip. Die Welt feindlich
gespalten sehen, das ist Geist" (520). His contempt for Settembrini's monism
stems from a dualist style of thinking that operates in dialectically contrasted
pairings: body and soul, matter and spirit, damnation and salvation.
It is easy to point to ideological irregularities in Naphta's Marxism, but
criticism of the validity of the character on those grounds is misplaced.\\ That
Naphta is no longer an orthodox Marxist is self-evident; he has become a Jesuit,
and his attempt to synthesize the two obviously involves considerable depar-
tures from ideological orthodoxy on both fronts. In Naphta's transformation
of scientific Marxist analysis of history into a religious myth, however, Mann
illuminates the process by which ideology, however rational in origin, becomes
for fanatics a system of irrationally held articles of faith. Mann is concerned
here not with Marxist theon' in pristine purity, but with Marxism-Leninism as
an ideology that had hecome the tool of those in pO\ver in Russia. It required
the individual to forego critical, rational analysis and to suhordinate his judg-
 154 An/hollY Grellville

ment to the higher ideological authority of the Party. The function of Marxist
ideology here is not that of its founding fathers; it is closer to that in Arthur
Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Mann had fully understood how totalitarian power
uses ideology for its own ends. The Stalinization of the Cerman Communist
Party, which took place precisely in the years after 1923.Jo demonstrates hO\\/
incisively Mann had gauged the political process that was at work.
In Mann's view, the liberal era of bourgeois democracy was in its death
throes. World War I had ushered in a new age of antiliberal, collectivist, totali-
tarian mass movements. That conviction forms a central theme in Mann's
thinking during the Weimar period. In the months after Germany's defeat
he resented the victorious Entente so much that his diary shows a readi-
ness to make common cause with the revolutionary proletariat. Whereas by
1922 Mann had rallied to the defense of parliamentary democracy, Naphta
expounds a dialectical, proto-Marxist view of history: after the initial stage of
primitive communism free of class differences and State oppression follows
the capitalist "Stindenfall," the stage of economic exploitation, which is in
turn replaced, through the dialectic of the revolutionary clash between capi-
talists and proletariat, by the utopia of the classless society.'; This is, in part,
an economic interpretation of history, like Marxism: Naphta sees history as
determined by class conflict and eagerly awaits the inevitable cataclysm that
will spell the doom of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: "Gewoll t wird
immer nur das Schicksal. Das kapitalistische Europa will das seine" (529).
Integral to these ideas are first, hostility to capitalism, which values every-
thing according to financial calculations, and second, its overthrow by the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. For Naphta, Marxism is the
"Gesellschaftslehre ... die die mensch lie he Oberwindung des Okonomismus
bedeutet" (557); it promises to remove the inhuman alienation of man in a
system riddled with inherent contradictions and dependent on the free play
of market forces, dismissed by Naphta as "Manchestertum" (557). This hostil-
ity to commercial speculation and economic thinking generally is shared by
the Church, which for Naphta also rejects private property, according to a
doctrine of production for the collective close to the maxim of communality
"to each according to his needs": "dar~ die Produktion sich nach dem Bedtir-
fnis richte" (559). But we can see that this is a mere surface resemblance:
whereas the Church condemns the cult of Mammon per se as detrimental
to the salvation of the soul, Marx objected only to private ownership under
conditions of capitalism and explicitly aimed, in the CommulIlsl Manifesto, atan
increase in material wealth after the revolution: "The proletariat will use its
political supremacy ... to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as
possible."JR
 "Unke Leuce von rechLs" 155

Naphta refers repeatedly to the dictatorship of the proletariat (557. 559.

S14). the transitional stage during which that class must secure its victory.
if necessary by violence. terror. and oppression. The Jesuits' notorious advo-
cacy of the doctrine that the end justifies the means would make this come
easily to him. Naphta eagerly anticipates an apocalyptiC reign of terror. He
takes a true hard-line revolutionarv Marxist stance. like Lenin who con-
tended that the doctrine of proletarian dictatorship. as delineated in the Cri-
tique (~f the Cotha I'wgral11l1le;w is nu b ofMarx's teaching. and drew on the account
of overt revolutionary violence and class war during the Paris Commune.~11
These Leninist elements again relate Naphta to the post-1917 era. Prior to
the Bolshevik Revolution. German left-wing Marxism had been associated
with the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. whose view of the proletarian revolution
was altogether more democratic; to have avoided the phrase "dictatorship
of the proletariat." with its overtones of dictatorial violence and terror and
substituted for it the softer "Eroberung der politischen Macht" earns her a
rebuke from the editor of the standard East (~erman edition of her works. 41
Rosa Luxemburg believed that the revolution would spring spontaneously
from the proletarian masses and rejected Lenin's concept of a tightly orga-
nized party of professional revolutionaries. classless intellectuals, acting as
vanguard to make the revolution in the name of the proletariat; she also
defended internal party democracy. Her ideas of spontaneity and democracy
led to a polemical exchange with Lenin in the early years of the century on
precisely the subject of party organization and discipline, and reappeared in
her critique in Die russische Revolution42 of the Bolsheviks' use of terror and party
dictatorship after their assumption of power. Had Mann conceived Naphta
before 1917, he would surely have looked as a model to Rosa Luxemburg,
rather than to Lenin, then an obscure Russian exile. For the revolution-
ary party, as depicted by Naphta, is characterized by rigid centralization,
iron diScipline, and absolute obedience. It demands the abandonment of
the individual's freedom-"Vergewaltigung der Personlichkeit" (554)-and
his unconditional submission to a totalitarian collective-"anonym und
gemeinsam" (545)-an all-powerful, infallible authority.41 Naphta's exclu-
sive, antidemocratic "Bund" (703) bears some resemblance to Lenin's con-
ception of the party as a tightly organized revolutionary vanguard elite. and
more to its subsequent elaboration into a totalitarian system backed by terror.
The German Communist Party developed precisely this "gestraffte Befehls-
und Subordinationsstruktur der ferngesteuerten. durch pseudo-religii.ise
Erwartungskonzepte getragenen Kaderpartei.'H4
The transitional stage of dictatorship It'ads on to the classless society and
the withering away of the State. Marx's secular prophecy of the socialist mil-
 150 Anthony Grenville

lennium, which Naphta also repeatedlv proclaims (557, 559, 814). To this end
he is prepared to use any means of violence or terror, and this involves him
in moral relativism: neither moral \alues nor truth are absolute, but are dic-
tated by the class struggle and its ultimate outcome, the realization of the
classless utopia: "Wahr ist, was dem Menschen frommt ... sein Heillist! das
Kriterium der Wahrheit" (551). Naphta's view of moral values accords entirely
with the Marxist vie\v: when he denies that Settembrini's Classical-humanist
values are eternal and absolute, and defines them, according to their origin
in a specific class-based social order, as "nur Geistesform und Zubehiir einer
Epoche, der burgerlich-liberalen" (720), he is following Marxist analysis by
linking morality and ideology as phenomena of the superstructure back to
the economic basis bv which they are determined, the interests of the rul-
ing classes. Lenin reiterates the relativity of human knmvledge, given the
concept of dialectical development, and consequentlv of morality and ideol-
ogy: "Just as man's knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which
exists independently of him, so man's sO(fa/ know/edw (i.e., his various views and
doctrines-philosophical, religiOUS, political and so forth) reflects the economic
system of SOCiety. "45
For Naphta there can be no "reine Erkenntnis," no "voraussetzungslose Wis-
senschaft" (550) in the style ofSettembrini's naive positivism. As Lenin wrote:

There can be no "impartial" social science in a society based on class

struggle .... To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as
foolishly naive as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the ques-
tion of whether workers' wages ought not to be increased by decreasing
the profi ts of capital. %

We have now reached the philosophical core of Naphta's thinking; and

it leads on to the right-Wing elements in his ideas. His theory of knowledge
is akin both to Marx's rejection of superficial empiricism and to the radi-
cal right's rejection of liberal-humanist rationalism. Similarly, his attitude to
capitalism is at least as close the nebulous anticapitalism of the extreme right
as to Marx; for example, to Spengler's condemnation of capitalism as the
rootless, money-bound economy of cities, with their political democracy,
that displaced land-bound feudalism:

Zum Lehnswesen gehort die Wirtschaft des stadtlosen Landes. Mit dem
von Stadten aus regierten Staat erscheint die Stadtwirtschaft des Geldes.
die sich mit dem Anbruch jeder Zivilisation zur Diktatur des Celdes erhebt,
gleichzeitig mit dem Sieg der welts tad tisch en Demokratie."
 "Lillke Leute VOII rechLs" 157

Spengler's contempt for "das Denken in Celd," financial and commercial

speculation, contributes po"verfully to his prophecy of the imminent demise
of Western civilization. as the economically determined view of man, origi-
nating in England, gives way to that of a new age of barbaric Cacsarism. The
very details of these arguments appear in Der Zauberbers in the debates between
Naphta and Settembrini:" as does Spengler's amalgamation of radical social-
ism and Christian otherworldliness: "Eigentum ist Diebstahl; das ist in denkbar
materialistischer Form der alte Gedanke: Was hillfe cs dem Menschen, wenn
er die ganze Welt gew()nne und nahme doch Schaden an seiner Seele!"~9
Naphta's apocalyptic view of history as contlict also owes less to Marx's
historical dialectic of class struggle than to the radical right\ conception of
reality in terms of unresolved antitheses. in Moeller's words: "Wir milssen
die Kraft haben, in Gegensatzen zu leben."~" The violent termination of the
bourgeois era of capitalism and liberal democracy is a stock theme of the
radical right, and when Naphta says "heute, wo \vieder ein Leitalter zu Crabe
sinke" (719), he is expressing. in terminology less Marxist than Spenglerian, a
morphological determinism that governs the rise and fall of cultures and an
inevitable revolutionary reversion into a barbaric, anticapitalist order.
Naphta's epistemology is based on the distinction between surface appear-
ances and true reality, taken most obviously from Kant and from Schopenhau-
er's distinction between the phenomenal world as perceived through our senses
and the underlying reality of the Will. Naphta questions our sense perceptions
of phenomena as a valid basis for making judgments and arriving at the truth;
he attacks the positivist view of the natural sciences, which assumes that time,
space, and causality, in which the phenomenal world unfolds, are objectively
real relations (960). Therefore, he is hostile to Settembrini's pragmatic empiri-
cism, to the individual's asserting of his sovereign powers of reason and judg-
ment, his claim to arrive independently at the truth through his ability to
perceive realities and draw valid conclusions from them. Like most figures of
the radical right-Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Oswald Spengler-Naphta
rejects, along with empiricism, both modern scientific thinking (which is not
true of Marxism) and the liberal-humanist tradition ofindividual freedom and
rationally based morality that dates back to the emancipation of the individual
from medieval theocracy at the time of the Renaissance.
To negate freedom and democracy by denying the assumption on which
they are based, namely, that objective knowledge and absolute truth are
accessible to the individual through observation and reason, is the hallmark
of totalitarian systems. To deny intellectual freedom is the key to denying all
other freedoms. When Naphta states: "lch glaube, damit ich erkenne" (550):
and when he relegates philosophy. the spirit of free enquiry, to the role of
 158 Anthony Grenville

handmaiden of theology (551-552); then he is subordinating the individual's

intellect and powers of rational analysis to faith, doctrine, dogma, and provid-
ing an intellectual justification for the sacr~fiClum intel/a/us. It is significant that
Naphta should choose astronomy as the point at which to attack the scientific
method of empirical observation and rational analysis (.'WHl). He casts doubt
on the validity of Copernican astronomy, which has the earth, "einen gleich-
gliltigen, kleinen Wandelstern," revolving round the sun. The displacing of
the Ptolemaic system by the Copernican, and the challenge to the authority
of the Church posed by Galileo's scientific discoveries are the classis example
of the battle between the doctrines of a theocracy, and, by extension, the idc-
ology of any totalitarian order claiming absolute authority, and the reason
and freedoms of the individual. Mann saw a play about Calileo in Vienna in
January 1919,51 and he read Spengler and Novalis, who both discuss the clash
between the new astronomy and ecclesiastical authority.52
The vital concept is that of "knowledge as power": the ability of totalitarian
Inquisitor-figures to gain control over men's minds by imposing their own
truth and system of beliefs, by epistemological manipulation and by deny-
ing the power of the individual's reason to arrive at objective knowledge or
absolute truth. That is why, in works like Brecht's Leben des Galilei and that
totalitarian paradigm, Orwell's Nineteen EiBhty-Four, individual freedom is seen
as dependent on man's ability to perceive what is objectively true, on the reli-
ability of facts as the empirical data for pragmatic judgments and rational
conclusions.
When Winston Smith, the last free man, writes: "Freedom is the freedom
to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows,"53 this
statement of pragmatic empiricism and rational logic must be his death sen-
tence, for he is opposing the Party's demand that men reject the evidence
of their eyes and ears. From O'Brien, the Party interrogator, come the same
arguments that Naphta uses as the basis for his totalitarian system: the nature
of reality is not self-evident; reality is not something objective, external, exist-
ing in its own right; it exists only in the mind, and not truly in the individual
mind, but in the collective, infallible mind of the Party; whatever the Party
holds to be truth, is truth. It is logically inevitable that O'Brien, like Naphta,
will scorn Scientifically proven hypotheses: "We control matter because we
control the mind. Reality is inside the skull." He concludes by asserting, like
Naphta: 'The earth is at the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go
round it."5~
Naphta's vision of a totalitarian order, ruling through "den absoluten
Befehl, die eiserne Bindung ... Oisziplin, Opfer, VerIeugnung des Ich, Verge-
waltigung der Persi"inlichkcit" (554), is rooted in precisely the same radical
 "Linke Leuce von rechcs" 15<)

subjectivity. When Winston Smith. for one luminous moment of certainty,

denies the evidence of his senses under torture and sees five fingers, not the
four held up by O'Brien, he is submitting to totalitarian intellectual con-
trol. in accordance with the Party's negation of reason, objective truth, and
empirically based logic. The function of the critical intellect is merely to rein-
force an unquestioning adherence to the ideological system; as Spengler puts
it: "Wissen war gerechtfertigter, nicht widerlegter Glaube."55
This is the ideological foundation on which any system of violence, terror,
oppression, and absolute authority finds its secure basis; it gives the authority
of the collective absolute power over the individual, whose only option is will-
ing and total submission to it. It is this combination of mystical irrationalism
,-,;ith the claim to dictatorial authority that attracts Naphta to the Catholic
Church at its most doctrinally absolute, to its readiness to degrade and mor-
tify the flesh in order to save the soul.
Clearly, despite the Marxist elements in Naphta's ideas, this pattern of
un-thinking submission to a totalitarian authority is far more readily related
to the extreme reactionary right; above all, Naphta's irrationalism links him to
the Germanic ideology. Yet Naphta is not simply a German nationalist-as a
Jew, that would be difficult for him. In response to Settembrini's question "Sie
huldigen dem Pangermanismusl" (528), he merely shrugs evasively, for Mann
intended Naphta to represent a Europe-wide phenomenon, as a letter of 1922
shows: "Ich werfe mich heute aus demselben Triebe der reaktionaren Welle
entgegen, die wie nach den napoleonischen Kriegen tiber Europa hingeht
(denn ich denke nicht an Deutschland allein)."56 As a model for reactionary
totalitarian thinking not limited to one nation, the Catholic Jesuit, with his
ideal of reverting to a universal, medieval, papal theocracy governed by Inquis-
itorial methods, suited Mann's purposes admirably. But Naphta is much more
a totalitarian than a Christian; there is remarkably little of the Sermon on the
Mount and of Christian brotherly love about him. An additional motive for
making Naphta supranational may well have been Thomas Mann's reluctance
to compete with his brother Heinrich, who had created, in Jadassohn in Der
Untertan, the perfect Jewish convert to straight German nationalism.
Irrationalism is absolutely central to German radical right-wing think-
ing, with its hostility to Western rational, democratic politics, its slogans like
"thinking with the blood," and its mythical, mystical concept of a Volksgemein-
schaft held together by ties of blood and soil. The subliminal appeal to emo-
tion and instinct, bypassing the level of rational control, gave the radical right
much of its dynamic appeal. Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie and Spengler'S organic
vitalism subordinated intellect to will, strength, Vitality. It found expression
in such writers as Ernst Jlinger, who claimed that World War I had stripped
 160 Anlhony Grenville

a\vay the veneer of civilization and liberalism from men's primitive instincts
and urge to violence; in the regressive primitivism of Cottfried Benn;" and in
National Bolshevist writers like Ernst von Salomon, whose Freikorps novel
Vie Gei:ichteten" glorifies combat and destruction as the most intense expression
of nihilistic radicalism. The radical right welcomed the triumph of a new bar-
barism over reason, truth and morality:

Fs handelt sich in del' Geschichte urn das Leben und immer nur um das
Leben, die Rasse, den Triumph des Willens zur Macht, und nicht um den Sieg
von Wahrheiten, Ertindungen oder Celd. [)le WeltBesch/(-hte 1St das Weltwricht. sie
hat immer dem starkeren, \'olleren, seiner selbst gewisseren Leben Recht
gegeben:"

The National Bolshevist mentality corresponds to this:

Es sucht geradezu seine Ehre darin, brutal und hart zu sein, aufzuraumen
mit all den Hicherlichen Illusionen, die schwachliche Charaktere fUr eine
Befriedung der Welt ersonnen haben. Es setzt die Ideen Nietzsches und
Spenglers urn in eine politisch-aktivistische Ideologie, die ihre Hauptwur-
zel aus der Verachtung zieht."O

Naphta's irrationalism and vitalism emerge repeatedly. His distinction

between health and disease reveals a cast of mind profoundly influenced by
Novalis; his eulogy of disease as a spiritualizing agent (642--{)43) is his contri-
bution to the novel's central theme. In a characteristic contradiction, he also
belittles the intellect, praises illiteracy (721), and defends the primitive Vitality
of life and instinct, inveighing against liberal reforms as "die Entmannung und
Entblutung des Lebens" (725) or "die Kastration des Lebens" (637). Scornful of
disarmament conferences and pacifism, he welcomes the impending world
war as likely to contribute to the "Ertuchtigung der Rasse" (533), or as Spen-
gler put it: "Krieg ist die ewige Form hohern mensch lichen Daseins.""' When
he quotes the phrase "Verflucht sei der Mensch, der sein Schwert zuruck-
halt vom Blute" (557, 559), he implies that violence, conflict, bloodshed are
necessary, indeed desirable, an attitude that draws on the Social Darwinism
endemic on the radical right: in the struggle for survival, the strong have the
right, indeed the duty to eliminate the weak in order to ensure the health of
the species. War and conflict are natural to man, and ruthless Iife-or-death
competition is the ruling principle in human affairs: "Die Geschichte jeder
Kultur ist ein nie heendeter Kampf zwischen V()lkern, zwischen Klassen,
zv"ischen Einzelnen."62
 "Linke Leuce von rechls" 101

The instinct most pmverfullv exploited politically by the radical right

was the sense of an organic, national, vijlkisch community. For all his Catho-
lic universalism, Naphta's glorification of instinctive nationalism far outdoes
Settembrini's milk-and-water conception of the nation-sta te: "Das Instinktive
ist durchaus auf seiten des Nationalen, und Gott selbst hat den Menschen den
natUrlichen Instinkt eingeptlanzt, Iphrasing that places nationalistic instincts
on a par with sexual urgesl der die Wilker veranlaHt hat, sich in verschiedenen
Staaten voneinander zu sondern" (531 ). He employs the key term \'iilk,sch (965.
966). which he traces back to Cerman Romantic nationalism, to its subjec-
tive individualism as well as its irrational urge to submerge individuality in an
organic. communal collective (965). Settembrini protests at Naphta's readiness
to obliterate all individuality. his anticipation of "die alles verschlingende und
ausgleichende Gemeinschaft, den mystischen Untergang in ihr" (640); hut,
as Naphta correctly senses (.)54), youth in particular is attracted to ideas of
totalitarian control. unthinking subordination, and Romantic-organic forms
of political organization. The appeal of radical movements to youth in the
Weimar Republic has often been shown: "Dies waren Organisationsprinzip-
ien, die nUchterne Sachgerichtetheit durch die mystische Verbundenheit
eines Glaubensbundes, einer von irrationalen Visionen getragenen Gesin-
nungsgemeinschaft ersetzten."fil Naphta exemplifies the betrayal of reason
by intellectuals like Spengler who "did not believe in reason, the mind, the
spirit ... which were to him an anachronism, and yet he presented a highly
intellectualised philosophy himself. He hated 'paper' and longed for deeds, he
hated the 'bookworm' and longed for life.""' This is the combination of bloody
barbarism and bloodless intellect that appals Serenus Zeitblom. 65 It led to a
curious intellectual convergence of left and right extremes: "Die Rolle einer
revolutionaren Intelligenz ... wies ... bei beiden extremen Parteien Ahnlich-
keitsmerkmale auf, die der auHeren Diskrepanz der ideologischen Motive ihr
Gewicht weitgehend nahmen."fi6
To Naphta's ideas corresponds politically the totalitarian principle of
organization expressed in the key concept of Ilindul1H (554, 645), signifying a
fanatical commitment to a hierarchically structured collective based on the
appeal to an instinctive sense of community. The totalitarian pattern of abso-
lute authority and absolute obedience appealed to nationalist students, as
Mann noted in December 1918: "Oiese jungen Leute sind nichts weniger als
Rationalisten. Es verlangt sie durchaus nach mythischen Bindungen."67 The
certainty of absolute discipline was more reassuring to many than the respon-
Sibility of democratic freedom and political choice. For Naphta, like Moeller,
modern man had gone astray in choosing freedom and emancipation: "Die
Entstehungsstelle des l110dernen Liberalismus liegt dort, wo sich das Indivi-
 102 Anrhony Grenville

duum den mittelalterlichen Bindungen entrang."i>X Rejecting the liberals'

optimistic view of human nature, Naphta, like the radical right, sees men
as weak, Sinful, imperfect, as requiring not freedom but an ascetic-terroristic
dictatorship that will gUide them to the millennium (703).
It is no accident that Naphta uses the term "Bund" (703) to describe the
political organization of the totalitarian future. It derives both from his own
Jesuit Order and from a new type of political organization, the Bunde. These
proliferated in the postwar period; described as "eine aktivistische, hierarchisch
geordnete, ordensmaRig gegliederte Elite"r,y modeled on militant religiOUS
orders like the Teutonic Knights, they attracted young radicals disillusioned
with the weakness of Weimar democracy. As the Runde mainly grew out of the
paramilitary Freikorps and the communist fighting formations of the early
Weimar years, their militaristic nature was readily apparent, not infrequently
leading them to develop into Kampjbiinde involved in political violence and mili-
taryactivity.
Just as Naphta stresses that, like his Order, the City of God will be authori-
tarian, hierarchical, and elitist (SI5, 966), so the ideologues of the extreme right
conceived of their ideal society, like the Biinde that prefigured it, as strictly hier-
archical, as organized, not according to the principle of individual freedom,
but on corporative lines derived from the medieval estates and aiming to weld
the entire community into an organic unity. The phrase "korperschaftliche
Bindung" is common among right-wing ideologists; it is in this spirit that
Moeller wrote: "Wir verstehen unter deutschem Sozialismus vielmehr eine
korperschaftliche Auffassung von Staat und Wirtschaft, die vielleicht revo-
lutionar durchgesetzt werden muB, aber alsdann konservativ gebunden sein
wird."70
Many right-wingers considered the workers' councils (soviets), which
sprang up after the November Revolution, proof that the radical left was also
corporative in its thinking, and envisaged a confluence of right-wing corpo-
ratism and left-wing syndicalism. Naphta's conception of the Church mili-
tant, whose vanguard would be a rigidly diSciplined "geistige Elite," the Jesuits,
accords wholly with the political conceptions of the radical right, and, given
the universal mission of the Church and the Order, with the organization of
revolutionary Communist parties within the Communist International.
Naphta's utopian vision of the "staats- und klassenlose Gotteskindschaft"
(559) clearly draws on that most potent of right-wing myths, the Reich,
with its overtones both of the millennium and of the Third Reich, where
all conflicting antitheses will be resolved. This concept is rooted in religious,
not political, attitudes; it was a secularized religious myth, the focus for the
discontented radicalism that yearned to transcend the mediocrity and fal-
 .. Linke LeUle von rech[s" 103

libility of Weimar democracy. It drew on an imaginarv past and a distorted

present to project a visionary future, the mysticaL universal millennium of
the early Church Fathers, promising redemption through the abolition of
private propertv and economic exploitation; thus did Moeller integrate into
his Reich the international proletariat. But to reach utopia, mankind must
first pass through the apocalypse, the last stage of the conflict oetween the
forces of Cod and Satan-analogous to the final stage of the class strug-
gle--in which the forces of evil are doomed. For the right, like the left, was
convinced that a transitional dictatorship was necessary, that only coercion
could bring men to redemption. Politics gives way to prophecy, historical
analysis to the messianic fervor that was so striking a feature of political
radicalism in the Weimar Republic. Since the cycle of history repeats itself,
liberal illusions of linear progress dissolve; Naphta's papal dictatorship is to
usher in a new theocracy, the medieval-communist City of God: Moeller
quotes Dostoyevsky: "Der Staat soli Kirche werden."71 Ultimately, in the
vision of the radical right, Marxism was transcended; as Naphta turns from
Marxism to theocracy, so Moeller looked to Bolshevik Russia only as a
source of destructive, regressive hatred of the West, of reactionary National
Bolshevist nihilism. This retreat into an unpolitical, reactionary radicalism
is the hallmark of N aph ta and of the extreme right:

Die politischen ldeen der deutschen Rechten in der Weimarer Republik

sind zu einem nieht geringen Teil AusfluB eines romantisehen, irrationalen
Verhaltnisses zur Politik .... Revolutionar nach vorwarts sttirmend, urn die
Zukunft zu gewinnen, enden sie zuletzt als Handlanger der Reaktion.72

Given this reactionary radicalism, looking both forward to the revolution

and backward to medieval BindunBen, it is wholly understandable that Naph-
ta's views on Romanticism should cause a duel. Romanticism is the crucial
ideological turning-point where many Cermans abandoned reason, freedom,
humanist individualism for the cult of emotion, instinct, nationalism, seeking
a new freedom in submersion in the collective VolksBemeinschaji. The influence
of Ernst Troeltseh's "Naturrecht und Humanitat in der Weltpolitik" (1922).
which Mann reviewed, is evident in this view of German Romanticism and
the ideas of the West. Like the Wars of Liberation against the hench, Romanti-
cism was a revolt against the liberal-democratic revolution, combining revo-
lution and reaction, or claiming to unite them in a higher third. This is the
essence of Naphta: it provokes Settembrini to mortal combat. That Naphta is
at once more revolu tionary and more reactionary than Settembrini reveals his
structural function in the novel; Naphta represents the two extremes enfilad-
 164 Anthony Grenville

ing Settembrini, the moderate center on both flanks. Geographically, Settem-

brini represents the center, \'i·hile Naphta is associated with both the Slav lands
to the East and with Spain, the origin of his Order. Historically, Settembrini
represents the liberal-bourgeois era, while Naphta is associated with medieval
times and with the revolutionary future. While Settembrini stands for a har-
monious balance between mind and body, Naphta disrupts that balance by
taking extreme positions, either advocating the degradation and mortification
of the flesh to save the soul, or extolling the vitalist qualities of life and will at
the expense of the enslaved intellect. As Settembrini takes the humanist view
of form as the means to civilized living, so Naphta either glories in formless
laxity and intellectual "Liederlichkeit" or adopts an inhumanly ascetic and
severe formal rigor. Always he is the point where "Ies extremes se touchent."
Naphta's function in the novel is made clearer by examining Hans Cas-
torp's changing attitude to him, as the "Sorgenkind des Lebens" develops
intellectually, coming under the influence of ne\\' ideas, evaluating and ques-
tioning them. Although Settembrini makes his entry as "Satan a," the sub-
versive champion of reason against reaction, it is Naphta, introduced under
the half innocuous, half sinister title "Noch jemand," who is the more truly
devilish figure, the more fully "der Geist, der stets \'erneint." His nihilistic
onslaught on all Settembrini's values forces the latter into a conservative
defense of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition. Undeniably, Naphta wins
most of the debates with Settembrini; yet Castorp comes to distrust his dia-
lectical brilliance, his uncompromising inhumanity and diabolically negative
logic. Castorp, it is true, has come to see the inadequacy and superficiality of
Settembrini's cult of reason and progress; he is attracted by Naphta's ideas,
which take account of the deeper, irrational aspect of human nature and
existence so much in evidence in the diseased world of the Magic Mountain.
But ultimately Castorp refuses to adopt Naphta's standpoint, for he perceives
the dangers inherent in an attitude that denigrates rationality and morality,
advocates the elimination of individual freedom, and scorns life and health in
favor of the dark fascination of sin, disease, and death.
Settembrini may come across as verbose and unconvincing, but, unlike
Naphta, his heart is in the right place. His humanism and his ideal of a brother
hood of mankind are ultimately closer to the message of love proclaimed
in the vision in the snow than are Naphta's ideas. The Children of the Sun
must seek to live in harmony and communal fraternity, even though they are
aware of the horrors that take place inside the depths of the temple. In this
sense, Castorp's development matches that of his creator. During the war,
Mann rejected the mechanical rationality of the Zil'llistltionslitertlt in favor of a
"Jeeper," German, Romantic ideology; hut in the postw'ar years he came to
 "Lil1ke Leure von rechts" 105

espouse the values of the West, while still remaining conscious of the impor-
tance of instinct and irrational forces, of ambigUity and irony-the powers of
darkness, disease, and death-in human affairs. Had Mann ended his novel
with the vision in the snow, there would have heen a clearer message-but
the novel would have been the poorer.
As the nO\'el proceeds, Castorp perceives Naphta ever more plainly as an
inhuman, destructive figure who sows confusion and negation in his wake.
The malicious. unpleasant qualities of the character are increaSingly stressed,
while at the same time a dangerous and repugnant nihilism comes to domi-
nate his ideas. His manner in the final debate with Settembrini is so offensive
as to justify the latter's description of him as a mad dog, willfully spreading the
destructive germs of fanaticism, immorality, and inhumanity. Hans Castorp's
sympathies, and ours, have settled by the time of the dud more on the side
of Settembrini than of Naphta. In the duel, the diseased nature of Naphta's
ideas is demonstrated once and for all when he commits suicide in response to
Settembrini's gesture of active humanism in firing into the air. Ultimately sdf-
destructive. Naphta is a dual-purpose totalitarian, the representative of the
radicalism of both left and right in the Weimar Republic, united by hatred of
the center. For some Communists and radical nationalists had more in com-
mon than they cared to admit: "Beide geistig-politische Stromungen haben
eine gemeinsame Wurzel: den Widerstand gegen die aIte bilrgerliche Welt des
19. Jahrhunderts. Als Kinder derselben Epoche haben sie darum auch mehr
Gemeinsamkeiten, als man auf den ersten Blick annehmen mochte.,,73 Of this
strange confluence, Naphta is the embodiment.

Notes

1. Otto-Ernst Schtiddekopf, Linke Leute von rechts: Ole llational-revolutlOniiren Minderheiten und
der Kommumsmus ill der Weimarer Republlk (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 1960). The title was origi-
nally used by Kurt Hiller for an article in the Welthiihne 28.2 (1932). (>ther standard works
on ideologicalcollaboration between radical right and left in Weimar( ;ermany are Armin
Mohler. Die Komerl'Util'e RevolutIOn m Deutschland 191,11-1932. Em Handhuch. 2nd ed. (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972); Klemens yon Klemperer. Germany's New Conser-
vatism: Its History and Dilemma In the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968); and especially valuable on ideology, Kurt Sontheimer, Antldemokratlsches Den-
ken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politlschen Idem des deutschen Natltlnalismus :wlschen 1918 und 1933
(Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung. 19(2). Outstanding on the development of
Cerman right-wing thinking is Fritz Stern, The PolitiCS or Cultuml Despair A Stud" in the Riwof
the Germanic Ideolo8.)' (Rerkelev: University of California Press. 1961).
 166 An!hony Grenville

2. "Ob der ZauberberB ein zeit- und geselischaftskritischer Roman sei, ist die
Gretchenfrage an jede Interpretation dt's Werks," in Hermann Kurzke, Auf der Suche
nach der verlorenen IrratlOnalitiit: Thomas Mann und der Konserl'atlsmu.\ (WUrzburg: KCinigshausen
& Neumann, 19RO), 253. Critical disunity on this question is almost total, and Mann's
statements art' il1l"onsistent: once he calls the work a Zeitmman. "indem t'r das innere
Bild einer Epochc, der europaischen Vorkriegszeit, zu entwerfen sucht," quoted in
DIchter iiber ihre Dlchtunl/fn: Thomas Mann, edited by Hans Wysling (Munich: Heimeran,
1975), I: 466 (henceforward referred to as DiiD). But Mann also relates it to the first
third of the century (Gesammelte Werke in zwiill lliiuden [hankfurt am Main: S. rischer,
19601, 11: 6021benceforward rt'ferred to as GIF1), and implies that it reflects the post-
1918 period when he maintains that it could not have been written ten years earlier
and would not then have found anv readers (GW 11: 609--610).
3. Hermann Kurzke, Thomas-Mann-ForschunB 1969-1976. Ern kritischer Rmcht (WUrz-
burg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1977),238.
4. Theodore Ziolkowski, Dimensions 01 the Modern Novel. German Texts and European Con-
texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1969),73.
5. Herbert Lehnert, "l.eo Napbta und sein Autor," Orhis Litterarum 37 (19S2): 47-69.
6. Claude David, "Naphta, des Teufels Anwalt," in Thomas Mann 1875-1975: Ilortriiw
in Miinchen-Ziirich-Liibeck, edited by Beatrix Bludau, Eckhard Heftrich, and Helmut
Koopmann (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fiscber, 1(77),97.
7. GUnter Scholdt/Dirk Walter, "Sterben fUr die Republik? Zur Deutung von
Thomas Manns Zauberber8," Wirkendes Wort 30 (1980): 109.
8. Judith Marcus-Tar, Thomas Mann und Geors Lukdcs.· BeziehunB, Einjluft und "Repriisenta-
tive Ge8ensiitzlichkeit" (Koln: Bohlau, 1982). See also Hans RudolfVaget, "Georg Lukacs
und Thomas Mann," Neue Rundschau 88 (1977): 656-663.
9. Pierre-Paul Sagave, Real/te sociale et ideoloBie rellsieuse dans les romans de Thomas Mann
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1954), and "Der Begriff des Terrors in Thomas Manns Zauber-
herB," in DialoB: Literatur und Literaturw1S.Ienschaft im ZeJChen deutsch-franziiSlScher lleWBnunB. FestBabe
fiir Josef Kunz, edited by Rainer Schonbaar (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1973), 184-193.
Almost all research that touches on Mann's political development as reHeeted in his
works, including the present chapter, is deeply indebted to T. J. Reed's study, Thomas
Mann: The Uses of TraditlOn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). Reed's exposition of the complex
process whereby the Mann oftht' RetrachtunBen became the Mann of Von Deutscher Repuhlik
is an invaluable aid.
10. Cerhard Loose, "Naphta: Ober das Verhaltnis von I'rotntyp und dicbterischer
C;estalt in Thomas Manns ZauherherR," in IdeoioRiekrrll5che Stud,en zur L,teratur, edited by
Klaus Peter et aL (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1972), 2L)'--250.
II. (; W voL 3: Der ZauherherB (1960, 1(74),560. Page references to this edition of Der
ZauherlwlH will henceforward be shown by page numbers in the text.
12. Thomas Mann, Doktor Fall.\IUs, CW 6: .'lOt.
 "Linke Leure von rechts" Ib7

13. Letter to Ernst Bertram, June 2, 1922, quoted in DilD I: 460.

14. CW' 12: 5117.
15. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, nus Re(hl der pmwn Viilker.· Sammluna poUtischer
Aufsiit:e, edited bv Hans Schwarz (Berlin: Verlag der Nahe Osten, 1932).
16. Arthur Moeller van den [)ruck, Re(hemchuji iiber Ru/iland, edited by llans Schwarz
(Berlin: Verlag der Nahe Osten, 19.'\3),43.
17. Thomas Mann, Tawbilcher 1918-1921, edited by Peter de Mendelssohn (frank-
furt am Main: S. fischer, 1979),841'.; henceforward referred to as T.
18. Letter to Julius Bab, September 5, 1920, in Thomas Mann, Ilrief/' 1889-1936, edited
by Erika Mann (Frankfurt am Main: S. fischer, 1961), 183.
19. Thomas Mann, "lIber Lenin," GW 13: 822. For Naphta's use of thesl' words, see
C:W 3: 557,
20. Arthur Moeller, Das Drllte Rmh (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstait, 1923),
64. On the origins of the myth of the Third Reich in medieval mysticism, and Joachim
of Floris's conception of a Third Reich of the Holy C;host transcending those of the
hther and the Son, see Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, 253fT.
21. Oswald Spengler, Der Unter8ana de.1 Ahendlandes.· Umrisse einer Morpholoaie der Weltae-
schichte (Munich: DTV, 1980). Volume I of the original edition was published in Munich
in 1918; volume 2, in 1922.
22. Moeller, Das Drille Reich, 14.
23. On the line of Jewish outsider figures, mostly unsympathetic, going back to
Mann's early works, see Marcus-Tar, Thomas Mann und Geor8 Lukacs, 73ff., and Lehnert,
"Leo Naphta und sein Autor," 56ff.
24. T 219 (entry for May 1, 1919) shows Mann's relief at the entry of White forces
into Munich. The more conciliatory reaction appears in T261 (entry for June 9,1919).
25. T 403 (entry for March 20, \920).
26. T528 (entry for June 5,1921).
27. On Moeller and the Juni-Klub, see Stern, Polltics of Cultural Despair, 226ff. From
Mann's diary we learn that he breakfasted "im Kreise der Leute yom Gewissen" on a
visit to Berlin (1'486, entry for February 23, 1921). On April 14, 1920, he calls Gewissen
"die mir angenehmste Zeitung" (T 419) and speaks of reading Moeller's "vortreffliche
Artikel" in it (1' 391, entry for March 4, 1920). Later he was to refer contemptuously
to the "Berliner faschistische Klubzeitung namens 'J)as Cewissen'" as the appropriate
setting for Arthur Hilbscher's deplorable attack on Mann's revision of the RetrachtunBen
(see "Antwort an Arthur Hilbscher," GW' 11: 0(6).
28. DiiD455.
29. GW 12: 424.
30. This reference to Hunge is in r 197 (entry for April 14, 1919). Other references
in the diaries are on 444 (entry for Junt: 6, 1920),450 (entry for July 5, 1920), and 528
(entry for June 5,1921).
 168 Anthony Grenville

31. From "Coethe und Tolstoi," C'{F9: Hi6.

32. Letter to Saga\t' of Februarv 18, 1953, DiiD 51B. See also the letter to Sagayt' of
January 30,1934, DUn 542, and of February 19, 1949, to Kenneth W. Bookout. nUl) .~72.
Better knO\\'n to Mann than Lukacs, and c\OSLT to "iaphta, are the Jewish publicist and
convert to right-wing nationalism Paul :-.iikolaus Cossmann; Oskar (~oldberg, author
of DIe V?trkltchkett der Hebriier (Berlin: David, 1925) and model for the title figure of the
early storY Helm i'rol'heten, reincarnated in Daniel zur Hiihe in Doktor Fuust!ls; and the
militant Catholic writer Ludwig Derleth.
33. T 211 and 223 (entry for MaS' 2, 1919). The same ideas are expressed in an article,
almost certainly read by Mann, by Paul "iikolaus Cossmann, entitled "Boishewismus
und Christentum," in Siiddeutsche Monut5hejie 10.2 (April 1919): 7)-79, where he eLjuates
communism with fundamentalist early ChristianitS'. "Nur ein Mal hat es wahren
Kommunismus gegeben, in den ersten Jahrhunderten des Christentums" (7ti), and
speaks of the Bolsheviks' attempt "an bestimmten Stellen der Erde das Reich Cottes
zu beginnen" (78).
34. See Lehnert, "Leo Naphta und sein Autor," 61, for an excellent discussion of
this point.
3). For a learned exposition of the perfectly obvious fact that Naphta is not an
orthodox Marxist, see Loose, "Naphta: Ober das Verhaltnis von Prototyp und dichter-
ischer Gestalt in Thomas Manns ZauherherB." It is probable that Mann had read very
little of Marx, let alone of Lenin. But he knew enough about Marxism to see that
its theory at least was in one key respect incompatible with Naphta's irrationalism.
As Mann pointed out in 1926, Marxism is an ideology based on rationality, and he
calls Bolshevism "eine strenge wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung," in his "Vorwort
zu Joseph Conrads Roman Der GehelmaBent," GW 10: 653.
36. See Hermann Weber, Die WandlunB des deutschen Kommunismus: Die StalimslerunB der
KPD in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1969).
37. This comes in the second debate with Settembrini, in the section "Vom
Gottesstaat und von Ubler ErlOsung," GW 3: 555ff.
38. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels,
BaSIC Writinlls on Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. reuer (New York: Anchor, 1(59), ti9.
39. Ibid., 153-173, espeCially 167-170. See Lenin's pamphlet The i'roletanun Rel'oiuti(m
and the Rene!lade Kaut5ky (1918), in The Lenin Antholo!JY, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New
York: Norton, 1975),461-476.
'10. See Karl Marx, rhe CIvil War In France, in Hasic WritinBs, 389-429.
41. Rosa Luxemburg, Ge.lammeilf Werke, edited by Cunter Radczun.) vok, 1: 198.'),
190). Erster Halbband, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1974) editor's "Vorwort," 24.
42. ()n Rosa I.uxemburg, see J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemhur!l, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Uni-
\'ersitv Press, 1969). ror her polemics with Lenin, see her response to his ideas on partS'
organization-as set out in his W'h'lt It 1$ to Be Done?-in her article "Organisational
 "Linke Leure von rechrs" 169

Questions in Russian Social Democracy," Nelle /1'11 (llJ(l.)jI904): also f)/(' rl/smeh" Re\'olll-
lIOn, edited by Paul Le\i (1922).
43. See r 211 (entry for April 24,1919), for Mann\ \'ie\\ of the coming a~cetic­
communist "Gottesstaat": "\Vahrhaftig, es wird unter dieser Tvrannei cine neue
Freiheit, eine neue Wahrheitslicl1l' und Cerechtigkeit gehen. \\eilcs zun~ichst lIUS sein
w'ird mit alldem. Das prolt'larisdll' Dogma, das politische Kriteriul11 wird hnrschen.
Merkwurdiger Irrtum, dall jetzt die Freiheit angehrochen sei. 1m Cegenteil. die I'rei-
heit war das Ideal der 'hurgerlirhen' Epo,·he."
44. Karl Dietrich Bracher. Jlie AlifliisclnH der lli'mllllrer Rel'lIh1ck bill' Sludie ,11m Pr"hlem des
Maehtverfulls cn einer /)emokratce, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Ring-Verlag, 19(4), 102.
45. V. L L.enin, The Three Sources and Three C(>lIlpOllent 1'1Irt.1 ofMar\1sm. in rice Ll'IllH Anth"loli.I',
641fT.
46. Ibid., 640.
47. Spengler, f)fr [I/ltt'rH<lnH des .1bendlundes, 1156.
41\. for St'ltemhrini's defense of "urban" demouac\ against l\iaphta, see (;IF 3:
560f.. and for Naphta's attack on the English "iikonomislische (:esellschaftslehre," see
ibid .. 524.
49. Spengler, Der IJnterHan[j des Abendlande.l, lJ1l5.
50. Moeller, Vas Drctte Reich, 244.
51. T 340f. (entry for December 10, 1919). The play was Dce Sterne, by an Austrian,
Hans MUller.
52. References to Copernicus and Galileo abound in Der UnterBanB des Abend/andes;
for one reference directly relevant to the point under discussion, see page 840. See
also Navalis: "Mit Recht widersetzte sich das weise Oberhaupt der Kirche, frechen
Ausbildungen menschlicher Anlagen auf Kosten des heiligen Sinns, und unzeitigen
gefahrlichen Entdeckungen, im Gebiete des Wissens. So wehrle er den kUhnen Den-
kern offentlich zu behaupten. daB die Erde ein unbedeutender Wandelstern sey," in
"Die Christenheit oder Europa," Schreften, edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Sam-
uel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960),3: 508.
53. Ceorge Orwell, Nineteen EiBht}-four (London: Seeker + \\arburg, 1949),115.
54. Ibid., 271f.
55. Spengler, Der Unter/lan,q des Ahelldlande.l, 927.
56. Letter to Ida Boy-Ed of December 5, 1922, Bnrfr 1889-1936,202.
57. See Hugh Ridley'S illuminating comparison of Jlinger and Iknn, "Irrational-
ism, Art, and Violence: Ernst Junger and Cottfried Bcnn," in W.'"cmar (;amany: \I;'.'nters und
Pollties, edited by Alan F. Banee (Edinburgh: S("()ttish Academic Press. 19112). 26-37.
58. Ernst von Salomon, lJie (;eiit/ctelen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 193."\).
59. Spengler, Del' UnterHanH des Ahendlund", 1194.
60. Sontheimer, Antidemokratcsche.1 Denken in der W.'eim,mr Repuhlck, 160.
61. Oswald Spengler, Preujientum und SOZcalCSHlUS (Munich: Beck, 1920),53.
 170 Anlhony Grenville

62. Ibid., 24.

63. Bracher. Die Aujlo.lun,4 dn Welmara Repuhlik, 131.
64. Hans Kohn, The Mmd Q{ (;ermany: The Education ,1' a Nation (New York: Scribner,
1960).336.
65. C U:' 6: 496.
66. Bracher. 1)ie Auflo·.IunlJ der Weiman'r Repuhllk, 99.
67. 'J' 101 (entry for December 4,1918).
61i. Moeller. f)a.l Drille Reich, 1i3.
69. SchLiddekopf, Unke Leute \'on recht.l, 24.
70. M(leller, Das Dntte Reich, 61.
71. Moeller. Rechen.lchufi Uhfr Rufiland, 121.
72. Sont hei mer, Antidemokrati.lches Denk('l/ In der Weimara Repuhlik, 20.
73. Ibid .. 391f.
 Naphta and His Ilk
Jewish Characters in Mann's The Magic Mountain
FRANKA MARQUARDT AND YAHYA ELSAGHE

• • •

Jewish Characters in Mann's Earlier Works

T HOMAS MANN'S REPRESENTATION of the "Jewish question" changed

radically between the periods of his early and late works. Characters
marked as Jewish play substantial roles in almost all the early novels and novel-
las, wherea~ such characters are simply absent from the texts written after
World War II. Jewish characters in The MaBie Mountain occupy a middle posi-
tion between these two extremes. To evaluate the very considerable change
that The MaBlc Mountam represents vis-a-vis the early work. one must tirst look
closely at the way the early stories and novels portray Jewish characters. tak-
ing "early" to mean works composed up to 1905. Here we find Jewish charac-
ters all woven according to the same pattern. appearing consistently as rivals
to "German" characters. and almost as consistently triumphing over them.
But these "Jews" are never named as such. /\s Mann remarked to his brother,
Heinrich, concerning W'iilsunwnbllli. "the words 'Jew' and 'Jewish' are not used.'"
Instead. "the Jew" is revealed in essentially two ways. First, he bears a stereo-
typically JeWish name; second. his external appearance is marked-hut to only
a limited degree-by stereotypically "Jewish" characteristics. fly eschewing
the actual word, the early texts create a quite distinct "appeal" (in Wolfgang
 172 Fral1ka Marquardl and Yahya Eisaghe

lser's sense). encouraging the reader to discriminate against the Jewish riyal
notwithstanding the rival's condition of virtually complete assimilation.!
Mann's early work therefore seems to appeal to certain anti-Semitic
prejudices held by his readers, even though later, in 1940, Mann claimed
as an exile in America that in and around 1900 "antisemitism was rare in
Germany.'" Evidently the younger Mann was not immune to the pressures
of the anti-Semitism that began to take political shape in imperial Germany
in the last third (and especially in the final decade) of the nineteenth century.
This was an anti-Semitism influenced hy a complex interplay of factors, the
most important of which were the rise of racial biology and racial hygiene; the
grant of legal equality to Jewish Germans; their sometimes very high degree
of assimilation and their notable success in commerce and the liheral profes-
sic)l1s; and the intensification of financial insecurity and competition during the
economic depression of the years 1871 to 1896.
Mann's susceptihility to this German anti-Semitism can he readily explained
in terms of his individual psychology. His family, like the Buddenbrooks,
belonged to an economically endangered segment of the German property-
owning bourgeoisie. After the death of his father, the sale of the paternal firm,
and his own failure to qualify for university, Mann was forced to see himself as
someone who had been de classed, who had lost most of his economic and social
capital, and who was not yet able to compensate for his loss by accumulating
cultural or symbolic capital. This psychological explanation of Mann's subtle
expressions of anti-Semitism is also supported ex ne8ativo by the fact that, with his
increasing success as a writer, the number of those expressions decreases sharply.
The nexus between anti-Semitic prejudice and personal frustration can
be observed in absentia, for example, in Royal Hi8hness (1909)-the first of
Mann's novels to be translated into English, in 1916--which includes on the
autobiographical level the story of how Mann's various losses of capital were
restored.' Although the Jew who appears here, Doctor Sammet, is possessed
like earlier characters of a typically "Jewish" name and a stereo typically "Jew-
ish" nose, he is no longer subjected to racist curiosity; instead, through his
"descent," anti-Semitism is specifically thematized in the text, in terms of the
impetus that it supposedly gives to the ambition of those v"ho suffer from
it. And overall Sammet, though not particularly attractive, is nevertheless a
generally sympathetic character.

The Satirization of German Anti-Semitism

Begun in 1913, four years after the completion of Royal HIBhness, and released
in the first of the four or five "golden years" of the Weimar Republic, in 1924,
 Naph/Q and His Ilk 173

The Mawe Mountain was written in a period that encompasses World War I
and a good many years thereafter. In social-historical terms, this places the
novel in an environment that saw a considerable intensification of German
anti-Semitism. The war had been lost, and plausible scapegoats for the defeat
were found in the supposedly Jewish war profiteers and in the legend of the
stab in the back. The economy suffered phases of turbulence and sometimes
sharp recessions. And the hyperinflation drove many people to the edge of
ruin and beyond. In this volatile climate the hatred of Jews flourished e\en
more than it had in the prev,(ar period-something that Mann, now an inter-
nationallv celebrated author, criticized publicly. The virulence of this new
hatred perhaps helps to explain-though not to justify-the exiled Mann's
later near blanket denial of prewar anti-Semitism.
The fact that The Mafllc MOllntain also belongs to the period in which Mann
had abandoned his early expressions of anti-Semitism and established a profile
as a vigorous opponent of Nazi racism becomes immediately evident on read-
ing the novel. Hans Castorp's rival is not a Jew, but "a colonial Dutchman"
(538).; Here the words "Jew" and "Jewish" are indeed used, some fourteen
times in all (including its variously derivative and compounded forms): most
frequently in connection with Leo Naphta, and after that within a context
that expressly thematizes anti-Semitism-in a way vastly different from the
trivializations of Royal Hishness-by making it the object of satire. This satire
is located in the second-to-Iast section of the seventh and final chapter, "The
Great Petulance," which was written at a time when the Nazi racial terror
had reached its first peak. In this section, the anti-Semite Wiedemann and the
Jew Sonnenschein ran "afoul of one another ... like savage beasts" (675), in
a battle caused by Wiedemann's anti-Semitic "taunts," to which the narrator
clearly ascribes a psychological motive. Wiedemann's anti-Semitism appears
as a projection of his ruined health and social position:

A man joined the ranks of Berghof society, a thirty-year-old former busi-

nessman, who had wandered from sanatorium tosanatorium for years now
with his fever. The man was an anti-Semite, on principle and as a matter of
sport. Hisopposition to Jews\vasacheerful obsession--thisacquired hostility
was the pride and content of his life. He had been a businessman, he was one
no more, he was nothing in this world, hut he had remained an anti-Semite.
He was seriously ill, his cough sat heavy on him, and at times it sounded as if
a lung were sneezing, aSingular, high, brief. uncanny sound. Hut he was not a
Jew, and that was the positive thing about him. His name was Wiedemann,
a Christian name-nothing unclean about his name. He subscribed to a
newspaper called The Aryan UHhl, and made speeches, as follows:
 174 Franka Marquard! and Yahya Eisaghe

"] arrive at Sanatorium X in the town ofY. I decide I shall claim a spot
in the common lounging area-and who is lying in the chair on my leftl
Why, Herr Hirschi And on my rightl Herr Wolt1 But of course I departed
immediately," and so forth.
"Serves you right," Hans Castorp thought with distaste.
Wiedcmann had a quick, furtive glance. He truly looked as if a very real
tassel wen: dangling just in front of his nose and he was constantly squint-
ing at it, was unable to see beyond it. The erroneolls belief that possessed
him had become an itch of mistrllst, a restless paranoia that drove him
to pluck out any uncleanness that lay hidden or disguised in his vicinity,
to hold it up to public disgrace. He taunted, he l-ast suspicions, he foamed
at the mouth wherever ht, went. And in short, his days were filled with
exposing to ridic ule everv form of life that did not possess the one merit he
could call his own.
The emotional circumstances we have been describing exacerbated the
man's illness beyond measure; and since he could not fail to encounter
forms of life here that displayed the imperfection of which he, Wiedemann,
was free, those same circumstances led to a dreadful scene that Hans Cas-
torp witnessed and that shall have to serve as one more example of what
we are describing. (674--675)

The object of the narrator's psychological analysis here, and of his and Hans
Castorp's express condemnation, is basically nothing other than---or at least
not Significantly different from-the dynamic of masking and unmasking to
which the related "appeals" in Mann's early work can ultimately be reduced.
This does not justify reading The MaBic Mountain as Mann's reckoning with
his earlier anti-Semitism, but it is nevertheless remarkable that in pragmatic
terms the relevant feature of Wiedemann's "erroneous belief"-his obsessive
desire "to pluck out" the "hidden and disguised" (675) Jews around him-is
actually entirely superfluous:

[or there was another man present-and there was nothing about
him that needed unmasking, the case was clear. The man's name was
Sonnenschein; and since one could not have a filthier name than that,
from Wiedemann's vcry first day here Sonnenschein became the tassel in
front of his nose, at which he squinted furtively and maliciously, batting at
it with his hand, less to push it aside than to start it swinging so that it could
annoy him all the more.
Sonnenschein, likc Wiedemann a businessman born and bred, was also
scriously ill and almost pathologically sensitive. A friendly man, certainly
 Naphca and His 11k 175

not stupid and even rather playful bv nature, he hated Wiedemann for his
taunts and the way he batted that tassel, until it was almost a sil'kness with
him as well. (675)

The Persistence of Early Anti-Semitic 'Appeals"

The paranoia suggested hy identifYing Jews by their names (such as Sonnen-

schein, Hirsch, or Wolf) Of hy their unassimilated physical features (such
as Sonnenschein's "curly hlack hair" [6761) is therefore parodied here, and
elsewhere in the novel it is transposed onto plot mechanisms and articu-
lated in characters' speech. Thus it is not until we arrive at the sixth and
second-to-last chapter, that we find that the most prominent Jew is endO\ved
hoth with the deCidedly non-Germanic and ud honum purtern evocative name
of Leo Naphta ("he giveth goodly words" [Gen. 49:211) and with a distinc-
tively (and no longer merely "somewhat") Jewish appearance-"small,
skinny, ... caustically ... ugly, ... aquiline nose, ... thick lenses" (166). This
quite unamhiguous characterization, which dearly can do as little to pro-
voke anti-Semitic investigations as Sonnenschein's figure and name, is also
reduced in a character's speech to the denominator of "the word": Joachim
ZiemBen categorically rejects not Naphta's ideological positions, but his very
person, by arguing not ad hominem but rather as ad gentem: "And that nose
is Jewish, too-take a good look at him. And only the Semites are such puny
physical specimens" (379).
In sharp contrast to that of the younger comic character of Wiedemann,
Ziem13en's anti-Semitism is relieved by no flashes of irony, nor does it detract
in the least from the comprehensively positive portrayal of Castorp's cousin.
Moreover, the anti-Semitism that here, too, is delegated to a character seems
to be ratified authorially in the extremely unfavorahle portrayal not simply
of Naphta's "caustically ugly" appearance, but especially of his terroristic and
hloodthirsty fanaticism, and implicitly perhaps also in the poetic "justice" of
his particularly grotesque death in a duel. where, as in the brutal struggle
between Sonnenschein and Wiedemann, the Jew cuts the more miserahle
figure.
It is unlikely that the contradiction hetween what hegins (with ZiemBen)
as an acceptable anti-Semitism and becomes (with Wiedemann) a vicious
and ridiculous anti-Semitism can he satisfactorily resolved, for example, hy
reference to the time at which the relevant chapters were written. Instead,
Mann's amhivalence in representing "Jewishness" is best acknmdedged
and interpreted as a symptom of his inability readily and completely to
 l7b Franka Marquardl and Yahya Elsaghe

free himself from the ingrained anti-Semitic notions of his formative years.
Such an interpretation may be supported by a reexamination of some admit-
tedly marginal but in the present context significant characters in the novel.
Hoth in themselves and in their massive overrepresentation (here as pre-
viouslv) when measured against real demographic conditions. these char-
acters could definitely be integrated into the relevant schemata in Mann's
earlv work. Their relationship to characters such as Sonnenschein or "a Jew-
ish woman from Romania with the very plain name of Frau Landauer" (538)
is as contradictory as the relationship between the authorial evaluations of
LiemBen's and of Wiedemann's anti-Semitism; that is. they are characters
who, ~.\ nmmnf and sometimes also through their physical features, their
stated origins, or their personality traits provoke the readers to fill in for
themselves the blank left open in the individual portraits by "the word"
that has been omitted: "Dr. Leo Rlumenkohl from Odessa" (71) or "Profes-
sor Kafka" with treacherous "business acumen" (60); "doltish-eved Hermine
Kleefeld" (66-67). "Fraulein Levi with the ivory complexion" (67), "plump,
freckled Frau litis" (67), "fat Frau Salomon from Amsterdam" (73), "frizzy-
haired Tamara" (321).

Dr. Krokowski

There are also characters who possess a particular feature that may suggest a
Jewish identity, but who nevertheless are described too vaguely to conform
to the identifying dynamic that operates in Mann's early work, and whose
ambivalence is of course as marked as the contradiction between the complete
renunciation of the early anti-Semitic "appeals" and their persistence. These
characters include Fritz Rotbein, "son of a doll-manufacturer" (lOS), or the
inhibited and obseqUiOUS "man from Mannheim with ... had teeth;" Wehsal,
Ferdinand Wehsal," like Sonnenschein "a merchant by trade" (419); and most
particularly. and once again near the center of the constellation of characters,
Dr. Krokowski.
On the one hand, Edhin Krokowski possesses some features from which
the readers might well "pluck out" the assimilated-or, more preCisely, never
entirely assimilable-Jew. He is a doctor, as were a disproportionate num-
ber of Jews at that time. His speCialty is psychoanalysis, a typically "Jewish"
discipline.' His C;erman is grammatically correct, but spoken "in a haritone
\oicE' betraying the drawl of a foreign accent" (16)." The alteritv revealed by
this "foreign accent" locates his family name in Eastern Europe and Poland,
perhaps specifically in the town of" Krokowa," given that the name has an
 Naphta and His Ilk 177

immediatelv transparent meaning and a typicallv Polish ending that had

at the time a demonstrably negative connotation: "there's something fishy
about people with names ending in kowsky," says the protagonist oflrmgard
Keun's 1932 novel The Artificial Silk Girl, which was published only a few years
later than Mann's novel."
On the other hand, the Scandinavian name Edhin is the antithesis of
everything Jewish. Yet as a kind of hyper-Germanic name, it could also reveal
an excessive eagerness to assimilate, and thus betray precisely what it was
designed to conceal. Krokowski's appearance can also be read in this way: he
is "considerably shorter" (16) (lwdeutend kleiner, CKFA, 30: "sI8nlficant~v shorter")
than the two German cousins Castorp and ZiemHen, and has conspicuously
"dark ... eyes, black eyebrows, and a rather long heard" (16). His "floppy" dress
lends something of an "artist's studio to Dr. Krokowski's ... appearance" (16),
which also seems intended to indicate something inauthentic, or assimilated.
These and other characteristics are retIected in the antipathy to Krokowski's
person felt not only hy Castorp and ZiemHen but also by the exceptionally
amiable Lodovico Settemhrini. But those characteristics and this antipathy are
dearly insufficient to create a substantial (Iserian) "appeal" that would neces-
sitate the application of "the word 'Jew, Jewish'" to Krokowski. His curious
lack of definition can probably be accounted for in historical-critical terms.
Krokowski seems to be a kind of throwback to Mann's earlier, gradually dimin-
ishing tendency to expose Jewish figures to readers' anti-Semitic prejudices.
Indeed, Mann transferred the name Edhin Krokowski from his project of a
novella, "A Wretched Man," in which he had intended to vent his own hatred
of individual Jews, namely, Theodor Lessing and Alfred Kerr.
Thus whereas in Krokowski's case the retention of a name attributes a vague,
almost imperceptible Jewish identity to a character, in Naphta's case, he being
a far more crucial character in the novel, a distinctly jewish ancestry is joined
with a new name at a comparatively late stage. Originally, the role of coun-
terpoint to Settembrini was to have been occupied by a pastor called Bunge,
by a figure, that is, who was completely unremarkable in both religious and
ethnic terms. Ultimately, ho\vever, that role came to be occupied by the
most infamous Jew in all of German literature-the most famous being
Lessing's Nathan the Wise-namely, by Leo Naphta. Mann created Naphta
on the model of Georg Lukacs, who is recalled metonymically in the name
of Naphta's landlord, the "ladies' tailor" (352,366, 384) Lukacek, who has "a
heavy Bohemian accent" (385), and whose very first word, Griilsl (GKFA, 591),
immediately reveals an eagerness to assimilate that is unwelcome among the
Swiss, because the word seems "to match neither his name nor appearance"
and creates a "rather false and odd" impression (384).
 178 Franka Marquardt and Yahya Elsaghe

"Someone Else"

The introduction of Castorp's second tutor as a Jew is carefully prepared.

That the "Someone Else" announced in the title of the subchapter is likely
to be a somewhat sinister counterpart to the "enlightened" humanist
Settembrini is immediately suggested by the time of year in which he makes
his first entrance: Leo Naphta appears exactly at "summer solstice" (362), that
is, at precisely the time of year when things are "headed back down into the
dark" (365). In accordance with this cosmic "coincidence," Hans Castorp is
himself engaged in astrological contemplations on the zodiac at the begin-
ning of the chapter in which he makes Naphta's acquaintance. The allusive
significance of Castorp's remark that these "ancient heavenly signs" date
back to the "Chaldeans ... , that ancient tribe of Semitic or Arabic magicians,
highly trained astrologists and diviners" (364), becomes evident when he is
about to refer to this ancient "Semitic" people again but finds himself inter-
rupted. On a walk with his cousin he wants "to return to the Chaldeans, who
had also waged war and conquered Babylon, although they were Semites,
and so practically Jews-when both of them at the same time noticed two
gentlemen just ahead ... ,They realized that it was Lodovico Settembrini at
the side of a stranger" (365-366).
"Magicians," "diviners," the seasonal decrease in daylight, and Castorp's
remark on the "Semites" as "practically Jews": right from the start, there is
something mysterious and magical, dark, and looming, and also "Semitic"
about the "stranger" at Settembrini's side, who soon turns out to be his
fellow lodger at the house of Lukacek, the also seemingly Jewish "ladies'
tailor." Although the suspicion that Naphta might himself be a "Semite" has
already been confirmed by Joachim's comment on his "Jewish" nose (379),
and although we learn of his affiliation with the Jesuit order in the very next
chapter, it is only four chapters and two colloquia later that we find his Jew-
ish origin authorially ratified, thus making Leo Naphta one of the few explicit
Jews in The Magic Mountain.
Immediately preceding what Thomas Mann himself held to be the climax
of the novel, the subchapter "Snow,"1lI the subchapter entitled "Operatio-
nes Spirituales" tells of Naphta's childhood in an Eastern Jewish shtetl-
inCidentally, the only episode in Mann's entire oeuvre, apart from the Joseph
novels, set in a non assimilated Jewish milieu, and the only account of genu-
inely Jewish proceedings within The MaBie Mountain. As a child, Naphta has
two specifically Jewish experiences: as the son of "the village shohet-a pro-
fession very different from that of the Christian hutcher" (432), he becomes
intimately acquainted with Jewish religiOUS practice; and as a victim of an
 Naphra and His Ilk 179

anti-Jewish "pogrom, a panic of rage" (433), he comes into dose contact with
the murderous forms of anti-Semitism.

The Shohet and Pogrom Episode

in "Operationes Spirituales"

This subchapter commences with a detailed description of Naphta's father

and his "godly skills" (432). Flia Naphta is not only a shohet but he is also a pro-
foundly learned, deeply pious, awe-inspiringly "priestly," and yet strangely
"uncanny" "scholar of the Torah," a "brooding introvert" (432-433), whose
abilities go much further than the requirements of his profession-much fur-
ther, in fact, than Jewish practice actually allows. Elia not only knows how to
slaughter animals "according to the Law of Moses and the regulations of the
Talmud" (432) but he is also capable of healing fellow humans with "blood
and spoken charms" (433), which is in fact contrary to Jewish law: along with
almost all other forms of contact with blood, the notion of Jews using it for
the purpose of healing is a common bit of anti-Semitic propaganda, I I yet
strictly prohibited in Judaism itself.12
Young Naphta watches his father attentively as he fulfills his "spiritual
office," seeing him "flourish the large butcher knife and cut deep into the
neck vertebrae of the bound and hobbled, but fully conscious animal," while
Elia's assistant catches "the spurting, steaming blood in basins that filled rap-
idly" (433). The "bloody profession" of the shohet stands in vivid opposition to
the equivalent, but profane "business" of the Christians. Naphta knows "that
Christian butchers were obliged first to stun beasts with the blow of a club or
an axe before they killed them, that this requirement was intended to pre-
vent animals from being cruelly tortured; whereas his father ... proceeded
according to the Law and administered the lethal cut while the creature was
still fully conscious and then let it bleed until it buckled and fell dead" (433).
The contemporary resonance of this indeed "standard representation of ritual
slaughter" in The MaBie Mountain is as evident as the description is faulty. U The
image of an animal that eventually "falls dead" to the ground after the fatal
blow-the German original being hinsank (CKFA, (64)-suggests a particu-
larly slow and painful death, yet at the cost of one of the most important rules
of the trade: for kosher slaughtering, the animal must first be immobilized,
which in Naphta's day usually meant binding it and laying it down, because
the first apparatus to render animals still without binding or repositioning, the
so-called "Weinbergsche Umlegeapparat," or "casting pen," was not con-
structed until 1927.1~ The animal in "Operationes Spirituales," by contrast, is
 180 Franka Marquardt and Yahya Eisaghe

said to be not only "bound," but also "hohbled" (wIesseit und Beknebelt, CKfA,
663); it must have been standing upright in order to he ahle to "fall" dead (hin-
.Iinken). These deviations from the actual process of kosher slaughtering o\)\'i-
ously serve a purpose that the text itself then spells out: an animal "bound"
and "hobbled," sinking slowly and dying painfully renders Elia Naphta's
"office" particularly cruel, "pitiless," and "bloody," especially in comparison
with the "excusably charitable" and "profane" methods of his Christian col-
leagues; it makes it indeed look like a somewhat "perilous" form of "piety"-
"a little uncanny, or at the least, out of the ordinary" (433).
Especially irritating is the idea of an "assistant ... catching" the "spurting,
steaming blood in basins," which has less to do with the process of kosher
slaughtering than it does with traditional images of Jewish ritual murder.
Usually thought of as a parody of the crucifixion, the setting is often quite
similar: scorning Jews are shown holding such "basins" under a naked bleed-
ing child, like mournful follm-vers holding consecrated goblets under the
bleeding wounds ofJesus on the cross. I; However, in Judaism itself, the strict
biblical prohibition of the consumption of blood, as per Genesis 9:4, Leviticus
3: 17, or Deuteronomy 12:23, is regarded as the underlying biblical principle for
the koshering of meat according to the equally important "oral" law collected
in the Talmud. 16 The Code of Maimonides, stemming from the twelfth century
and still today one of the most important rabbinic authorities, explicitly states
that one should not "slaughter in such a way that the blood would fall into a
vessel or into a hollow, since that is the custom of idol worshipers."17 And the
"repugnance felt by Jews for blood caused the extension of the prohibition
even of permitted blood," such as one's own, "if it were collected in vessels."lx
With this distorted account of kosher slaughtering, The MaBie Mountain par-
ticipates in the "fierce political debate in anti-Semitic journals and state parlia-
ments about kosher slaughtering" at the turn of the century,19 a debate that
eventually led to its prohibition in many parts of Germany, particularly after
the rise of the NSDAP in the 1930s. 211 By deviating from actual Jewish prac-
tice, the novel in fact takes sides: in its suggestive depiction of Elia Naphta's
"spiritual office," it encourages notions of kosher slaughtering as a particu-
larly cruel, gruesome, and bloodthirsty procedure founded on archaic forms
of piety that link sanctity \vith blood. And by confronting the "excusably
charitable" methods of the "clumsy goyim" (who stun before they kill in
order to "prevent animals from being cruelly tortured") with the "solemn
pitilessness" of Naphta's father (who thus "honorlsl sacred things" 14331),
the novel draws on one of the main arguments against kosher slaughter-
ing: the inhumanity of killing without prior stunning. 21 While some of the
most ardent opponents in the debate concede that the protection of animals
 Naphra and His Ilk 181

is in fact a highly important value in Judaism,n the Jewish perspective on

kosher slaughtering as "the swiftest and most painless way possible" to kill
an animal is not even touched on in 'J'hp MllHle Mountllln'"' ()uite the opposite:
the phrase "solemn pitilessness" in itself already suggests the contluence of
"cruelty" and "brutality" as essential to this supposedly archaic rituaL with its
religious "solemnity" explicitly "recalling ancient times when the slaughter-
ing of animals had indeed been the duty of priests" (432). The notion of maxi-
mum pain inflicted on the fully conscious animal is thus coupled with one of
the most ancient anti-Jewish insinuations, the Jews' alleged "special relation-
ship to blood"14-even against the [ules of the trade-to form the speCifically
Je\vish \"ersion of the "spiritual operations" announced in the title of the sub-
chapterY On the grounds of these descriptions alone it is little wonder that
for young Naphta "the idea of piety became bound up with cruelty, just as the
sight and smell of spurting blood was bound up in his mind with the idea of
what is holy and spiritual" (433).26
Strangely, the proximity of Mann's Hawed description of Jewish "ritual"
slaughter to tales and images of Jewish "ritual murder" actually surfaces in
the same chapter, when it comes to Naphta's second specifically Jewish experi-
ence. For the "bloody odor" ofElia Naphta's "profession" is intimately related
to his ritual murder:

But this same aura of a somewhat perilous piety, in which the bloody
odor of his profession played its role, had also been his undoing. During a
pogrom, a panic of rage unleashed by the unexplained deaths of two Chris-
tian children, Elia had met a terrible end: he had been found hanging on
the door of his own burning house, crucified to it with nails; and his wife
... had fled the region with her children, ... all of them with arms raised,
crying in loud lamentation. (433---434)

Here, Mann seems to find un just the notion that Elia's pious profeSSion should
have in some way sanctioned the accusations absurdly made against him by
the '''primitive'' masses. Yet it is precisely this connection that the preced-
ing shohet episode evokes: now "the set of associations seems to be complete,"
ohserves Sander Gilman; "ritual slaughter, the phYSiognomy, and the psyche
of the Jew, the Jew who cures through blood, ami the ritual murder accusa-
tion, which ends in the death of the Jew."27 Hence Elia and his whole family
become victims of exactlv the kind of anti-Semitism to which the novel itself
proves subliminally susceptible only few pages earlier. The rupture within
the text seems irreconcilahle: as such, it hears striking resemblance to the epi-
sode with Sonnenschein and Wiedemann in "The Creat Petulance." On the
 182 Franka Marquard! and Yahya Elsaghe

surface of the text, both cases, the pogrom and the parody-both unique in
the works of Thomas Mann-are no doubt designed to condemn all forms of
anti-Semitism in whatever form within the novel; yet the novel's own under-
lying affinities with patterns of anti-Semitism demonstrate how deeply rooted
such images and attitudes actually are in the language, and how they can vio-
late even the best intentions of the author.

Naphta's "Profoundest Instincts"

The fact that the account of Naphta's orthodox Jewish childhood and its
abrupt end are never again referred to in the course of the novel renders
more pressing the question of what their specific function might be. Attempts
to integrate this monolithic episode into the novel as a whole usually read
the .lhohet and pogrom affair as a psychological explanation of Naphta's adult
extremism and terrorism. Readings along these lines do of course seem logi-
cal: lacking explicit connection with the rest of the text, the story of Naphta's
traumatic childhood seems most easily understood as a retrospective motiva-
tion for the ruthless radicalism he has already demonstrated in the two "col-
loqUies" we witness before we hear of his pitiful past. 2H However, such readings
of "Operationes Spirituales" overlook the extremes to which the narrator goes
precisely in order to undermine this form of psychological interpretation,
which he indeed appears to have anticipated. The first thing we learn about
young Naphta after his father's death and his mother Rachel's flight with her
children concerns his explicitly "inherited" physical and mental constitu-
tion~omething bestowed on him long before he was subjected to any trau-
matization: "From his mother he had acquired incipient lung disease; from
his father, however, in addition to a frail physique, he had inherited an excep-
tional mind-intellectual gifts that very early on were joined with haughti-
ness, vaunting ambition, and an aching desire for more elegant surroundings,
a passionate need to move beyond the world of his origins" (434).
In the following account of Naphta's development from a "wretched young
Jewish lad" (435) to a brilliant Jesuit scholar, not a word is lost on his traumatic
past or on the reasons for his homelessl1ess. Instead, to characterize the young
convert, the narrator persistently resorts to the terminology of "inheritance,
"nature," and "instinct": It is not Naphta's fate but his "manner" (Wesen, CKPA,
666) that attracts "the attention of the district rabbi," and it is not his ambition
as a newcomer, but his "love for formal knowledge ... and his passion for logiC"
(formalel rl Tneh, (;KFA. 666) that has to be satisfied with language learning, logie,
and mathematics (434). "Like many gifted Jevis" (and explicitly not on account
 Naphw and His Ilk 183

of his individual experience), Naphta is said to be "bv instinct both a revolution-

ary and an aristocrat" (436), \vhich blends well with his "bent for paradox" (435;
allBemeinel rl Hanf( zur Paradoxie, GKFA, 667). His "homage" to the Catholic Church
is apparently not only "genuine" but also "deep rooting within his nature"
(436; aus seines Wesens MItte, GKFA, 669), that is, once again something innate,
not acquired. Even before his conversion, the "clever subtlety" (437; Kiuf(heit und
SpIlzfindiBkeit, CKFA, 671) of the Jesuits "meets" Naphta's "own natural tenden-
cies" (437; personiIche AnlaBen, GKFA, 671), just as the "discipline and elegance,
the hushed serenity ami intellectual challenge" speak "to Lco's profoundest
instincts" (436-437; "schmeichelte ... Leos tiefsten lnstinkten, GKFA, 670). Neither
pogrom nor persecution, neither loss of his father and later of his whole family
nor the ambitions of a convert thirsting to assimilate are ever even alluded to
as motivations for Naphta's extremist character and attitudes.
On closer scrutiny, we see that far more important for Naphta than the
experience of persecution, murder, and flight are the perSistently recurring
allusions to his father's "spiritual office"; indeed, sensing the relationship
between cruelty and "ritual" piety is the crucial experience of Naphta's early
childhood. 2Y That it is solely th/.I combination that remains of Naphta's ortho-
dox Jewish upbringing becomes all the more conspicuous as we observe the
adult convert showing no further, even indirect, traces of Jewish religiOUS
belief or tradition in his many debates with Settembrini. On the contrary, his
authorities are the Church Fathers, notably St. Augustine (see 390), who was
certainly no particular friend of the Jews;.lO he fervently defends the Inqui-
sition (see 389-391), an institution that brought great suffering to the Jews,
notably in Spain, with which the Jesuit obviously feels a special kinship;}1 and
he proclaims the precedence of the Church over the State and the sovereignty
of the pope (see 394-395), although in history, the secular state proved to be a
slightly better guarantor of the welfare of the Jews than did the church or the
vast majority of the popes. J2 The only way in which his Jewish childhood does
seem to have left its lasting mark on Naphta belongs to the implicit answer to a
question Castorp poses to himself in his lengthy reflection on the "improper"
Jesuit (457): "how did Naphta actually achieve such bloody, unconditional
certainty?" (458). The trail of blood that accompanies Naphta throughout the
novel whenever he "cross[es] intellectual swords" with Settembrini "to the
point of drawing blood" (400) provides a singular hu t constant reminder of
Elia Naphta's bloody spiritual operations and the specific association it estab-
lishes for his eldest son. Shortly after the Jesuit has made his first appear-
ance, bu t long before we learn of his Jewish origins, we hear him speak in one
breath of blood and religious belief, violence and piety, cruelty and holiness.
Naphta defends "every sort of torture, every bit of bloody justice" so long
 184 Franka Marquardt and Yahya Eisaghe

as it stems from "a belief in the next world" (389): he justifies the "Church's
bloody deeds" by claiming that the zeal of the godly cannot, by definition,
be pacifistic," and he proclaims "the necessity of terror" as preparation for
the "kingdom come" (395). In the "great colloquy on health and sickness" in
the second half of "Ope rationes Spirituales," Naphta and Settembrini come to
discuss some key \vords from the first half of the chapter, namely, their con-
troversial concepts of "sympathy" and "pity" (442: Mitleid, GKFA, 679). Here it
becomes evident where "solemn pitilessness" (feleriI,he Mlllelds/osIHkeit, GKFA,
664) is likely to lead; for Naphta, medieval preoccupation with the "human
body," far from empathy or pity, is nothing but "religious affirmation of
the bodv's sunken state" (445), just as an "impenitent soul" having "violated
the law" justifies "temporary merciless procedures" (I'OriiherHehende MII/eidll'SIH-
keit, CKFA, 691) in the form of torture (450). "Piety" and "pain" merge in his
unconditional approval of corporal punishment, particularly in the choice
of his religious-notably catholicized-example: "Saint Elizabeth had been
diSciplined by her father confessor ... until he drew blood, 'transporting her
soul,' as the legend put it, 'to the third choir of angels'" (447). While he ridi-
cules the "Philanthropist's reluctance to shed blood" (452), Naphta's admira-
tion for Ignatius of Loyola seems again to be rooted in blood, when he holds
the founder of the Jesuit order to be "so devout and strict that it drew blood"
(458). Finally, the confluence of "piety" and "cruelty" of the shohet episode
reverberates almost literally in Naphta's plea for "holy cruelty" as essential to
any form of "higher education" (448), and then again in the words with which
he challenges Settembrini to the duel: 'The Absolute, the holy terror these
times require, can arise only out of the most radical skepticism, out of moral
chaos .... You shall hear from me" (688).

The Jewish Jesuit

The narrative mechanics of the Jewish Jesuit can be seen with particular clar-
ity in what Castorp calls Naphta's military "axiom" (440): "Cursed be the man
who holds back his sword from shedding blood" (395, see 4(2). In fact, the
words Naphta clothes in the authoritative verdict of Pope "Gregory himself"
(395) turn out to be a biblical quotation from the Prophet Jeremiah 48: 10,
which Mann found ascribed to Pope Gregory in one of his main sources for
the character of Naphta-Heinrich von Eicken's Geschichte und .\~vstem der MII-
telalter/iehen Weltanschauuns, first published in 1887.\\ Jesuit-Catholic in disguise,
but biblical-Jewish at the core, the constellation repeats itself. Naphta's first
name, Leo-the name taken by the pope who reigned for the better part of
 NapfJra and His Jlk 185

Naphta's fictional lifetime 14-appears particularly Catholic at first sight, but

in fact it bears a more than superficial resemblance to his "real" name of Leib.
as he \vas knmvn in his childhood (432). Lein is in fact a common yiddish kin-
nUl. that is, secular name recalling a sign or symbol, for the "holv" name of

Juda,15 whose symbol in turn is the lion, as per Jacob's blessing of his sons in
Genesis 49:9. Hence, Leib in Yiddish and Leo in Latin point to Juda, the collec-
tive name for the Jews par excellence, especially in anti-Semitic propaganda.
Similarly, the title of the chapter, which includes the on Iy Jewish "operations"
in the novel as a whole, "translates," or perhaps hides its at least partly Jewish
contents behind a vaguely Jesuit term: having itself no theological meaning,
"()perationes Spirituales" at least conveys reminiscences of Lmola's "Exercitia
spiritualia," one of the fundamental pillars of Jesuit life. 10 And while Naphta's
"Jewish ness" is never again expliCitly referred to, Naphta as a Jesuit is subject
to several further discussions and reflections (see 398-404. 448, 457-460, 477,
497-5(4).
In every respect, Naphta is a twofold character. With a birthplace exactly
"on the border" and appearing precisely \vhen day and night are split in two,
Naphta also carries the somatic traits of rupture, "sharpness" and "corrosive-
ness." He is "caustically, one could almost say corrOSively, ugly .... Somehow
everything about him was caustic: the aquiline nose dominating his face; the
small, pursed mouth; ... even his studied silence, from which it was clear
that his words would be caustic and logical" (366). Not only his silence but
also his voice is literally "broken," sounding "like a piece of cracked porcelain
when you rap it with a knuckle" (366-367). With splitting "sharpness" thus
inscribed, the Jewish Jesuit must obViously find "all monism" to be "boring"
(368). Naphta is hence not only Settembrini's sinister counterpart, he is the
"nihilistic onslaught on all Settembrini's values,"17 who warns the cousins
of the fundamental disorder and chaos that the Jewish Jesuit produces: "His
form is logic, but his nature is confusion" (399), his "kingdom is lust" (404;
Wollust, GKFA, 620).
While Settembrini in particular, and other elements of the novel in general,
seek to establish an atmosphere of secrecy, clandestine activity, and dubious
conspiracy around Naphta's affiliation with the Somtu"jfslI, there is something
even more "secret" to this "improper" Jesuit, something so clandestine that it
is never discussed by the characters of the novel and is revealed to the reader
on only one, strangely belated occasion: namel\" his Jewishness, which appears
to be even more secret than his Jesuit half, and even more "furtive" than
the "nice unpretentious fa,,-ade" at Lukacek's house, behind which Naphta
"indulges ... his priestly penchant for silk" (402). The emphasis that the nar-
rator places on what precedes Leo Naphta's education and conversion-his
 186 Franka Marquardt and Yahya Elsaghe

"nature," his "instincts," his "natural tendencies" (434-437)---would suggest

that Naphta is not so much a "product" of the Jesuits as that he had an affin-
ity for their teachings to begin with. In this respect, too. the son takes after
his father. "Just as things had once gone between Elia Naphta and his rabbi"
(434), with whom he "discussed" the Scripture and "frequently argued" (433),
there are certain tensions between young Leib and his first Jewish teacher, the
"district rabbi": "teacher and student did not get along, religious and philo-
sophical friction increased. grew worse and worse. The honest old scholar suf-
fered every abuse imaginable as a result of young Leo's intellectual obstinacy,
captiousness, scepticism, contrariness, and cutting dialectical logic. Moreover,
l.eo's restive mind and sophistry [SpilzjindiHkell und ilflStiws Wiihlertum, GKFA, 6661
soon showed a rebellious streak" (434). The fact that the Jesuits are impressed
with Naphta's "caustic, tormented spirituality," his "maliCiously elegant mode
of thought," his "bent for paradox," and the fact that the "diSCipline and ele-
gance" of their school speak to "Leo's profoundest instincts" (435--437), is no
coincidence. As a '''Juda-Jesuit' par excellence,",\ll Leib-Leo Naphta is in fact the
embodiment of a long and infamous tradition of amalgamating Jews and Jesu-
its, of which he is the literal embodiment. One tertIUm comparationls supposedly
relating the two is the boundary-transgressing, supernational cosmopolitan-
ism they were thought to have in common. And it is precisely this aspect of
the Jesuits' school that allegedly levels Naphta's Jewishness, while actually
reinforcing its essentially natural status: "The cosmopolitanism ... prevented
his racial traits from being noticed. There were other young foreigners-
Portuguese South Americans, who looked more 'Jewish' than he, and so the
very term lost meaning. The Ethiopian prince who had been admitted at the
same time as Naphta was a very elegant-looking Moor with woolly hair" (437).
Even in this form of alleged negation, both Naphta's specific "racial traits"
(Rassen8eprii8e, GKFA, 671) and the understood hierarchy ofthe human "races"
are reinstalled. Jews obViously rank lower than the Romanics, but-clearly in
the German original-well above the Moors. while the presence of the Ethio-
pian prince reveals that "race" is significantly more important than "class":
"Oer athiopische Prinz ... war sogar ein wolliger Mohrentyp, dabel aber sehr
vornehm" (GKFA. 671. our emphasis).w
It is not only because of their supposedly supranational loyalties. which of
course imply their national disloyalty and unreliability, that Jews and Jesuits
were often drawn together to form a twin threat; there is also the fact that
the founder of the order not only accepted Jewish converts but even named
a convert as his successor, while other Catholic institutions followed the fun-
damentally racist criteria of ilmpil'w. that is. of "pure," non-Jewish blood.'o Not
long after Loyola'S death the order "instituted a racial standard first to the
 Naphw and His Ilk 187

holding of office and later even to membership,"j, hut the hybrid stereotype
was already firmly established; so firmly, in fact, that the article on "Jews" in
the Jesulten-LeXlkon published in 1934 is nothing but a lengthy refutation of the
"charge" of the order's particular friendliness toward the Jews. 42 Thus could
fears of a Jewish world conspiracy be eaSily coupled with an allegedly analo-
gous threat from the Jesuits, as can be seen in (lttomar Beta's 1875 treatise
on what he calls "Juda-Jesuitismus," written at the height of the Cerman
Kulturkampt' and dedicated to Bismarck himself: "Jesuitism and Judaism have
at least the same origins and the same aim: the domination of the world
(WIeltherrschafi). "j\
The same confluence emerges in rumors of Jesuit influence in the Dreyfus
Affair,'j and above all in that preeminent document of fear, the anti-Semitic
Protocols ot'the Elders 4 Zion. The Protocols "reveal the menace of Zionism 'which
has the task of uniting all the Jews in the whole world in one union-a union
which is more closely knit and more dangerous than the Jesuits."'" Already
in 1844, Karl Marx used the phrase JiidlSChe[r] Jesullismus in passing in his essay
Zur Judenfraw, where the expression stands for a special combination of ego-
tism and cleverness to be found in the Talmud.'" August Rohling, professor at
the Faculty of Theology in Prague, aims in the same direction and goes a step
further; in his Talmud-Jude of 1876, he declares that the symbiosis of Jesuits and
Jews is nothing but a cunning trick of "the Jew" who is always behind "the
Jesuit;" one should therefore "stick to the truth" and not call "jesuit" what
is in fact essentially "Jewish."i7 Here, the parameters of the hybrid stereotype
become evident. On the one hand, anti-Semitism and anti-Jesuitism are con-
flated in the notion of snide intellectualism of both Jews and Jesuits, of their
outright hypocrisy and their boundless egotism, especially in terms of money.
Like the Jews, the Jesuits, too, were charged for black magic and conspiracy
with the devil,'8 dreaded as exceSSively powerful,'Y regarded as usurers despite
their vow of poverty,50 and portrayed as dark and ugly, sometimes even with
a particularly large nose.'1 On the other hand, there is a distinct difference
between these two merging halves; if the Jesuits were thought to pose a suf-
ficient threat in themselves, still, when linked to the Jews, they were seen not
as the essence of the threat but as threatening "Jews" in disgUise.
Accordingly, Ottomar Beta believes that the Jesuits as the advance guard
of the Jews are supposed to "distract" the peoples' attention in order to allow
the Jews to infiltrate and profit from their unawareness. 52 On almost every
page of his anti-Semitic propaganda, Erich Ludendorff, the ex-member of the
Cerman High Command in World War I, claims that "the Jew" is the sinis-
ter force behind "the Jesuit." Like Beta, Ludendorff declares that the popes of
the fuunding rentury of the order were "infested" and entirely "degenerated"
 188 Franka Marquardl and Yahya Elsaghe

by "Jewish hlood"; he takes the Jesuit-friendly Pope Paul 1lI to he a crvpto-

Jew;,·1 and sees Jesuit morality, from the beginning of the order's existence, as
essentially Jewish." Hence, Leih-Leo Naphta-the "unhalanced" hyhrid with
two unmerged halves of which one forms the outer appearance while the
other constitutes the clandestine core---again stands in accord with a speCific
anti-Semitic discourse of his day. Its logic is of course quite simple: "The Jew"
takes precedence over "the Jesuit," just as someone's race takes precedence over
someone's calling.

The "Improper" Jesuit

Interestingly, in the narration of Naphta's childhood, the Jesuit half proves

to he as "improper" as the Jewish "operations" are faulty. Even as an incor-
rect memher of the order in the literal sense-Naphta has only completed his
"novitiate and takel n J his first vows" (401 )-a Jesuit, in the eyes of hoth the
Swiss and the Cerman jurisdiction in the first decade of the tvventieth century,
would not have heen allowed to serve, as Naphta does (401), as a teacher at a
school in Davos. On the grounds of the so-called jesuitenartikel (Art. 51 of the
Swiss Bundesverfassun8 of 1874, which was in force until 1973), any occupation in
"church or school" for members of the order, even novices, was forbidden. 55
The same would apply even if the Fridericianum-which was founded in 1878
as a German Schulsanatorium and which later became a Deutsche Auslandschule,56
where Naphta allegedly teaches Latin-had been subject to German employ-
ment policies, for the eqUivalent German jesuiten8esetz of almost the same
wording was proclaimed in 1872 and not repealed until after Naphta's suicide. 57
Furthermore, after the seventeenth century, Jesuits of Jewish descent are not
only "rare,".l8 but actually impossible; after the fifth Jesuit "General Congrega-
tion" in ]593--1594, Jews were excluded from the order, and it was explicitly
decreed that not even the General could grant dispensation. 59 It was not until
1946 "that the Society ofJesus finally eliminated ... its centuries' old exclusion
of converso descendants from membership candidacy."60 Also the notion that
the order "takes care of its own" in a rich and luxurious way, as Castorp sup-
poses it does for Naphta (402), is of course a widespread cliche, but far removed
from Jesuit reality (GKFA, 289).61 And for Naphta not to relate to the true
origins one of the key words of anti-Jesuit propaganda, Kadal'er8ehorsam (GKFA,
688), is at least irritating. Instead of associating the term with the order's rule
of ohedience---"perinde ac si cadaver essent,"!.2 that is, of obedience as if one
were a corpse-Naphta plays on its literal meaning, on the actual "flogging"
of the dead (see 448; die ZiichtlHun8 des Klldarers, GKfA, 688). rinally, challenging
Settemhrini to a duel and then committing suicide clearly violates the rules
 Naphta and His Ilk 189

of the order, even if those acts are common to the anti-Jesuit polemics of the
nineteenth century. Johann Ellendorf claims that "nothing" whatsoever was
impossible to the intellectual twists of the Jesuits who could, if they pleased,
outwit all "laws of Cod, the Church and the State" and hence "not only accept
a challenge but even challenge themselves."'"
The remarkahle deficiencies in the portraits of Naphta as Jew and Jesuit
appear to serve a similar purpose. The distorted description ofElia Naphta's "rit-
ual office" as cruel, hloodthirsty, and gruesome, and the errors in the account
of Leo Naphta's Jesuitism around 1900 intensify the impression that Naphta is
a potential, and in the end a real, threat to those with whom he comes into
contact. For even as he is morihund. he is more influential if he is thought of
to have pupils, and he appears as even more hypocritical and usurious if he
is thought to be henefiting from an invisihle force that generously supports
him. While his defense of corporal punishment is already dreadful enough in
its fascist implications~Naphta welcomes the approaching end of the "liberal
individualism of the era of bourgeois humanism" and the rise of "newer, less
nambv-pamby social concepts, ideas of submission and obedience, of bridles
and bonds ... not to be had without holy cruelty" (448)-the fact that he
does not to even balk at a play on the pOSSibility of desecrating a corpse cata-
pults him well beyond all social, not to mention religiOUS, acceptance. M The
notion of a duel between two fatally ill opponents is itself both macabre and
comical, but Naphta's clear readiness to murder and/or to die makes him seem
all the more dangerous. With hindSight, we see him as entirely unpredictable
and entirely untamable, even by the strict rules of his order or of the biblical
commandments.

Conclusion: Leib-Leo Naphta

and Anti-Semitism

The anti-Semitic undercurrent of the character of Naphta is manifold. The

portrayal of his father's "godly skills" enjoins a fiercely led dehate of its time
and articulates. in its distortions, a distinct point of view. The narrator, who
suggests that the Jesuits appeal to young Leib-and he to them~on the
grounds of something "natural" and "essential," something "innate" and
inherited, and thus the result neither of trauma or conversion. is clearly
drawing on the tradition of an alleged Judaeo-Jesuitical confluence. Yet at
Naphta's core is not his Jesuitical education or morality, but rather what is
left of his Jewishness (as depicted in a suhchapter whose theme then curi-
ously and totallv disappears from the no\el). The character of Leib-Leo
Naphta corresponds to fears of the "Juda-Jesuit"; although these elements
 190 Franka Marquard[ and Yafrya Efsagfre

may be individually dreadful, when they are merged, it is "the Jew" in "the
Jesuit" who poses the greater threat.
Although never again explicitly evoked, the Jewishness of Naphta's child-
hood does remain present in the text in the equation of "holiness" and "cru-
elty," of "piety" and "pitilessness," and of religious "solemnity" and the drawing
of blood. Naphta's affinity to the Jesuit order and his affiliation with it in its
symptomatically distorted depiction both conceals and intensifies the original
threat that he poses. In and only in "()perationes Spirituales" is its abstract
form established as the link between "blood," religious "belief," and brutality,
and as something rooted in Naphta's "origins" (432), that is, in his childhood
experience of orthodox Jewish practice.
It is thus perhaps no wonder that the enemy besieged in Hans Castorp's
dream of"Snow"-the suhchapter immediately following "()pcrationes Spir-
ituales"-bears striking resemblance to the Jewish Jesuit Leib-Leo Naphta. At
first, "temptation" is something only "whispered from one particular corner,
the promptings of a creature in Spanish black with a snow-white, pleated ruff;
and bound up with the idea and image were all sorts of gloomy, caustically
Jesuitical, and misanthropic notions, the torture and corporal punishment
that were such abominations to Herr Settembrini, who ... could only appear
ridiculous in his opposition to them" (477). But in the decisive passage of Cas-
torp's dream monologue, death himself, to whom Castorp vows not to let his
thoughts succumb, appears suspiciously reminiscent of Naphta:

I will grant death no dominion over my thoughts .... He wears the ceremo-
nial ruff of what has been .... Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is
only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust .
. . . I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that
if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that
leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. (487)

In its ultimately abstract form, the character of Naphta thus hecomes the
embodiment of all anti-Semitic projections that constitute, in whatever form
or disguise, "the image of the Jew in the aftermath of Enlightenment," as
Ruth Kli.iger puts it, the image of the "deadly Jew."·)

Notes

I. Thumas Mann, letter to Heinrich Mann, Decemher 5,1905, Bnefe L 1889-1913,

vol. 21 of (;roll1' kommentlerte Frmlkjilrter /Ius(iube (GKFA), edited lw Thomas Sprecher, Hans
R. Yaget, and Cornelia [krnini (Frankfurt am Main: I'ischer, 2002), 3.'\5.
 Naphra and His Ilk 191

2. See Wolfgang her, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose hc-
tion," in Aspects of Narrative.· Selected Papm from the fnIJli.lh In.lt/lute, edited by I. Hillis Miller
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 1-45, here 21.
3. Thomas Mann, letter to Lulla Adler, October 25, 1940, in Hans Wysling, ed.,
Thomas Mann: Dichter Uber ihre Dichtunwn (Munich: Heimeran, 1975-1981),603.
4. Thomas Mann, Royal Hillhness. translated by A. Cecil Curtis (London: Sedgwick
& Jackson, 1916).
5. Page relerences to The Mallie Mountain, translated by lohn E. Woods (New York:
Knopf, 1995), and from the standan.l (;crman edition, Der ZauherberIJ, vol. 5.1 o[CKl'A, edited
by Michael Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: fischer, 20(2), are given in the main text.
6. On the significance of "tooth decay" (Zahnverderhms) in the discourse of "racial
theory" (Rassenkunde); the German term seems to be documented here for the first time;
see Carl Rose, "Beitrage zur europaischen Rassenkunde und die Beziehung zwischen
Rasse und Zahnverderbnis," Archlv fiir Ras.lfn- und Gesellsrhajt.lbiololJie 2 (1905): 689-789.
7. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Yom BeIJlnn des Ersten WeltkrielJ.I bl.l zur GriindunB der beiden
deut.lchen Staaten: 1914-1949 (Munich: Beck, 2(03), 501.
8. As to the racial significance of the "baritone voice," see Marc A. Weiner, Richard
Wallner and the Anll-Semltic imaBlnatio (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 177.
9. Irmgard Keun, Oas kunstseidene Madchen (l19321 Berlin: List, 1992), 169 (our translation).
10. In an interview with Bernard Guillemin on October 30, 1925, Thomas Mann
calls the fact that The Magic Mountain does not culminate in and end with the subchap-
ter "Snow" a "compositional mistake" (our translation) of his novel; see Thomas
Mann, Selbstkommentare. "Der Zauberberg," edited by Hans Wysling (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1993),79.
11. See Stefan Rohrbacher and Michael Schmidt, Judenbilder· Kulturgeschichte antijii-
discher My then und antisemitischer Vorurteile (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991),280-281;
Rainer Erb, "Der 'Ritualmord'," in Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und My then, edited by Julius H.
Schoeps and Joachim SchlOr (Munich: Piper, 1995),74-79.
12. See Jiidisches Lexlkon. fin enzvklopiidisches Halldbuch jiidischen Wissens in vier Handen, edited
by Ismar Elbogen, Ceorg Herlitz, Josef Meisl, Awn Sandler, Max Solowietschik. Felix
A. Theilhaber, Robert Welsch, and Max Wiener (Berlin: JUdischer Verlag, 1927; reprint,
Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 19112) s.\". "Blut." The fact that the prohibition of
using blood for the purpose of healing is explicitly mentioned in this 1927 handbook is
in itself most likely to be a reflex of the many versions of the hlood-Iibel that Jews were
charged with at that time and in the past.
13. Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka. the JeWIsh PatIent (New York: Routledge, 1995), 142.
Gilman gives a detailed account of the many debates on kosher slaughtering through-
out Europe around the turn of the century; ibid., 1.)4-156.
14. See Israel Meir ].evinger, "Die jUdische Schlachtmethode--das Schachten,"
in Schiichten: ReliBwnsfreiheit und Tiers,hutz. edited by Richard Potz, Brigitte Schinkele, and
Wolfgang Wieshaider (Freistadt: Pliichl; Egling: Kovar, 2(01), 1-15, here 5. Precisely
 1<)2 Fral1ka Marquardl al1d Yahya Eisaghe

this "immobility" rule was cited by opponents of kosher slaughtering as particularh

cruel. See ibid., 4;JiidlSChes Lexlkon, s.\'. "schachten."
15. For easily accessible reproductions of such images from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, see Judisches Museum der Stadt Wien. cd .. Llle M'lcht der Ilrlder. Anti-
sem,t'.sc/,e \/orurtellr und Mvthrn (Vienna: Picus, IIJ95), tm (lig. 44a), 67 (fig. 44b), S9 (lig. lO). YI
(lig. IS); Rohrbacher and Schmidt,Judrnhilder, 20, 277; Ecb. "Der 'Ritualmurd,'" 76. Still in
the nineteenth century, the so-called Schiilhtschnitt, the stroke applied by a shohet, and the
significant lack of blood of the alleged victims were regarded as proof of "ritual murder."
See Erb, "Der 'Ritualmord:" 75.
16. That the "oral law" is just as binding as the written Torah needs to be stressed
in this context, since one of the arguments in the debates against kosher slaughtering
around 1900 was that there was no religious foundation for it in Judaism, since there
is no biblical commandment demanding it. See, for example, Carl Hauwerker, nus "tu-
rile Schiichten der Tsrueliten im Lrchte der W'islenschaJi (Kaiserslautern: i\ ugust Gotthold, ISS2),
20-38. From the Je"'ish standpoint see, for example, Hirsch Hildcsheimcr, Das Schiichten:
Erne vorliiufiw Auseinandmetzuni/ (Herlin: Cutenberg, 1906). A reference to the "oral" law
on correct slaughtering within the Torah itself is ~een in Deuteronomy 12:2 I, where
such rules are referred to but not laid down, hence pointing to the "other," that is, the
oral law beside the Torah.
17. Moses Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides (Mlshneh Torah), edited by Leon
Nemoy, book 5, The Book of Holiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 19(5),266.
18. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16 vols. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), s.v. "blood." The "con-
sumption" of blood is allowed if the blood comes from a wound in one's own mouth
or a nosebleed.
19. Michael Brenner, "Beyond Naphta: Thomas Mann's Jews and German-Jewish
Writing," in A Companion to Thomas Mann's "The MaBic Mountain," edited by Stephen D.
Dowden (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 141-157, here 143. See Gilman, Franz
Kafka, the Jewish Patient, 134.
20. For example, Bavaria in 1930, Braunschweig in 1931, Oldenburg, Anhalt,
and Thuringen in 1932. See Richard Potz, "Eine historische Einleitung," in Schiichten
Reli8ion~freiheit und Tierschutz. edited by Richard Potz, Brigitte Schinkele, and Wolfgang
Wieshaider (heistadt: Plochl; Egling: Kovar, 2(01), 27-4S, here 39; Sibylle Horanyi,
J)as Schiichtverbot zwischen Tiefl(hutz und Religionsfreiheit: Eine (;iiterahwiii/unH und interdiszipliniire
Darstel/una von Losuni/.lan.liitzen (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 2(04), 234. For a detailed
analysiS of the anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic undercurrent of the debates on kosher
slaughtering in past and present, see Pascal Krauthammer, Dal Schiichtverbot in der Schweiz
1854-2000.' DIe SchiichtfraW zlfl.lchen TIer.lchutz. Politlk und Fremdenfeindllchke1t (Zurich: Schul-
thess Juristische Medien, 20(0).
2 I. See Hauwerker, Da.1 ntuel/e Schiichten der Israeliten, 13-20; see also Potz, "Eine histo-
rische Finleitllng," .'l4-·.'lS.
 Naphw and His Ilk 193

22. See, for example, Bauwerker, /)us riluelle S(hii(hten da /srud/kll, 2 \.

23. EncyclopaedwJudu/cu, S.\'. "Shehitah"; Horanyi, Pus S,'hikhfl'rr/w :wIS(hen lierschut:
und Reili/lOns(reihelf, \04.
24. Gilman, Fran: Kulka. Ihe.ln'!l.lh Putlenl, 112.
25. The connection between the title oi the chapter and the Jewish "office" it
depicts becomes more evident in John Wood's English translation than in the (;erman
original, where the adjective sp,nluell is not actually used. In his version, Woods has
Elia introduced as someone holding "a spiritual office" (432), and he also translates
the W,slii/f Operatlonen that l\iaphta spends his time with at the Jesuits' school literalh
as "perullOnes spinluules, thus spelling out what the German version only alludes to (437;
GKFA,671).
26. The emphasis on the olfactorv dimension of hlood ior the Jews is apparentlv
not uniljue. [n his Gesdllchle des Antisemitlsmus, I.eon I'oliakov mentions an anti-Semitic
hrochure hy Wassilij Rosanow circulating in Russia in 1914 that carried the title "Das
geruchsmallige und yom Tastsinn ausgehende Verhaltnis der )uden zum Blut." See
Leon Poliakov, Gesdll(hte des Antl.lemllismus, vol. 7, Zwis(hen Asslmrlation und '}iidischer Weltver-
schwi;runi/" (Frankfurt am Main: l\thenaum, 1(88), 16\.
27. Cilman, Fran: Kajka. the JeWIsh Patient, 143.
28. See, for example, Jacques Darmaun, Thomus Mann, Deutschland und d,e Juden
(TUbingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 152; Herbert Lehnert, "Leo Naphta und sein Autor,"
Orbis Lmerarum 37 (1982): 49-71, here 63; Judith Marcus-Tar, Thomas Mann und Georg Lukacs
(Cologne: B6hlau, 1982),71-72.
29. See Ingo Seidler, "Zauberberg und StraJkolonie: Zum Selbstmord zweier reaktion-
arer Absolutisten," Germanisch-romamsche Monatsschrift N.F 19 (1%9): 94-103, here 100.
30. On St. Augustine's ambivalent relationship to the Jews, see Heinz Schreck-
enberg, Die chnstlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literansches und historisches Umfeld (1.-11
Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982),352-362.
31. See Leon Poliakov, Geschichte des Antisemitismus, vol. 4, Die Marranen 1m Schatten der
TnquIsition (Worms: Georg Haintz, 1981),43-64. Interestingly, Poliakov sees St. Augus-
tine as the most important theological forefather of the Inquisition. See ihid., 43.
32. Ruth KlUger detects a disturbing regularity in what she calls an "irony" within
modern German literature in the fact that Jews in literature often appear in contexts in
which the Enlightenment is ridiculed and irrationalism celehrated, while historically
Jews generally endorsed the age and ideas of Enlightenment that promoted their social
and political equality. See Ruth KlUger, "Die Leiche unterm Tisch: JUdische Gestalten
aus der deutschen Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts," in Katastrophen: Oherdeutsche
Literatur, edited by Ruth Kluger (Gi'ittingen: Wallstein, 19(4),83-105, here 85.
33. See Heinrich von Eil-ken, Geschichte und System Mlttelulterllcher Weltans(hauunB (Stutt-
gart: Cotta, 1887), 338. Thomas Mann read von Eicken with great interest in April
1919, at precisely the time when he recommenced work on The Mallie MountaIn after an
 194 Franka Marquardt and Yahya Elsaghe

interruption of four years; see Thomas Mann, Taaebucher 1(j18-1921, edited hy Peter de
Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1(79),200-214.
34. Leo XIII was pope from 1878 to 1903.
35. See Benzion C. Kaganoff, A Didionurl' o!Jewlsh Names and Their Iilstor), (New York:
Schocken, 1977)' 24-25, 51, 171; Margit Frank, Das Blld des juden In der deutschen Literatur im
Wandel der ZeltBeschichte Studien zu jiidischen Namen und Gestalten In deutschsprachlBen Romanen und
Erziihlunwn 1918-1945 (Freiburg: Burg, 1987), 145 n. \00. Dietz Bering shows that I.eo is
also a name chosen under anti-Semitic pressure in exchange for typical JeWish names
such as Louis and I.ev/win; see Dietz Bering, Ver Name als Stigma: Antisemltismus im deutschen
Alltag 1812-1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 191\7),239-240.
36. See Ludwig Koch, Jesurten-Lexlkon.· Die Gesellschaji jesu elnst und JeW (Paderborn:
Bonifacius, 1(34), s.v. "Exerzitien."
.17. Anthony Grenville, '·'Linke Leute von reehts.' Thomas Mann's Naphta and the
Ideological Contluence of Radical Right and Radical left in the Early Years of the Wei-
mar Republic," Deutsche Vlcrteljahrsschriji 59 (191\5): 651--675, here 674. Reprinted in the
present volume, pp. 143- J7().
38. Eda Sagarra, "Intertextualitat als Zeitkommentar: Theodor Fontanc, Gustav
Freytag und Thomas Mann oder: Juden und Jesuiten," in Theodar Fontane und Thomas
Mann. Die Vartrage des Internationalen Kolloqulums in LUbeck 1997, edited by Eckhard Heftrich,
Helmuth Ni.irnberger, Thomas Sprecher, and Ruprecht Wimmer (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1998),25-47, here 28.
39. The subtle proximity of the "lower" races, the Jews and the Moors, is suggested
here in the adjective "woolly." Not only the wollhaari8f Tamara (GKFA, 319; Wood writes
"frizzy-haired," 206) in The Ma8ic Mountain itself, but especially the epitheton constans of
Thomas Mann's last Jewess Kunigunde Rosenstiel in Doktor Faustus establishes "wool-
liness" as a somatic leitmotif first and foremost for Jews within Mann's ceuvre. See
Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend, trans-
lated by John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1998),313,479,495.
40. See Poliakov, Geschichte des Antisemitismus, 4: 82-85.
41. Jerome Friedman, "Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Ref-
ormation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism," Sixteenth Centur),
journal 18.1 (1987): 3-30, here 23.
42. See Koch,JesUlten-Lexikon, s.v. "Juden."
43. Ottomar Beta, Darwin. Deutschland und d,e .Juden oder der .Juda~/esuit1smus: Dreiund-
drelpiH Thesen nebst einer Nachschriji uher einen verfjfssenen Factor der Volksll'irthschaji (Berlin: Otto
Dreyer, 1875), 16; our translation.
44. See Koch,Jesuiten-Lexikon, s.v. "Dreyfusamire."
45. Norman Cohn, Warrant for GenOCIde.· The Myth of the .JeWIsh World Conspiracy and the
Protoco/., of the flder.l of Zion (London: Serif, 1(96),74; see Christopher Hollis, Diejesuiten
Siihne des Heillwn Vute,.s (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campc-, 1970),214-215.
 Naphw and His Ilk 195

46. Karl Marx, Zur Judenfra,qr (I)erlin: I{owohlt, IYIY), 46.

47. August I{ohling, Talmud~Jude (Leipzig: Theodor Fritsch, IXYI), 115 (our translation).
4X. Hanns Bachthold-Stauhli, ed., Handw,irterhuch des deutschen AhrrHlauhens (Berlin: de
Cruytef. 1Y27--IY42), s.v. "Jesuiten."
49. See Johann Heinrich Ledle[, (;ropes l'Oilstiindi,qrs Unlversal-Lex/kan ailer W!issenschaften
und Kilnste . . (Leipzig: Zedler, 1732-1754; reprint Craz: Akademische Druck- und Ver-
lagsanstalt, IY93-1999), s.v. "Jesuiten."
50. See Johann Ellendorf, Die Morul und l'oiltIk derJesuiten nach den Schn/ien vorzUH"cher
theoloBischer Autoren dieses Ordens (Darmstadt: Jeske, lX40), 121 124.
51. One of the best examples in text and image is perhaps Wilhelm Busch's "Pater hlu-
cius." in Die ililderHesch"'hten: HlstorI5ch-krltlsche CesamtausHahe. vol. 2, Reijezeit. edited hy Herwig
Curatzsch and Hans Joachim Neyer (Hannover: SchlUtersche, 20(2), columns 416--458.
52. Otto mar Heta, Darwin. Deutschlund und die Juden oder der Juda)esuitismus, 16-·17; our
translation.
53. Erich Ludendorff and Mathildl' Ludendorff, Vas (;eheimnis der Jeluitenmoral und
ihr Ende (Munich: Ludendorffs Volkswarte, 1929),5; our translation. See Beta, Darwin,
Deutschland und dle./uden oder derJuda-Jesuit,smus, 17.
54. See Ludendorff and Ludendorff, Das ceheimnis der Jesuitenmoral und ihr tnde, 171-172.
55. See Werner K1igi, cutachten zum Jesuiten- und Klosterartike! der BundesverfassunfJ (Bern:
Eidg. Drucksachen- und Materialzentrale, 1973),99-102. K1igi demonstrates how the
article was generally interpreted in a rather rigid sense at first, that is, in Naphta's time,
while a more tolerant exegeSiS only gained ground in the decades immediately preced-
ing his commentary of 1973.
56. Georg Laule, 80Jahre ETldericzanum: Aus dem Leben der Auslandschule zu Davos (Eschwege:
RoBbach, 1958),7-9. While the status as SchulsanatoTlum meant sending the pupils to sit
their final exams in German schools, an Auslandschule was entitled to hold the examina-
tions itself. See also Thomas Sprecher, Davos im 'ZauberberB': Thomas Manns Roman und sein
Schaup/atz (Zurich: Verlag Neue ZUrcher Zeitung, 1996),76.
57. On the grounds of §3 of the German JesuitenResetz of July 1872 empowering the
Bundesrat to execute the law, it was decreed that the Svmtas -'esa was to he forbidden
and any position of its members in "church and school" prohihited; K;igi. Gutachten zum
Jesaiten- und Klosterartlkel der Bundes,'erfilS.,unH, 63.
58. See Koch,Jesuiten-Lexlkon, s.\". "Juden."
59. See Decreta, Canones, Censurae et Pruetepta ConWfHutionlllll (;,'neral/uIII SocietatisJesu ... , vol.
I: 354-356: "ne ullus posthac in Societatem admittatur, 'lui ex Hebraeorum ... genere
descend at ... ; sic scilicet, ut nullus omninn Superior, ac Ill' ipse qUidem Praepositus
Ceneralis, in eo dispensare possit." We are indebted to Paul Uberholzer SJ, Head of the
Jesuits' .Archive and Lihrary of the Swiss Province, Zurich, for his valuahle help.
60. Friedman, "Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reforma-
tion," 23.
 196 Franka Marquardt and Yahya Elsaghe

(, I. See Christopher Hollis. f)iejesuiten: Sijhne de.< HerliHcn Vater.1 (Hamburg: Hoffmann
und Campe. 1970).221-222.
62. Sancti llinatir de Loyola Constitutwnes Societatis Jesu. vol. ."\. Textus Latinus, 176.
63. Johann Ellendorf. Dre Moral und Polark der/esurten noch derr .\'chrijten \'orziitllicher lireolo-
tlrscher Autoren dIms Ordell.l (Rome: Bargo S. Spiritu, 19:18).89; our translation.
04. The "literary descendant of the Jewish Jesuit Leo Naphta" is Chaim Breisacher
in Thomas Mann's [)oktor Fuu.<tus. who is not only just as "ugly" and of the same Jewish
origin as Naphta but also like him the embodiment of the greatest threat within the
novel. which in his case is Cermany's "devilish" pact with fascism for which Naphta
here already seems to pave the way. See Ruth KlUger. "Jewish Characters in Thomas
Mann's Fiction." in Horizonte Fes/'Ichriji fiir Herbert Lehnert. edited by Hannelore Mundt.
Egon Schwarz. and William J. Lillyman (TUbingen: Niemeyer, 1990). 161-172. here 104.
65. Klliger. "Die l.eicht unterm Tisch." X4 (our translation).

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 Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg
DORRIT COHN

• • •

I N "STRAN DSPAZIE RGA NG ," the section that introduces the last and longest
chapter of Der Zauberber8, the narrator indulges his inclination to comment
on his story at greater length than at any other textual moment. Beginning
with the question "Kann man die Zeit erzahlen, diese selhst. als solche. an
und fur sich:" it launches into aesthetic reflections on the comparative role
of time in the arts, notably in the two time-hound sister arts of music and
narration. It is hy way of articulating their difference that the narrator arrives
at a conceptual distinction that a narratologically informed reader will find
surprisingly familiar:

Das Zeitelement der Musik ist nur einl's: l'in Ausschnitt ml'nschlicher
Erdenzeit. in den sie sich ergieBt ". Die Frzahlul1g dagegen hat zweierlei
Zeit: ihre eigene erstens, die musikalisch-reale. die ihren Ablauf. ilue Ers-
cheinung bedingt; zweitens aber die ihres Inhalts. die pefspektivisch ist. und
zwar in so verschiedcncm Masse. dass die imagin;ire Zeit def Erzahlung fast.
ja \'iillig mit ihrcr musikalischen zusammenfallen. sich aber auch stern cn-
weit \'on ihr entfernen kann.'

20[
 202 Dorril Colin

What the narrator here pinpoints as the variable relationship between a nar-
rative's "musikalisch-reale Zeit" and its "imaginare Leit"-or, as it is alterna-
tin'lv called in the following sentence. "inhaltlkhe Zeit"·-dearly corresponds
to the differential ratio between the t""o temporal levels that modern theo-
rists lahe I Erziihlzeit and erziihlte Zeit in German (after C; linther M tiller), temps
du rrllt and tfmps de I 'hlstolre in hench (after Gerard Cenette), discourse time
and story time in English (after Seymour Chatman). Mann's novel, in short,
seems to be well on its way to offering us a poetics of narrative time, more
prelisl'l; a treatise on narrative speed. 2
This impression continues as the text proceeds to describe the two opposite
extremes of this clastic relationship. First the maximal dilation (or expansion)
of discourse time over story time:

L:ine Frz;ihlung ... , deren inhaltliche 7eitspanne flinf Minuten hetrlige,

kiinnte ihrerscits vcrmogc aullerordentlicher Gewissenhaftigkcit in der
ErfUllung dieser fUnf Minutcn. das Tausendfachc dauern-·und dahei sehr
kurzweilig sein, obgleich sic im Verhaltnis zu ihrer imaginaren Zeit sehr
langweilig ware. (749)

Next the maximal contraction (or compression) of discourse time over story
time: "Andererseits ist moglkh, dass die inhaltliche Zeit der Erzahlung deren
eigene Dauer verktirzungsweise ins Ungemessene tibersteigt" (749). To this
point, the narrator's remarks-their picturesque formulations notwithstand-
ing--sound every bit as objective and universally valid as those found in a typ-
ical narratological manual.> As this sentence describing the second alternative
continues, however, it veers in a direction that leaves the sober technicalities
of narrative speed far behind:

-wir sagen "verklirzungsweise," urn auf ein illusionares, oder, ganz deu-
tlich zu sprechen, ein krankhaftes Element hinzudeuten, das hier offen bar ein-
schlagig ist: solem namlich dieses Falls die Erzahlung sich eines hermetlschen
Z£luhers LInd einer zeitlichen iJberpcrspektive bedient, die an gewisse anormale
und deutlich ins Uhminnliche weisendc Faile der wirklichen Erfahrung erin-
nem. (749. my emphases)

Meta-discursively-"wir sagen. , , urn ... hinzudeuten"-the narrator here

charges the standard narrative device he has just identified with the peculiar
!llorbidity that magnetizes the space of the novel we are reading, the magic
space featured in its title.
On general grounds, this loaded description of summary narration is highly
questionable. It is hard to see how and why even the most ahbreviating account
 Telling Timelessness in Orr Zaubcrbcrg 203

of past events--"veni, vidi, vincil"-~llOulo in any way signify the diseased or

the uncanny. Certainly no such meanings atteno summary passages in nov-
els-say, the famous "il voyagea" beginning of a chapter in L'Education senti-
mentale CHi) that Proust so greatlv admired, or "the foreshortened image" by
which Balzac, according to Henry James, represents "the lapse of time ...
more subtly than by a blank page, or a row of stars."~
Clearly, the ominous accents placed on time-compressing narration in
"Strandspaziergang" must be understood as emphatically pro Jama. ben as this
sentence alerts the reader to the time-compressing stretch of the discourse that
lies ahead in chapter 7-by far the most time-compressing chapter of Ller Zauher-
herg'-it attributes meaning to this discourse in terms that directly allude to the
story in progress. Its diagnosis of pathology and intimation of the supernatural
in the practice of summary narration correspond intimately to the dangerous
extremity of Hans Castorp's adventure in Davos, touching the thematic nerve of
the novel. The phrase "eines hermetischen Laubers," in particular, threads into
the leitmotivic verbal weave that hints at the occult significance of his time on
the mountain; the identical phrase will recur in the narrator's gobal retrospec-
tion just beti.)re this time comes to a stop: "diesem hermetischen Zauber, ... der
das Grundabenteuer seiner Seele gewesen, dasjenige, worin aile alchimistischen
Abenteuer dieses schlichten Stoffes sich abgespielt hatten" (984).
These loud echoes of the protagonist's experience in the sentence describ-
ing the technique of summary narration prepare us for the instance of "real
experiences"-"Falle der wirklichen Erfahrung"-that now follows. Prepare
us, that is, for the evocation of a documented example of temporal pathol-
ogy that corresponds to Hans's arrested sense of time on the mountain. This
"case" is described as follows:

Man besitzt Aufzeichnungen von Opiumrauchem. die hekunden, dass

der Betaubte wah rend der kurzen Zeit seiner EntrUckung Traume
durchlebte, deren zeitlicher lImfang sieh auf zehn. auf drcillig und selbst
auf sechzig Jahre helief oder sogar die (;renzc allcr ITIcnschlichen /.citerfah-
rungsmoglichkeit zurtickliess,-Tralll11C also. dncll imagill~irt'f /,eitraum
ihre eigene Dauer urn ein Gewaltigcs liherstieg lIlld ill dCllclleillc unglallh-
liche Verktirzung des Zeiterlebnisses herrsdlle, die Vorsteliullgen sich von
solcher Geschwindigkeit drangten als w;irc, wie ein Has(-hischesser sich
ausdrtickt, aus dem Him des Berauschtl'1l "etwas hinweggenol11men gewe-
sen wie die Feder einer verdorhenen Uhr." (749)

There is no reason to doubt that Mann refers to genuine reports of opium

addicts here: he could have drawn this information from any number of
sources, including de Quincey and Baudelaire. 6 But it must appear highly
 204 Dorril Cohn

doubtful to a careful reader that these opium-induced experiences are in any

sense analogous to the "hermetischen Lauber" that characterizes narrative
summary in the preceding sentence. What happens to time in these experi-
ences is in fact the exact opposite of what happens to time on the magic moun-
tain and in Del' Zauberberg.
I am aware that this conclusion is apt to meet with dishelief. Thomas Mann
is, after all, known for his faultless command over the thematic structure of
his novels, and of this novel in particular. "I doubt whether any book in the
world's literature is so perfectly integrated," writes Hermann Weigand, one
of its earliest and most astute critics; "despite the vastness of the pattern, con-
scious control is manifest down to the most infinitesimal details of its com-
position."; Such hyperholic statements have been reiterated many times. In
face of this consensus, my first task is to demonstrate the alleged incongru-
ence of the opium-dream analogy with some care.' My further task is to show
that, though the textual moment to which it applies may well appear as a
mere "infinitesimal detail," it in fact has implicatiOns that reach beyond its
immediate context. The fact that the textual moment in question concerns
time-the axial concept of this Zeltroman-may begin to suggest that it opens
to wider and weightier issues that concern Mann's novel as a whole.

II

The malfunctioning of the analogy between opium dreams and Hans's magic-
mountain experience comes into view as soon as we cut through the massive
rhetorical complications of the sentence that proposes it. Its incongruence
can be explained most succinctly if we distinguish between "clock time" and
"experienced time."9 For the opium dreamer, a short span of clock time corre-
sponds to a large amount of experienced time; experienced time moves faster
than clock time; clock time appears expanded, at the limit to infinity. For
Hans approaching the end of his fictional life, by contrast, a long span of clock
time increaSingly corresponds to a small amount of experienced time; expe-
rienced time moves slower than clock time; clock time appears contracted,
at the limit to zero.1O This liminal point to\vard which experienced time on
the mountain moves is of course frequently alluded to in the text itself, both
directly-"ein stehendes Jetzt" (258, 757), "eine ausdehnungslose Gegenwart"
(258), "Reduzierung auf Null" (479)-and by way of its principal corollary:
the sense of absolute sameness it creates between past and present-"das
Damals wiederholt sich bestandig im Jetzt" (479), "Konfusion ... des 'Noch'
und des 'Schon wieder'" (752), "schwindlige Identitaten" (754), "schwindlige
 Telling Timelessness in Oer Zauberberg 205

Einerleiheit" (755). Each of these varied terms contradicts the implied parallel
between Hans's experience and the opium eater's, confirming that it intro-
duces a logical lapse into the text.
The contradiction is even more palpahly highlighted if \\e compare the
conceit of the opium eater with other real-life experiences to which Hans's
foreshortened time sense is compared. All of them refer to \vaking and sleep-
ing states of absolute monotony. Two of these explicitly call to mind situations
that the reader is likely to have known in his own life. The first occurs in
the section named "Ewigkeitssuppe und pllitzliche Klarheit," which precedes
"Strandspaziergang" by some five hundred pages. Here the narrator calls on
the reader to remember how the sense of time erodes when one is sick in bed:
"Man bringt dir die Mittagssuppe, wie man sie dir gestern hrachte und sie dir
morgen bringen wird ... dir schwindelt, ... die Leitformen verschwimmen
dir, rinnen ineinander, und was sich als wahre Form des Seins dir enthtOllt, ist
eine ausdehnungslose Gegenwart, in welcher man dir ewig die Suppe bringt."
(258), This apostrophe places the reader right into Hans's story, right into the
sick-bed to which he has been confined for three weeks of eventless routine.
As it turns out, this episode anticipates on a small scale the potentially lifelong
vacancy that eventually invades Hans's mountain existence, and for which
the narrator also offers the different but no less familiar simile in memory
of which "Strandspaziergang" itself is named: the time-drowning activity
of beachcombing that the narrator likewise evokes for the reader by direct
address: "Ou gehst und gehst ... du bist der Zeit und sie ist dir abhanden
gekommen ... dort ist wie hier, vorhin wie jetzt und dann; in ungemessener
Monotonie des Raumes ertrinkt die Zeit" (756).
But in "Strandspaziergang" the narrator also presents a number of less
familiar (though equally cogent) analogues for Hans's experience of time,
cases whose extremity verges on the legendary: the huried miners who,
unlike the over-estimating opium eaters, vastly under-estimate the time they
spent in obscurity and isolation: "Sie [die Zeitl war ihnen auf weniger als
ein Drittel ihres ohjektiven Umfanges zusammengeschrumpft." (751); the
preadolescent girl who awakens as a mature woman after thirteen years of
deathlike unconsciousness (753); the animal whose oVl'fextended hibernation
has earned it the suggestive name of "Siehenschlafer" (753), also a sobriquet
for human oversleepers that, not surprisingly. will be directly applied to Hans
himself when he wakes from his seven years of suspended animation (985,
988)." Though biologically affected hy time (since their body ages during
sleep) all these dormant creatures are as unaware of its passage as the dead.
And indeed it is to death that the narrator ultimately compares Hans's state:
with the effect of time reduced to the corpse like growth of his hair and nails,
 200 Dorrit Cohn

it seems to him that no time has passed between his periodic visits to the
barber-"er saB eigentlich immer don"-where he experiences "das wirbelige
Nicht-mehr-unterscheiden von 'Noch' und 'Wieder: deren Vermischung und
Verwischung das zeitlose Immer und Ewig ergibt" (753). Even more strikingly
than the serveral suggestiVt:' analogues, this description of Hans's years of sus-
pension in a state of death-in-Iife drives home the contrast with the opium
sleeper's lifelong and lifelike night of oneiric adventures.
We must not fail to note, however, that at its conclusion the conceit of the
opium dream is referred back to the technical concerns that initially launched
the simile: "Ahnlich also wie diese Lastertraume vermag die Erzahlung mit
der Zeit ZLI Werke ZLI gehen, ahnlich vermag sie sic zu behandeln" (749). It
now appears that it is the narrator, rather than his protagonist, who is the
opium dreamer's potential analogue. II This understanding is presently con-
tirmed when the narrator expresses the hope that his readers-"die urn uns
Versammelten," as he calls them-have by now more or less lost track of
clock time, "weil die allgemeine Teilnahme an dem Erleben unsen's Heiden
natlirlich in unserem Interesse Iiegt" (750). We are even told that a "Zeltro-
man"-the genre that is being exemplified (or created?) by Hans's story-depends
on its treating the time element in such a manner as to reflect its protagonist's
experience: "Das gehort zu seinem Roman, einem Zeitroman,---so-und
auch wieder so genommen" (750)./3
If we now look back on the analogy of the opium dream from the vantage
point of these metanarrative statements, the narrator's thinking mistake is
even more clearly highlighted. Imagine for a moment what would happen to
the speed of a narrative that rendered the dreams of an opium-eater from his
own perspective: its discourse time (corresponding to the time experienced by
the dreamer) would be hugely dilated to a liminal infinity, not radically con-
tracted to a liminal zero. Fictional works that actually follow this temporal
structure are not hard to tind (though none that I know actually thematize
drug-induced dreams). They range from sections of realist novels that embed
their protagonist's dreams, visions, or memories to stream-of-consciousness
novels like Ulysses and Mrs. Oalloway, where the passage of a single day swells
the text to hundreds of pages. The narrator of Der Zauberbers, as it happens, has
himself provided an instance of this sort only some fifty pages prior to "Strand-
spaziergang": Hans's dream in "Schnee" and the afterthoughts it inspires take
a full ten pages to recount; where-upon he discovers to his surprise that only
ten minutes have passed while his brain produced "so vieles an Cllicks- und
Schreckensbildern und waghalsigen Cedanken" (687). To be sure, this is an
entirely untypical, indeed a unique, moment in Hans's experience of time:
on the range of possible narrative speeds, its richly tilled minutes inscribe the
 Telling Timelessness ill Der Zauberberg 207

extreme that lies at the pole opposite the vacuous years narrated in chapter 7,
when time seems to slip away at "sinful" speed.
His similistic error notwithstanding, ho\vever, the narrator's stated inten-
tion for the chapter introduced by "Strandspaziergang" is clear: his discourse
will contract Hans's remainingyears on the mountain in a manner that renects
the effects its hermetic magic has worked in his protagonist's consciousness.
Does the narrator (is he able to) carry through this program: Is it not, in eiiect,
contradicted by the very fact (and at the very moment) of its statement? As.1
am about to show, the narrative situation of Per ZauherhefJl, notably of its final
chapter, is far more problematical than its metanarrative rhetoric leads us to
believe. In taking up this question, I will momentarily bracket the misleading
image of the opium dream, but with a view to returning to it with a possible
explanation gathered on the way.

III

Mode and speed are of course closely, if complexly, interrelated features of

narrative form. The crucial correlation for our purposes is a negative one:
story time cannot be summarily contracted in the figurally focalized mode. li
Since the enabling condition for summary narration is the overview (or gath-
ering-together, Raifuns) of an extended stretch of time, it inevitably brings the
narrator's voice audibly to the fore, distancing it from the figural experience.
A character's experience, in other words, cannot be conveyed from the char-
acter's own vantage point (i.e., in the figurally focalized mode) unless narra-
tive speed slows to close-paced scenic presentation.
In light of this correlative norm, the narrator's programatic statement in
"Strandspaziergang" must appear nothing short of paradoxical. On the one
hand, he asserts that he wants the reader to share Hans's mountain experi-
ence, including his atrophied sense of time, "weil die allgemeine Teilnahme
an dem Erleben unseres Heiden nattirlich in unserem Interesse liegt" (750).
He even insists that the creation of this empathic reader experience is imposed
by the fictional genre that determines (and is determined by) Hans's story:
"Das gehort zu seinem Roman, einem Zeitroman" (750). ()n the other hand,
he asserts that the only way to treat-beltandeln-time in this story is by dras-
tic summary: by narrating the passing years at break-neck speed, his narra-
tive will resort to the second potential technique for maximally distancing
discourse time from story time, the distanced temporal perspective-mtli-
cite Oberperspektive-that liminally foreshortens discourse time to zero. His
stated intention, in short, is at once to focalize his narration figurally and to
 .lO8 Dorrie Cohn

summarize it authoriallv. without any apparent awareness of the contradic-

tion involved. How does he (and does he) resolve this problematic purpose in
the final chapter of the novel?
The answer is, perhaps predictably. bv compromise. Structurally speaking.
chapter 7-its metanarrative introit aside-in fact conforms to the perfectly
standard practice of alternating summary and scene that one finds in nov-
els prior to the advent of the stream-of-consciousness mode. Each of its ten
titled sections follows this pattern. Each presents at least one and at most two
scenes. including such extended and memorable occasions as the noctural
bacchanalia presided over by Mynheer Peeperkorn (776--795), the excursion
to the waterfall (1:;51-863), the occultist session that culminates in the appear-
ance of Joachim's ghost (931-947), and the final dispute and duel between
Naphta and Settembrini (962-980). All these events. as well as the many scenes
adeu\ (with Ua\'dia, Peeperkorn, Behrens, Settembrini) are by and large figur-
allv focalized, filtered through and accompanied by Hans's perceptions and
reflections.
The summaries are less extended and less memorable. They are mostly
found at the beginning of sections, where they often refer to the large quan-
tities of time that surround, or pass between, the scenically narrated events:
"Mynheer Peeperkorn, ein alterer Hollander, war eine Zeitlang Gast des Hauses
'Berghof' (758); "Wie so die Jahrchen wechselten, begann etwas umzugehen im
Hause 'Berghof'" (947); "die Zeit ... hatte in ihrer schleichend untersichtlichen,
geheimen und dennoch betriebsamen Art fortgefahren, Veranderungen zu
zeitigen" (982). Once the narrator pOintedly refers back to the distinction he
had drawn in "Strandspaziergang," even as he metanarratively anticipates
the end of his discourse: "Einmal endigt selbst diese Geschichte; sie hat die
langste Zeit gedauert, oder vielmehr: Ihre inhaltliche Zeit ist derart ins Rol-
len gekommen, dass kein Halten mehr ist, dass auch ihre musikalische zur
Neige geht" (868). And another time, he reveals his awareness that time must
be slowed to scenic speed if narration is to survive at all: "Oass nicht alles auf
einmal da ist, bleibt als Bedingung des Lebens und der Erzahlung zu achten ...
Ceben wir der Zeit wenigstens soviel Ehre, wie das Wesen unserer Geschichte
uns noch erlauht! Vie! ist es ohnehin nicht mehr damit, es geht nachgerade
holterdiepolter! oder, wenn das zu larmend gesagt ist, es geht husch, husch!"
(796). These narratorial allusions to time's swift passage are on occasion explic-
itlv contrasted to Hans's temporal ohlivion: "So verging eine Zeit,--es waren
Wochen, wohl drei bis vier, von uns aus geschatzt, da wir uns auf Hans Castorps
Unci! und messenden Sinn unmi.)glich verlassen ki.)nnen" (769). But even
\vhen the narrator concedes that Hans is himself intermittently aware of his
own loss of time. he does so in a duratively summary manner that surveys this
 Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg 20<)

awareness from a distance: "Er sah durchaus Unheimliches. Bi"isartiges. und er

wuBte \\as er sah: Das Leben ohne Zeit. das sorg- und hotfnungslose Leben. das
Leben als stagnierend betriebsame Liederlichkeit. das tote Lehen" (872).
In sum, what is told from Hans's perspective in this chapter (tigurally
focalized) is nothing more or less than his experience of the scenes that slow the
increasingly rapid passage of time, that forestall its complete disappearance, its
drowning in monotonous repetition. Whereas the progressive acceleration of
time itself is told solely from the narrator's perspective (authorially focalized),
in summaries that he accompanies with his alarmed judgmental comments.
The actual structure of chapter 7, in other words, confirms the narratological
proposition stated at the beginning of this section: the negative relationship
between figural focalization and summary. The narrator's explicit, metanar-
ratively stated, intention remains unfulfilled; the reader cannot be made to
share Hans's experience of evolving timelessness; nor could the narrator tell
us about this experience if he did not himself keep his distance from it. Since
this, the essential happening of the protagonist's mountain life, extends over
years of story time, it cannot be figurally "shown," it can only be authorially
"told."
In this connection I would suggest that the "Donnerschlag" ending that
rescues Hans Castorp from his bewitchment on the mountain also serves
to rescue the narrator of the novel from a vexing predicament. Describing
his work in progress in a letter dated August 22, 1914 (less than three weeks
after the declaration of war), Mann writes: "in die Verkommenheit meines
'Zauberberges' soil der Krieg von 1914 als Losung hereinbrechen, das stand fest
von dem Augenblick an, wo es los ging."'5 This suggests that Mann already
knew at this early point of its genesis that the war-an event unrelated to
mountain magic-was the only "way out" of this novel, that no other ending
was discursively viable. But this does not mean that no other ending is con-
ceivable: in terms of sheer story, Hans's fictional life up to August 1914 can eas-
ily, and quite realistically, be imagined to continue on and on, war or no war,
until he dies of old age at the Berghot. This future could even be said to con-
tinue and complete the thematic unity of the story line more logically than
Hans's voluntary service and probable death in the service uf the fatherland."
What such an ending would have looked like, the shape it would have
imposed on the narrator's discourse, is adumhrated by the four pages of text
(981-984) that initiate the section entitled "Donnerschlag" and that lead up
to the phrase "Da erdrohnte-." The Naphta/Settemhrini duel that concludes
the preceding section on a note of high drama is the last event, as well as the
last figurally focalized scene prior to Hans's departure. But the seven-year
story time still has quite a way to go after the duel, a full eighteen months
 210 Dorri[ Cohn

to be precise. 17 The four pages in question thus easily figure as the most fore-
shortened time span in the novel. Here the discourse takes the form of pure
summary; and it has nothing more involving to summarize than the pubes-
cent growth of Teddy, a Berghof patient barely known to us. Hans's reac-
tion to this happening-"Hans CastoTp hatte es nicht gesehen, abeT er sah
es" (983)-is the closest these pages come to figural focalization, the closest
they come to interrupting the discursive monotone that alone can render
absoute monotony. Hans, we are told among other summary matters, no
longer wears his wrist watch and no longer owns a calendar, "dem Strand-
spaziergange, dem stehenden Immer-und-Ewig zu Ehren" (984). The sentence
immediately prior to "Da erdrohnte-" reads: "So lag er, und so lief wieder
einma!, im Hochsommer, der Zeit seiner Ankunft, zum siebentenmal-er
wuBte es nicht-das Jahr in sich selbst" (984).

IV

In this light one may well wonder whether the question that opens "Strand-
spaziergang"-"Kann man die Zeit erzahlen, diese selbst, als solche, an und
fur siehl" (748)--should not have read: "Kann man die Zeit/osi8keit erzahlen,
diese selbst, als solche, an und fur siehl" For that is ultimately the Zauberber8
narrator's problematic design. And it is surely worth noting that the discourse
by which the narrator conveys the mountingly rapid passage of time in chapter
7 curiously resembles the anti-story he produces to prove that time cannot be
told: "Eine Erzahlung, die ginge: 'Die Zeit verfloss, sie verrann, es stromte die
Zeit' und so immer fort,-das konnte gesunden Sinnes wohl niemand eine
Erzahlung nennen" (748). The same could surely be said of the "story" told
solely from the narrator's vantage point in the chapter that follows, the story
made up of such statements as "die Jahrchen wechselten ... ," "die Zeit ... hatte
fortgefahren, Veranderungen zu zeitigen," "So verging eine Zeit ... " "so lief
wieder einmal ... das Jahr in sich selbst." What differentiates both these anti-
stories from real stories is clearly that they deal summarily with an abstract
concept ( time), not with a human being's (a character's) moment-to-moment
experience, the kind of experience that can be figurally focalized in the telling.
This brings us to the concept of Zeltroman, introduced by the narrator in the
paragraph immediately follOWing the opium-dream simile. Here we are told,

daB die Zeit, die das Element der Erzahlung ist, auch zu Ihrem Gegenstande
werden kann; und wenn es zuviel gesagt ware, man konne "die Zeit
erzahlen," so ist doch, von der Zeit erzahlen zu wollen, otlenbar kein ganz so
 Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg 211

absurdes Beginnen ... ,-so dass denn also dem Namen des "Zeitromans"
ein eigentlimlich traumerischer Doppelsinn zukllmmen ki-innte. (749-750)

It is only toward the end of the vexingly digressive passage that now follows
that the difference between "die Zeit erzahlen" and "von der Leit erzahlen"
becomes dear: the crucial factor that transforms the former into the latter is
the presence of a figural medium, a fictional figure through whom the passage
of time can be focalized as a lived experience--an Erleben that the reader can be
made to share. IS It is this "allgemeine Teilnahme an dem Erleben unseres HeI-
den" that I take to be the antecedent of the "Das" in the final sentence of the
paragraph: "Das gehort zu seinem Roman, einem Zeitroman,-so-und auch
wieder so genommen" (750). On this hasis, the ambiguity-"Doppelsinn"-of
the novel before us would indeed he dreamlike-eiwntiimhch triiumerisch: it would
involve the kind of contradictory wishes we find in dreams, wishes that are
impossible to reconcile: in this instance, the wish to tell the accelerating speed
of time's passage on the magic mountain by means of figural focalization.
It is interesting to note that the term Zeltroman is explained rather differ-
ently in the paratextual Einfiihruns in den Zauberbers (written some fifteen years
after the novel's publication). Here also there is mention of a double meaning,
but without allusion to dreams:

Er [Der ZaubergergJ ist ein Zeitroman in doppeltem Sinn: einmal historisch,

indem er das innere Bild einer Epoche, der europaischen Vorkriegszeit, zu
entwerfen versucht, dann aber, weil die reine Zeit selbst sein Gegenstand
ist, den er nicht nur als die Erfahrung seines Heiden, sondern auch in und
durch sich selbst behandelt. 19

The first of these meanings-conspicuously absent from the "Strandspazier-

gang" passage-is of course the Standard one found under "Zeltroman" in lit-
erary handbooks. The second meaning hegins by denoting the same general
idea as the intratextual passage, even using the same term, (;ewnstanJ, to signify
time as the thematic crux of the novel. The following dausc---"den er nicht
nur als die Erfahrung seines HeIden, sondern auch in und durch sich selbst
behandelt"-may at this point still be understood as a variation on the prob-
lematical [Joppelslnn attributed to this type of novel in "Strandspaziergang."
But the next sentence makes it dear that the "handling" referred to here is
not summary authorial narration, but an altogether different device:

Das Huch ist selbst das, wovon es erzahlt; denn indem es die hermctische
Verzauberung seines jungen HeIden ins Leitlose schildert, strebt es selbst
durch seine ki.instlerischen Mittel die Aufhebung der Zeit an durch den
 212 Dorrit Cohn

Versuch, der musikalisch-ideellen Gesamtwelt, die es umfafk in ,edem

Augenblick volle Prasenz zu verleihen und ein magisdles "nunc stans"
herzuste lien. 20

What Mann directs attention to here is manifestly the leitmotivic repeti-

tion he practices throughout the novel. And as he introduces it here, he
employs almost identical terms to those used in connection with summary
narration in "Strandspaziergang": "hermetische Verzauberung ... ins Zeit-
lose," "Aufhebung der Zeit." Note however that there is no mention of a
"krankhaftes Element" in this connection, nor does this technique call to
mind the sinful dreams of opium eaters. The author evidently does not (or
no longer) share his narrator's sense that the representation of timelessness
involves an alarming morbidity.
I shall merely mention in passing that the most probing readers of Der
ZauberberiJ agree with the explanation offered by Mann in Emfiihrunfj: they too
attribute the distinction of his novel-its achie\"ed representation of a life
lapsing into timelessness-to the technique of repetition rather than to the
technique of summary narration. 21 More important for the questions that
concern us here is the fact that the late paratextual essay corrects, or at any
rate throws a critical light on, the metanarrative discourse in the text itself.
It thereby suggests the possibility of distancing the voice that utters Hans
Castorp's story from the novel's author, of assigning it to an unreliable nar-
rator, in Wayne Booth's sense of the wordY This in turn brings into view a
virtual way of normalizing the problematic metaphor of the opium dream in
"Strandspaziergang." Which returns me, in conclusion, to the question I left
suspended earlier.

v
I will approach this question by momentarily assuming (in a fictional conceit
of my own) that the narrator of Der Zauberbertj is a human being like the rest of
us, with values and biases dictated by his desires and fears. From all I have said
to this point, it would appear that he has a stake, a vested interest, in attribut-
ing to the technique of summary narration the qualities that he attaches to
it in "Strandspaziergang." He knows it to be a technique that is indispensable
for the telling of Hans Castorp's story, a technique to which he will have to
resurt increasingly as Hans's mountain life becomes an increasingly vacuous
stretch of time. He may sense that this technique is not in keeping with his pro-
fessed aim of neating the reader's sympathy with his protagonist-"weil die
 Telling Timelessness in Oer Zauberberg 213

allgemeine Teilnahme an dem Erlehen unseres Helden natUrlich in unserem

Interesse liegt" (750). In these circumstances it does not appear surprising that
this narrator's reflections on the time structure of narrative should he subjec-
tively motivated; nor, for that matter, that he should feel moved to reflect on
such technical matters at the beginning of his story's final phase, under the
pressure of what lies ahead. He needs to convince his readers. indeed he needs
to convince IlIl11se(f, that summary narration originates in and provokes a mor-
hid spell-"krankhaftes Element," "hermetischer Lauher"-nllt unlike the
one that is holding his protagonist on the mountain. C:omplicit reflection (to
use the existential term for this blinding mental disposition) trips up his logic,
inspiring a false simile that perfectly answers his need: "sofern namlich dieses
Falls die Erzahlung sich eines hermetischen Lauhers und einer zeitlichen Oher-
perspektive hedient, die an gewisse anormale und deutlich ins Ohersinnliche
weisende Faile der wirklichen Erfahrung erinnern. Man besitzt Aufzeichnun-
gen von Opiumrauchern" (749).
My fiction remains a fiction, of course. But it can, in a didactic spirit, point
to two different, mutually exclusive, ways of accounting for the presence of
a flaw in this "perfectly integrated" novel: one, the genetic resolution, would
attribute this tlaw to a thinking mistake on the part of its author, Thomas
Mann himself; the other, the perspectival resolution, would attribute it to an
unreliable narrator, a spokesman expressly conceived to voice opinions the
author knows to be untrue or implausibleY An attempt to substantiate either
of these alternatives leads in rather different directions. The genetic alterna-
tive leads to research into documents related to the genesis of Der ZauberberB,
with a view to finding evidence that, during the time of its composition, Mann
himself showed signs of uncertainty and confusion concerning the formal
presentation of his novel, especially in regard to its focalization and temporal
structure. The perspectival alternative leads to an interpretative analysis of
the novel itself: it seeks to establish a pervasive pattern of unreliahility in the
narrator's normative comments, a repeatedly implied invitation to the reader
to distrust the narrator's understanding of the story he tells or (as in the case
of the opium-dreamer image) of the prohlems involved in its telling. Addi-
tional evidence for this resolution might he provided by certain paratextual
data-including, as I suggested earlier, the ErnfiihrunH essay-hut the case
would have to rest primarily on textual grounds."
My own attempt to substantiate either of these resolutions has led to
largely negative results. No relevant genetic data emerge from Mann's
pronouncements related to his novel in the making,Z, with the possihle excep-
tion of the letter ( quoted above) alluding to the prohlematics of its ending.
Nor am J able, on rereading the narrator's comments throughout the noveL
 214 Dorrie Cohn

to fi nd an overall pattern of inconsistencies or incongruities; the "narratologi-

cal" gloss at the beginning of "Strandspaziergang" remains for me the only
flawed moment in his normative discourse. 2" But even as I close this chapter
with these inconclusive comments, I mean to open it to a debate of the alterna-
tive hypotheses I have proposed (and perhaps of others that have eluded me).
On this account I will merely suggest that a preference for the genetic o[ the
perspectival resolu tion of this Zauberherf/ flaw (and of novelistic flaws generally)
depends on quite basic critical perspectives: on the degree of conscious control
attributed to Thomas Mann (and to canonical authors generally), as well as
on the length to which one is willing to carry the positive yaluation of Der
ZauberberH (and literary materpieces generally). Civen the present climate in
literary studies-with its tendency to deconstruct the au thority of au thorship
and the perfection of the finished work-the genetic resolution will no doubt
find more adherents than the perspectival one.
Meanwhile my focus on the faulty simile of the opium eater and its
surrounding context may serve to counteract the widely held critical assump-
tion that the meaning of Der Zauberberg can be conveyed simply by summary
paraphrase and massive quotation. For if one looks critically at the highly
quotable metanarrative explanation that launches its final chapter, it turns
out to be far from self-explanatory.

Notes

1. Thomas Mann, Der ZauberberB, in Gesammelte Werke in zwij!f Biinden, vol. 3 (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 1960), 748-749. All subsequent references to this work will be cited
parenthetically by page number in the text.
2. "Speed" (vitesse) is the term applied by Gerard Genette to the relationship
between discourse-time and story-time in NarratIve Discourse Revisited, translated hy Jane
E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983),33-37. Here he explains why he
prefers "speed" to "duration" (durie) , the term used in his earlier hook. Narrative Dis-
course, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980),82-112.
3. See, for example, Eberhard Lammert's introductory comments on narrative
speed: "Die erzahlerische Wiedergabe von Geschehensverlaufen kann deren Zeiter-
slreckung sowohl untn- als Uheschreiten. Die lInterschreitung der erzahlten durch
die I'r:dhlzeit bezeichnet man als eigentliche Zeitratlilrril . ... Die l"lherschreitung der
erz:ihllell durch die Erzahlzeit bedeutet entsprechend /eitdehnun,q. Zwischen heiden
liegt die ideait' ... Zettdeckunil zwischen Geschehen und Wiedergabe"; Bauformerr des
Erziihll'lls. (Stultgart: Metzler, 1955), 82-1l3.
4. The I'uture oJthe N,)wi (New York: Vintage. 1950), 121-122.
 Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg 215

5. In chapter 7, about two-thirds of the overall (seven-year) story time is covered

in about onC'-quartC'r ufthe overall (seven-hundred-page) disnmrse time. The mount-
ing reduction of discourse time in relation to story time in Der ZauherherH has been
discussed by, among others, HC'rman Mewr (Zum Prohlem der epischen IlltewutlOn in Zarte
Empirte, Stuttgart: MC'tLler, 1963, 2'J-30). For the most detailed C'xamination of the time
ratio, see Francis Hulhof, Franspersonalismus I/nd Synchronizitiit: Wieder-holl/nB als Struklurelement
In Tlwmas Mann.' "Zauberbe~~" (GroningC'n: Drokkerij van Denderen, 1966), 132--135.
6. Mann's formulations comt' close to both these writers. lk Quincey speaks of
"the vast expansion of time" in his trances. "Sometimes [ seemed to have lived for
seventy or a hundred years in one night; nay. [sometimes had feelings representative
of a duration far heyond the limits of any human experience"; '!he Confessions 4 an EnHlJ.,h
Opium Eater (London: folio Society, 1(411), 197. In Le Poemedu Haschisch. Baudelaire reports
that opium induces ''l'accroissement monstrueux du temps ct de \'espace" and pro-
duces the sense "qu'on vit plusieurs vies d'homme, en l'espace d'une heure"; (Euvres
(PariS: Editions de la Pleiade,) 377 and 366. [ have not, however, found either of these
two writers using the image of the hroken watch.
7. Hermann Weigand, Thomas Mann's Nove! "Der ZauherherH" (New York: Appleton-
Century, 1933),91 and 95.
S. J have found no critical examination of the opimum-eater simile in studies con-
cerned with Der Zauberberg--notably in those that focus on the problematics of time:
for example, Meyer, Zum Problem der epischen [ntewa/lon; Bulhof, Transpersonalismus; Weigand,
Thomas Mann's Novel; Richard Thieberger, Der Besriff dey Zeit bei Thomas Mann (Baden-
Baden: Verlag fur Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1952); Helmut Koopmann, Die Entwicklull8 des
"Intel/ektua/en Romans" bei Thomas Mann (Bonn: Bouvier, 1971); Paul Rie<:eur, "Der ZauberberB"
in Temps et ricit, vol. 2 (PariS: Editions du Seuil, 1984).
9. J chose this pair of terms from a mul titude of corresponding pairs used hy con-
tributors to The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man's Views of Time as Expressed by Science
and by the Humanities, edited by J. T. Fraser (New York: C. Braziller, 1981). The series includes
internal vs. external time, suhjective vs. objective time, private vs. puhlic time, and the
Bergsonian duree vs. temps. The distinction to which all these terms refer is of course the-
matically central to Der ZauberberH' whose narrator discusses it explicitly and repeatedly
(e.g, 147-148, 75(}-751, 982-983). Mann's concern with this prohlem, and thl' parallelism
it presents with Bergson's thought, is examined in Thieherger, Der /leWI[fder ZeIt.
It is important to realize that the philosophical distinction hetween experienced
time and clock time is not identical to the narratological one between discourse time
and story time. Though story time (hy definition) corresponds to the clock time of the
fictional world, discourse time corresponds to experienced time only if and when the
narrative is figural1y focalized (see helow).
10. A dose look at the language that describes the opium dreamer's experience
allows one to pinpoint (if not to explain) Mann', confusion more precisely. Two lexical
 216 Dorrie Cohn

inconsistencies may have operated hen:-: the contradictory meanings attrihuted to the
adjective ImaHiniir and the noun VerkUrzunH in the passage that introduces the simile and in
the simile itself. This hecomes clear if we juxtapose (with slight syntactical changes) the
wordings Mann provides respectively lilr summary narration and opium dreams: (A) in
summary narrative: "die imaginare Zeit der Erzahlung lihersteigt deren eigene Dauer
verklirzungsweise ins Ungemessene": (B) in opium dreams: "der imaginare Zeitraum
libersteigt ihre eigene Dauer urn ein Cewaltiges: eine unglaubliche Verklirzung des
Zeiterlehnisses herrscht."
Whereas in (A) "imaginare Zeit" signifies storY time, i.e, the clock time to which
a narrative refers, in (B) "imaginarer Zeitraum" signifies experienced time, i.e, time as
perceived by the dreamer. And whereas in CA) "verklirzungsweise" correctly refers to
the foreshortening of clock time in summary narration (a long stretch of dock time is
experienced as short), in (Ll) the phrase "Verklirzung des Zeiterlehnisses" erroneously
attributes foreshortening of clock time to the opium dream (where a short stretch of
clock time is experienced as long).
II. The term stems from a medieval legend about seven sleepers (dIe "hen ,/ujaere),
whose title has been singularized in modern German usage. That another legendary
long-sleeper was not far from Mann's mind is attested by a letter (dated August 3,
1915) about his work in progress: "'!)er Zauberberg' heisst es, etwas vom Zwerg Nase,
dem sieben Jahre wie Tage vergehen ist darin"; Dichter iiber ihre DlchtullBen, 14/1, Thomas
Mann, vol. 1: 1889-1917, edited by Hans Wysling (Frankfurt am Main: Heimeran/
Fischer, 1975), 455. Zwerg Nase, the protagonist of Wilhelm Hauff's tale of that name,
in fact believes, on waking from a dream-filled seven-year sleep, that only a few hours
have elapsed.
12. The same is true for the only further mention that the novel makes of opium
dreams, With its syntax cast in first person plural form-the form the narrator habitu-
ally uses to refer to himself-it reads as follows: "Schon Jahre, soviel ist sicher, sind wir
hier oben, uns schwindelt, das ist ein Lastertraum ohne Opium und Haschisch, der Sit-
tenrichter wird uns verurteilen" (796). The negatively qualified lexical repetition pOint-
edly reaffirms the earlier analogy hetween the immoral, mountain-induced pathology
of time and the well-documented temporal distortions induced bv addictive substances.
But if the accusation here is addressed, however ironically, to the narrator rather than
to his protagonist, this merely confirms the notion that the narrator "Sinfully" identi-
fies with his protagonist's experience, at least so far as the passage of time is concerned.
13. I will return to this difficult passage below, pointing up some of its amhiguities.
[n the present context 1 will simply note the following discrepancy: while this passage
makes it appear as though the espousal of Hans's time sense by narrator and reader
were an entift'lv special and privileged fE'ature of the novel (or the type of novel) WE'
are reading, we had in fact been told at an earlier moment that «II narrative com-
munication aims at an empathic reading experience of this kind: "[esl entspricht den
 Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg 217

Cesetzen des Erzahlens und Zuh15rens ... , daB uns Inarrator and reader1 die Zeit
genau so lang oder kurz wird, flir unser Frlebnis sich ebenso breitmacht oder zusam-
menschrumpft, \vie dem auf so unerwartete Art yom Schicksal mit Heschlag belegten
Heiden unserer Ceschirhte" (257). This statement occurs in EwiJjkeit.<'<lIppe und pliitzliche
Klarheit. where it justifies the sudden ~peeding up of the narrati\ t' pace \vhen Hans is
condemned to his three weeks of bed rest.
14. I follow both Gl'fard Genette and Franz Stanzel in distinguishing between two
principal modal types in third-person tiction. Combining their terminology (zero
focalization \"s. internal focalization for Cenette INarratil'e Discourse. IRY-1941. authorial
vs. figural narrative situation for Stanzel, Theorie des Er:iihlells [C;iittingen: Vanden hoeck,
7(}-81 I), I will refer to these two modal types in what follows as authorial focalization
vs. figural focalization.
15. Dichter iiher ihre DichtunJlfn. 454. About a year later, in the letter quoted in note 11,
Mann's reference to Hauff's tale leads to further insistence on the war-ending: '''Der
Zauberberg' heisst es, etwas vom Zwerg Nase, dem sieben Jahre wie Tage vergehen,
ist darin, und der Schlu5s, die Autiosung,-ich sehe keine andere M{)glichkeit. als
den Kriegsausbruch" (Wysling, Dichter, 455). The Zwerg Nase assodation having given
way to the "SiebenschHifer" in the novel itself, Mann insists on Hans's identity with
the latter precisely at the moment when the war breaks out: "Der Donnerschlag, der
den Zauberberg sprengt und den Siebenschlafter unsanft vor seine Tore setzt" (985);
"Es waren jene Sekunden, wo der Siebenschlafer im Grase, nicht wissend wie ihm
geschah, sich langsam aufrichtete, bevor er sass und sich die Augen rieb.... Er sah sich
entzaubert, erlost, befreit" (988).
16. Cf. Hans Robert Jauss's passing mention of the fact that this closure brings
"eine Dberraschung ... aber kein Ende in der traditionellen geschlossenen Form";
Zeit und Erinnerun8 in Marcel Prousts "A la recherche du temps perdu" (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1970),43. T. J. Reed likewise points up the arbitrariness of the war ending, stressing the
unanswered (and unanswerable) questions it raises regarding the value and mean-
ing of Hans's "education" on the mountain; Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975),263--274.
17. According to Bulhof (Transpersonalismus, 131), who establishes a rhronological
overview for the prinripal events of the novel, the date of the duel is February lY13.
18. In this respect I disagree with Jauss, one of the rare nitil's who has given this
passage some attention (Zeit und Erinnerun!l, 37-3/1). For Jauss "von der Zeit erzahlen"
implies "ein Subjekt der Erzahlung." which he underst.mds to b(~ represented by the
omnisciently ironic narrator in Der ZauherherJj.
19. Gesammelte Wake. vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: I'isrher, 1960),611--612.
20. Ibid., 612.
21. Cf. Bulhof(Transpersonal ismus, 142): "Dei Erz;ihlug bewirkt nicht die Vorstel-
lung, daB die Zeit sich beschleunige, sondern dass sie sich wiederholt," Ct'. also Jauss
 218 Dorr;! Cohn

(Zeit und ErinnerunR. 4D---43). who regards the practice of leitmotivic repetition as "die
entscheidende !'Jeuerung des ZauberberBs." i.e .. the essential technique that effects the
reader's identification with Hans Castrop's experience of time.
22. According to Booth. "a narrator [isJ reliable when he speaks for [... J the norms
of the work (which is to say the implied author's norms). unreliable when he does not";
The Rheloricofhrtion (Chicago: Chicago Univereity Press. 1961), 158-159.
23. I take the terms "genetic resolution" and "perspectical resolution" from the
reception-oriented approach to fictional unreliability developed in Tamar Yacobi.
"Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem," Poetics Today 2 (1981): 113-126.
24. I have proposed an argument of this sort. wholly based on intra textual evi-
dence, for another work by Thomas Mann; see "The Second Author of 'Der Tod in
Venedig:" in frohleme der Moderne: Studien zur deutschen Literalur I'on Nietzsche bi.l Brecht. edited
by Benjamin Bennett. Anton Kaes, and William ,. Lillyman (Tiibingen: Max Nie-
meyer), 223-246. For the theoretical grounds underlying a diagnosis of narratorial
unreliability. see Felix Martfnez-Bonati in Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature
(Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
25. That is, the various documents concerning Der ZauberberR published in Wysling,
edited by Dirhter uber ihre Dichtunaen.
26. The only critic who has, to my knowledge, proposed that the narrator of Der
ZauberberB is unreliable is Bulhof: "Der Leser kann gewiss sein, daB der Erzahler kein
zuverlassiger Fuhrer ist: Manchmal schafft er Ordnung. aber er hinterlasst mehr
Unordnung" (Transpersonalismus. 160; see also 187); I do not, however, find his textual
demonstration of this idea sufficiently persuasive.
 The Magic Mountain
A "Humoristic Counterpart"w Death in Venice
ELLIS SHOOK MAN

• • •
111 Memoriam Steven Paul Scher

Dem Humor. clem gottlichen Kind. ist nichts verwehrt: auch

nicht mit clem Schmerz. clem Elend. dem Tod zu spielen.
-Arthur Schnitzler. 1925

I NA DISCUSSION recorded by a German radio station on August 22,1953,

Thomas Mann explained how he viewed the difference between irony and
humor. Irony elicits an intellectual smile, he said, whereas humor occasions
hearty laughter. He added that he valued such laughter more highly, as an
effect of art, and that he felt happiest when his public readings of his works
produced it in his audience. He went on to say that he was always pleased
when people saw in him less an ironist than a humorist, and that it would not
be hard to demonstrate the humoristic element in his writing. Mann himself
discerned this element in four of his novels: Buddenbrooks (1901), Joseph and HIS
Brothers (1933-1943), Doctor Faustus (1947), and ConfeSSIOns of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
(1954).1 His remarks on these novels, though, imply that his notion of humor
was complicated. Felix Krull is the only one that seems to fit his definition,
the only one Mann said elicited hearty or cheerful laughter. The other three
hardly sound humorous in this sense. Mann called Buddenhrooks a book of pessi-
mistic humor; he cited the peculiar humor surrounding Joseph's father Jacob,
a character he described as highly pathetic; and noted humoristic elements
such as his undemonic narrator in what he called his melancholic and deeply
serious Doctor Faustus. Pessimism, pathos, melancholy, and seriousness are not
usually associated with humor, at least not with the bubbly laughter Mann

21 9
 220 Ellis Shook man

said humor causes. In the more complex sense that Mann suggests by linking
it to these unlikely concepts, however, humor also informs another of his
novels: The MaBle Mountarn (1924).
Seeing complex humor in The MaRl' Mountarn would seem to be consistent
with Mann's own statements about the novel's genesis. In letters, essays, lec-
tures, and other writings, Mann said that this work initially promised to be a
humoristic counterpart to his Death In Venice (1912).2 As he explained, the novel
was written in a humorous style, at least to begin with, though its subject was
much like the somber one of his Venetian novella; v,·hat is more, it was con-
ceived as a satyr play, as a comic or grotesque sequel to that tragic no\'ella,
though it proved to be far more substantial and significant than the humoristic
counterpart Mann said he intended. Finding complex humor in The MaHle Moun-
tmn thus seems Simple. One could read the novel, that is, as serious comic relief.
Mann's indications of an initial discrepancy between its style and its subject,
moreover, are confirmed by his further remarks on how it at first took shape
as such a counterpart to Death in Venice. His most extensive comments about its
origin occur in a lecture that he gave to students at Princeton in 1939. In this
introduction to The MaRie Mountam, he said that the novel was supposed to be
a humoristic counterpart to his Venetian novella not only in the sense that it
transposed, to a humoristic level, the fascination with death and the triumph
of chaos over a life devoted to order that are also shown in Death in Venice; it was
to be of comparable length as well, to be an extended short story.3 A year later,
in 1940, Mann repeated most of his comments in On Myself, an account of his life
and his works that he gave in another lecture at Princeton. Here, too, he used
the word humoristisch to describe the less decorous level of his novel as well as its
expansive or "English" style. Here, too, moreover, he used the word GeBenstUck
when he referred to its serious subject as well as its short intended length. In
English, these two words are rendered as humoristic and counterpart. With respect
to that subject, then, he meant The MaBlc Mountain to be like Death in Venice. The
style of the novel, though, would differ from that of the novella. Again, locat-
ing humor in The MaBie Mountain seems Simple.
With Mann, however, things are rarely as simple as they appear. His state-
ments about conceiving The Ma8lc Mountain as a humoristic counterpart to Death
in Venice prove this point. Describing the novel in this way may seem straightfor-
ward, but there is more to doing so than meets the eye. It is correct to translate
the words Mann uses-humonstisch and Ge8enstUck-as humoristic and counterpart, for
example, but both these German words have meanings that ditfer markedly
from those of their nearest English equivalents. In English, humoristic derives from
humor, a word used to denote a quality possessed by someone or something com-
ical, laughable, witty, or amusing. In German, though, humonstisch comes from
 The Magic Mou.ntain 221

Humor. a word defined as the ability to take the dark sides of life philosophically,
that is. to consider them calmly and serenely and from an intellectually supe-
rior point of view.' In other words, Humor is a talent for facing the inadequacy
of the world and its inhabitants. the difficulties and the misfortunes of life, in
a serene. composed frame of mind.' The good mood or cheerful attitude that
Humor also denotes is thus potentially far more pensive than what the English
humor suggests. Accordingly. humoristisch can mean something far different from
humorous. something wiser and more contemplative, not just something funny.
The German word Ge8enstiick is similarly complicated. It has two basic mean-
ings, and they appear divergent. First, it can mean a person or thing that consti-
tutes the opposite of some other person or thing. Second, it can mean a person
or thing that suits, matches. or corresponds to some other person or thing. 6 In
the first of these senses. the word implies difference. In the second. it suggests
similarity. The English counterpart, moreover, means someone or something
similar to. or resembling. or complementing someone or something else. This
word can also mean someone or something having the same traits, position, or
function, perhaps in a different time or place, as someone or something else. It
thus implies commonality, completion, or equivalence. Despite starting with
counter--which comes from the Latin contra. meaning "against"-countetpartdoes
not suggest opposition or contradiction as strongly as Ge8enstiick does. Countetpart
thus renders the second meaning of GeBenstiick more dearly than the first, the
concept of similarity more dearly than that of difference. The German word
is ambiguous, denoting antithesis as well as implying agreement. In English
translation, this ambiguity is largely lost. Neither humoristisch nor GeBenstiick is as
simple a word, then, as it seems to be. What, strictly speaking, does it therefore
mean to call The MaBie Mountain a humoristic counterpart to Death in Venice?
To answer this question-which pertains not only to the genesis of Mann's
novel but also. and more important, to its interpretation--one needs to know
how the word humoristisch is used in The Ma8ic Mountain itself. It occurs there many
times, referring to scenery. people. thoughts. and attitudes. In the latter instances,
it suggests the superior wisdom mentioned in its definition. Describing the
onset of Hans Castorp's first winter at the sanatorium. for example, Mann's
narrator tells how heavy and humoristically formed pillows of snow lie on the
branches of pine trees. In this instance. humori.~ti$ch means "comical" or "amus-
ing." When Castorp's grandfather spoke Low (;erman dialect with his house
servant. moreover, he was not being humoristic. On this occasion, humoris-
tisch means "jocular." Madame C:hauchat's entourage includes a humoristic,
woolly-haired woman named Tamara. In the case of this "original and humor-
istic type," humoristisch seems to connote a peculiar manner or appearance.' It
has this same connotation when Hans Castorp is introduced to Settembrini,
 222 Ellis Shookmal1

who bows humoristically. Settembrini also calls the shrewd Doctor Behrens
"our humorist," ironically suggesting that Behrens has a ready wit. x Settem-
brini himself quips that Naphta's brand of humor lies in thinking of Christ's
wounds when looking at red primroses. Naphta replies that doing so would be
more witty than humoristic, distinguishing humor from merely clever men-
tal associations. When Herr Magnus and Herr Wenzel, two of Castorp's fellow
patients, get on each other's nerves, the narrator recalls that Settembrini had
humoristically moderated on such occasions. In other words, he was concilia-
tory, above their petty arguments. Tn these last two instances, humoristisch has a
larger meaning, as it does when it is used in other contexts as well. Hans Cas-
torr had to repeat a grade in school, for example, and he enjoyed the disgrace-
ful but humoristic state of not having to keep up in class at the end of the
year, of being able to laugh about it all. In a small \Vay, he thus took adversity
philosophically. He also acts as though he could tease Miss Engelhart, who ini-
tially sits next to him in the dining room, from a humoristic distance, about
her having a crush on Madame Chauchat. Such distance implies knowledge
of the erotic ways of the world. The word humonsflsch is used in a related sense
when the narrator reports how Joachim ZiemBen, Castorp's cousin, is at first
delighted with the spirit of the Prussian military hierarchy. That hierarchy is
strict, but it "grimly-humoristic ally" indulges what is only human. 9 Here, too,
humoristisch implies knowledge of human nature, even humaneness. As these
examples show, this word is used in The MaBie Mountain not only in the sense
of "entertaining" or "funny" but also to suggest a detached, reflective human
awareness.
The word humoristiseh also occurs in further remarks that Mann made on
The MaBie Mountain, rather than in it, and the notion of humor also informs
the novel in another way. Most of these additional remarks concern his sym-
bols or symbolism, characters, choice of words, or interest in pedagogy.lO As
he uses it when referring to these various subjects, that word helps indicate
his half-serious style, his ambivalent narrative attitude. Indeed, these remarks,
like some of his comments cited above, show that he often used humoristiseh
in its older, English sense of "whimsical." In this sense, it describes his partly
playful narrative mood. Mann also used this word, however, in remarks sug-
gesting that the humoristic element of his novel is not limited to any ease of
style Of lightness of tone. II In 1926, for example, he claimed that he had always
considered the epic and the humoristic nearly identical, adding that he was
prouder of nothing more than of the notes on humor that Arthur Schnitzler
made to accompany The Mawc Mountain. As Mann explained, Schnitzler wrote
that the humorist "goes for a stroll within infinity."'2 Mann thus seems to
have welcomed the idea that humor has a place in the larger realm, in the
 The Magic Moutllain 223

larger human concerns, implied by the definition of humoristisch. After all, he

had just maintained that the humorist was the true benefactor of humankind
and that today, in 1926, humor represented a refuge for sufferers. Ii
One need not take Mann's comments on his own works at face value, of
course. In this case, though, his statements about his novel are consistent with
those made in it. There, too, as shown above, humoristi5ch describes not only the
style of The MagIC Mountain but also its substance, its elevated-and elevating-
outlook on human life. There, too, moreover, Mann's use of this word thus
implies the calm, serene, and intellectually superior perspective mentioned
in its definition. This fact is hardly surprising. After all, so far above sea level,
Hans CastOfp is literally superior to his usual bourgeOiS life, and much that
happens to him or that he does there heightens his intellect. He is liter-
ally humorous as well: the damp patch on his purportedly tubercular lung
recalls the bodily moisture or fluid deSignated by the Medieval Latin word
humor. Etymologically, then, there is humor in what Madame Chauchat calls
Hans Castorp's "petite tache humide."14 In this sense, too, Mann's novel can
be called humoristic. There is indeed much more than meets the eye, then, to
the first word in the phrase that Mann coined when he described that novel
as a "humoristic counterpart" to Death in Venice.
The full extent of humor in The MaBie Mountain, however, does not seem to
have been appreciated in prior research. IS Studies that treat Mann's humor
are rare, and they underrate its scope in Hans Castorp's story.16 Some schol-
ars, moreover, appear to take Mann's humor there too lightly, finding it
merely comic. 17 There is, of course, significant humor in his narrative digres-
sions as well as in his scenes, characters, and language, not to mention in the
structure of his novel. The MaBie Mountain is also, to be sure, often ironic, sym-
bolic, comical, and funny. None of these studies or scholars, though, despite
raising such issues, accounts for how the novel reflects Mann's frequent use
of the word humori5ti5ch in its serious sense of quasi-philosophic detachment.
Neither do studies that consider how The MaBle Mountain began as a humoris-
tic counterpart to Death ill Venice. Those studies, too, underrate the major role
that humor plays in the novel. lB Even the two or three of them that mention
humor do so only in passing, and none conveys its import. Many of those
studies, though, discuss the extent to which Mann's novel is like his novella.
Most suggest, as Mann did, that The MagiC Mountain was initially a humoris-
tic counterpart to Death in Venice but that it went on to become an earnest
BildunBsroman. 19 Others, skeptical of this supposed progression, disagree. 20 One
sees the novel as a counterpart to the novella because the novel is comic. 21
The question, then, is how the two works are related. Is the novel more than
such a counterpart since it turned out to be a BildullBsroman, a novel of personal
 224 Ellis Shook man

development? Is it still such a counterpart because it, too, describes a down-

ward trajectory, its protagonist's decline? Or is it such a counterpart because
it is not seriousi 22 Other studies suggest further ways in which the two works
may be related ,21 or maintain that they have other things in common2~ These
various studies, too, thus all show the degree to which The MaBie Mountain and
Death III Velllce are alike. Mann himself suggested several other points of com-
parison. Referring to the historical context of World War I and to the intel-
lectuallegacy of Romanticism, for example, he, too, stressed their similarity
and their differences, indicating how the novel resembles but also surpasses
the novella. 2.'
To say that The MaBic Mountain and Death In Venice are similar and different,
though. as both prior research and Mann's own comments suggest. is to cast
their relationship in the general terms implied by the word counterpart. As
explained above, this word and Its German equivalent-(;ewnstiick--connote
both similarity and difference. As is also explained there, the German word
denotes opposition, too, thus conveying the notion of antithesis and contra-
diction more strongly than counterpart does. While Mann used humonstisch in its
speCifically German meaning of philosophic detachment, however, of calm
superiority to the unpleasant sides oflife, he may not have used (;eBenstiiek in its
stronger sense. Indeed, that word seldom occurs either in The MaBle Mountain
itself or in Mann's comments on it other than those already cited. Settem-
brini predicts that bourgeois democracy will one day be a bright counterpart
to Metternich's Holy Alliance. Its adherents, too, will form an alliance, that
is, but will be middle-class liberals. Similarly, Hans Castorp muses that the
regulations for spiritual exercises in the Jesuit order are a kind of counterpart
to those that Frederick the Great issued for his Prussian infantry. In other
words, and in spite of the difference between the sacred and the secular, both
Naphta and Joachim belong to military outfits. Mann also commented, in
1930, that Death in Venice corresponds to The MaBie Mountall1 and that the novel
is the counterpart to Buddenbrooks. 2n In his remark, Ge/ienstiiek may have the same
meaning as korrespondiert. It may thus suggest congruity more than contrast.
Mann may instead be using it in its sense of "opposite," however. One cannot
tell for certain. In any case, if The MaBic Mountain-as he wrote a few years later,
in two of his letters cited above-turned out to be a great deal more signifi-
cant than the humoristic counterpart to Death in Venire that he intended, then
the meaning of Ge8enstiick, in his parlance, seems neither clear nor constant. If
Death in Venire corresponds to The Ma8lc Mountain in 1930, it seems unlikely to
have done so when the novel was still no more than the less ambitious story
that Mann initially planned. still no more than simply a humoristic counter-
part. If the novel, at first, was such a counterpart, but then became something
far greater, that is, its original relationship to the novella was prohably not
 The Magic Mountail1 225

its later one of correspondence. When Mann, starting in 1913, described the
novel as a Gesenstiick to the novella, he thus may have meant something else,
some other sort of relationship. The question raised above therefore remains
unanswered: What does it mean, exactly, to call The Maflic Mount",n a humoris-
tic counterpart to Death In Vemce~

The best answer to this question is supplied by the novel itself. Mann, as noted,
uses the word Gesenstiick only twice there. He also only twice alludes to Venice: in
the first salon of the sanatorium there is a stereoscopic viewer showing a photo-
graph of a Venetian gondolier, and in Naphta's sitting room there is a Venetian
chandelier. These allusions seem to link Naphta as well as the pastimes of Hans
Castorp's fellow patients to the morbid decadence that Mann's novella associates
with Venice. They are far from being the only such links to that novella, how-
ever.lndeed, the novel's scenes, subjects, characters, and classical references, not
to mention Castorp's hallucinatory vision in the chapter "Snow," often likewise
suggest significant connections. They do so, moreover, in ways that demon-
strate specific similarities and differences, thus suggesting exactly how The MaSK
Mountain can be read as a humoristic counterpart to Death In Venrce.
Hans Castorp's arrival in Davos, for example, is much like Aschenbach's
arrival in Venice. The locomotive pulling the train that carries Castorp on the
last stage of his journey from Hamburg emits coal particles that make a book
lying next to him, Ocean Steamships, unclean. Similarly, flakes of coal dust fall on
the deck of the ship that takes Aschenbach across the Adriatic Sea. A book is
lying in Aschenbach's lap. In both these scenes, a means of transportation that
Castorp later hails for involving the triumph of human civilization over chaos
is sullied. So is the written word. Aschenbach's book is probably not a techni-
cal work, though. (It may instead be a book of poems by August von Platen,
whom Aschenbach recalls.) As Castorp ascends higher, into the unknown,
he asks himself how things will go for him there. As Aschenbach sails toward
Venice, he similarly wonders whether a new enthusiasm and confusion, some
late emotional adventure, awaits him. When Castorp thinks how high he has
climbed, he feels dizzy and he covers his eyes with his hand. Aschenbach, after
boarding his ship and seeing the old dandy who carouses with younger men,
similarly covers his forehead with his hand and doses his eyes. Both protago-
nists thus anticipate, as well as feel the adverse effects of, entering new emo-
tional territory. When Castorp first breathes the mountain air, however, it is
fresh, odorless, empty, and dry; it goes in easily and says nothing to his soul.
When Aschenbach opens the window of his hotel room, on the morning of his
second day in Venice, he thinks that he perceives the foul smell of the lagoon.
Castorp thus seems to be in an atmosphere that is initially less threatening to
his psyche. When he reaches the sanatorium, moreover, Castorp is shown to
 220 Ellis Shookman

his room on the second floor by an employee of the French type, \vho operates
the elevator. Aschenbach, arriving at his hotel, is similarly shown to his room
on the second floor by a manager who rides in the elevator and wears a frock
coat tailored in the French style. Castorp's room, though, has white, practi-
cal furniture, a few flowers Joachim placed in a vase, and a view of the valley.
Aschenbach's room is furnished in cherry, is adorned with strongly odorifer-
ous flowers, and affords a view of the open sea. Castorp's accommodations
appear clinical, rather than voluptuous, that is, and in them he has a relatively
limited horizon. Finally, when CastOfp falls asleep, he dreams almost con-
tinuously until the next morning, and Aschenbach's sleep on his first night in
Venice is similarly enlivened by dream images. Taken together, these several
similarities and differences hint that Castorp's story will be more prosaic, if
not without the symbolic and psychological depth of Aschenbach's.
Other similarities and differences emerge from how Mann's two works
treat the subject of time. Castorp originally comes to visit Joachim for three
weeks. Aschenbach plans to take a siesta of three or four weeks. Both soon lose
track of time. Castorp does not have a calendar on his trip and does not always
know the exact date. According to Mann's narrator, this lack of attention to
time is a lack of order and conscientiousness. The narrator also observes that
we lose our sense of time most naturally and justifiably on a walk at the beach.
Aschenbach no longer keeps an eye on the free time that he has allotted him-
self for his vacation, and he fails do to do so after he loses the will to leave Ven-
ice and starts spending day after day at the beach. In neither work, moreover,
does Mann himself indicate exactly what year it is. About six months after
Castorp's arrival, the number of the year has changed to another, a new one.
Mann hints only vaguely at which years these might be. The documents relat-
ing to the feud among Polish patients at the sanatorium mention dates such
as "27 March 19 ... ," similarly omitting the actual year. This imprecision also
occurs in the first sentence of Death in Venice, which relates that Aschenbach
has taken a walk, in Munich, "on a spring afternoon of the year 19 ... "
The connection between the months in which Castorp's and Aschenbach's
stories start is more intricate. Castorp travels to Davos in early August, whereas
Aschenbach takes his walk at the beginning of May. The weather in Munich
is as sultry as it is in August, though, for a false high summer has set in, and
the first sentence of the first chapter of The MaBie Mountain says that Castorp
travels from Hamburg to Davos in high summer. This link may reflect Mann's
initially having the novel, like the novella, hegin in May.n At any rate, World
War I breaks out at the time of year when Castorp comes to Davos. Late in the
novel, when that historical event is about to occur, Mann's narrator says that
the nerves of Europe were stretched on the rack. At the outset of the novella,
 The Magic Mouncain 227

moreover, his narrator there reports that the year "19 ... " showed Europe a
threatening mien. In the novel, this threat becomes more acute, more than
just a diplomatic crisis.
Finally, the novel places far greater emphasis on the link between percep-
tions of time and those of space. On at least six occasions, it tells how space and
time are related or how we measure one with the other. Death in Venice draws
this parallel but once. The MaHic Mountain thus treats the subject of time much
as Death In Venice does, although with a more urgent sense of European history
and in far greater psychological detail.
Mann's treatment of further subjects in both the novel and the novella
likewise shows how these works are alike and different. Those subjects include
psychoanalysis, knowledge, form, and soldierly disCipline or ascetic composure.
Castorp is disgusted, for example, when he initially hears about Krokowski's
dissection of souls, that is, psychoanalysis. Similarly, the narrator of Death In
Venice states that Aschenbach's story "Ein Elender" (An Outcast) is an expres-
sion of disgust with the indecent psychologism of the times. This psychologism
mayor may not be psychoanalysis, while Krokowski is clearly a psychoanalyst.
In the first fortnightly lecture Castorp attends, moreover, Krokowski destroys
illusions and inexorably honors knowledge. Naphta, by contrast, rejects all the-
oretical and scientific knowledge not conducive to human salvation. Aschen-
bach goes to similar extremes. In his youth, he exploited knowledge, but it
qUickly lost its bitter charm. "Ein Elender" accordingly shows the possibility
of a moral resolve that transcends the most profound knowledge. Ultimately,
though, Aschenbach says that artists abjure knowledge because it lacks dignity,
severity, composure, and form; that they then strive for beauty instead, for
reborn naivete and for form; and that naivete and form lead to intoxication,
desire, and-like knowledge-to the abyss. This half-coherent reflection sums
up a danger inherent in Aschenbach's aestheticism.
Form is similarly problematical in The Ma8ie Mountain. Just as Aschenbach
muses about the problem of form and art after first seeing Tadzio, Castorp
ponders matters such as form and freedom when he envisions the human
body as the apex of organic life. Castorp, too, learns that the human body
involves not only form and beauty but also sensuality and desire. Although
he considers the fine arts, however, his study of the body is more scientific.
Furthermore, as in Death In Venice, form is also an ethical issue. Speaking with
Clavdia Chauchat about morality, Castorp calls form pedantry itself. Later,
lost in the snow, he understands that form-that is, civilized customs-comes
from love and goodness. The humanistic mean, he even later maintains, lies
midway between the extremes of formlessness in the East and deadly formal-
ity in Spain. Castorp thus appears to become wiser than Aschenbach, who is
 u8 Ellis Shookman

unable to keep his balance between such extremes, suffers from the moral
ambiguity of form, and is a victim of the complications that arise when moral
resolve goes beyond psycho logistic knowledge. The theological, scientific, and
social lessons Castorp learns in connection with form and knowledge~e\'en
if he forgets or fails to act according to them~are in any case broader than
Aschenbach's aesthetic concern with these same subjects.
The same more encompassing, more balanced perspective on life that is
evident when Hans Castorp reflects or comments on the subject of form in
general is also plain when Settembrini raises that of literary form in particular.
Aschenbach no longer takes pleasure in creating such form. This is an acute
problem, since the style of his prose has become increaSingly formal, even
formalistic. About the same time that his style began to undergo this change,
his story "Ein Elender" rejected \vhat is objectionable, that is, it turned away
from moral skepticism and renounced the maxim that to understand is to
forgive. This same idea apparently recurs when Settembrini insists. in reply
to Naphta, that one must distinguish good from evil and reject what is mor-
ally objectionable. His idea of literary form, though, differs from the one that
inspires Aschenbach 's ma~terly prose. As Settembrini later argues, humane-
ness is impossible and unthinkable without such form. Assigning a human
value to literary form is a sign of a noble generosity, he thinks, and literature
is a human impulse, a marvel linking analysis and form. He hails the effect of
literature, the destruction of the passions through knowledge and the word,
and he praises literature as a means of understanding, of forgiving, and of
love. When he observes that the spirit of literature creates the most extreme
moral refinement and sensibility, Settembrini thus says something very differ-
ent from what Mann does after describing Aschenbach's worn face, when he
explains that art produces pamperedness, overrefinement, nervous fatigue,
and curiosity. Settembrini is less concerned with art for its own sake; unlike
Aschenbach, he praises skepticism and tolerance.
A related difference exists in his attitude toward soldierly discipline or ascetic
composure. There is a lapse of such discipline in Death In Venice. Aschenbach has
written a prose epic on the life of Frederick the Great; he thinks of himself as
a soldier and a man of war, because art is war; and says, in the end, that poets,
although they may be warriors in their way, necessarily go astray. Similarly,
Hans Castorp wishes there were more of the "Spanish" military spirit in civil-
ian life. He witnesses that spirit at work in Joachim, who lives for duty and
diSCipline and therefore resists Marusja's charms. Castorp, after his tryst with
Madame Chauchat, also has a bad conscience when he considers this military
modesty. He still has sympathy with the military profession, though, and with
its asceticism. By contrast, Settembrini finds the soldierly life intellectually
 The Magic Mounlain 229

inadmissible. He also rejects as madness the asceticism that Naphta advocates.

Settembrini has already said that he has no ascetic inclinations; instead, he has
a qualified and humanistic respect for the human body. His approach is thus
more moderate than Aschenbach's, reconciling the intellect and the senses
rather than veering between them. With respect to literary form as well as
soldierly asceticism, then, Settembrini is not so torn between extremes. Both
he and Aschenbach are writers who want art to be ethical, but Settembrini is
better adjusted.
Settembrini is not the only character in The MaRie Mountain who both resem-
bles and differs from Aschenbach. So, of course, does Hans Castorp. His symp-
toms, actions, and gestures are often like Aschenbach's, and though he may
seem less mature, he is in some ways more reflective. The feverishness that
he feels in his face on his first night in Davos recurs the next morning, when
he hears the Russian couple next door having sex. Later, as he skis, this burn-
ing and its attendant mixture of excitement and fatigue-his permanent
condition-remind him of the effects of sea air. Aschenbach, on his second day
in Venice, is similarly afflicted by the excitation and languor caused by sea air
and the sirocco. Less immediately, the cause of this recurring condition, too,
is thoughts of sexuality. Both protagonists also go for fateful solitary walks.
To stanch the nosebleed he gets along the way, Castorp lies on a bench in the
woods, where he soon dreams of his schoolmate Pribislav Hippe. Aschenbach
similarly throws himself onto a bench in a park just after Tadzio smiles at him
and just before he whispers that he loves the boy. When Castorp writes a letter
informing his relatives of his decision to stay in Davos, he lifts his hand, with
his palm turned outward. When Aschenbach misses his train out of Venice,
then returns to his hotel, he Similarly raises his arms and turns his palms out-
ward. Both of Mann's protagonists also drink pomegranate juice mixed with
carbonated water. This repeated allusion to the fruit whose seeds the Greek
goddess Persephone was tricked into eating indicates that both men, like her,
enter the underworld. Castorp's rapt attention when his grandfather recited
all of his ancestors' names seems childish compared to Aschenbach's concern
that his sober forebears approve and respect hb literary accomplishments.
Furthermore, Castorp's aversion to hard work, which quickly tires him, makes
him seem less substantial than Aschenbach, who is so enervated by his work in
part because he never knew the idle and carefree pleasures of youth. Castorp
is far more thoughtful, however, about two important motifs. First, he weighs
the advantages of honor against those of disgrace, and he tentatively imag-
ines enjoying the latter, which seem boundless. He also finds these advantages
expressed in Madame Chauchat's bad posture and casual manners. He is thus
more deliberate and observant than Aschenhach, who-as he fails to warn
 230 Ellis Shookman

Tadzio's mother to quit Venice-impulsively prefers the similar. sweet advan-

tages of chaos to art and virtue. Second, Castorp does not recall a deck chair
as comfortable as the one on his balcony, says he would like to buy one, and
considers its construction. He has soon had his fill of the horizontal wav of
life that such chairs encourage, even though he will later adopt it. and he
both resists the urge to lie down in the snow and gets back up onto his skis
after he has his vision. Aschenbach, by contrast, sinks into a series of chairs,
beginning with a deck chair on the ship that carries him to Venice. The most
tempting of these seats is in his first gondola, a chair thJ.t is black like a coffin
and seems to cast a spell of torpor. Castorp may not have the will to escape
the similar spell cast hy his magical mountain, hut his attempts to stay on his
feet and to remain upright show that he does not succumb to decadence as
completely, his posture implying a less susceptible temperament. Despite his
youth, then, he sometimes seems more cognizant as well as more circum-
spect than Aschenbach.
Hans Castorp and Aschenbach resemble and differ from each other in
another way, too: Castorp's love for Madame Chauchat recalls Aschenbach's
love for Tadzio, but Castorp is less solitary, less constrained, and less obsessed.
This seems clear from many particulars mentioned in both their stories. The
daily routine at the sanatorium furnishes many occasions for Castorp to
encounter Madame Chauchat. The confined space and the shared regime at
the Venetian hotel prOvide frequent opportunities for Aschenbach to observe
Tadzio. Both protagonists' passions are fueled by hope that is vague and
adventurous. Both men also yield to emotional intoxication, to a rush that
defies reason and that they welcome. Neither prefers sobriety to this rush or
wants to come to his senses. Furthermore, eyes are important in both their
erotic situations. In the novel, Mann notes that people, when they speak with
their eyes, use the informal pronoun du even when they have not yet actually
used the formal pronoun Sie. In the novella, he writes that nothing is odder
or more ticklish than the relationship between people who know each other
only with their eyes. When Madame Chauchat comes to the radiology lab
wearing a white sweater and blue skirt, she is reminiscent of Tadzio, more-
over, who wears these same colors when he appears in his sailor or bathing
suits. Both she and he also enter a dining room through a glass door, and
hoth have a name that causes confusion. Castorp asks Miss Engelhart what
Madame Chauchat's first name is. The old maid replies that it might be
Tatyana, Natasha, or Advotya, hut not Katyenka or Ninotchka. The next day,
she informs him that it is Clavdia. Aschenbach has similar trouble ascertaining
Tadzio's name, which at first sounds like "Adgio" or "Adgiu." He figures it out
by himself, however, whereas Castorp, as noted, discusses Madame Chauchat's
 The Magic Mountain 231

with someone else. When Aschenbach catches up to Tadzio one day, more-
over, he is unable to speak a friendly French phrase that is on the tip of his
tongue. When Madame Chauchat bumps Castorp as they both wait for their
mail, by contrast, he has the presence of mind to say, "Pas de quoi, Madame!"
hnally, toward the end or the novella, Aschenbach worries only that Tadzio
might depart, admitting that he would then not know how to go on living.
Castorp, though, survives not only Madame Chauchat's departure but also
her return. After her consort l'eeperkorn dies, he even gets over her, putting
his infatuation hehind him. He thus survives a passion that~despite seeming
heterosexual~is like the homoerotic one that kills Aschenbach. He discusses
it with others, including its object, and ultimately keeps it in perspective.
Mann's treatment of homoeroticism~an attraction suggested by Madame
Chauchat's similarity to Tadzio and Hippe~thus seems more relaxed.
Castorp's and Aschenbach's comparable erotic involvements also raise the
issue of Mann's ethnography. Madame Chauchat is a Russian, and Tadzio is a
Pole. Both are thus Slavs, and both therefore represent the Asiatic. The MaBic
Mountain elaborates this strange racial logic more fully, abstractly, and ironi-
cally than Death in Venice. The loud, sloppy, barbarian Russian couple~Joachim
and Mann's narrator use these adjectives~whose room adjoins Castorp's has
already heen mentioned. The first time he sees them, as they cross the dining
room, a family is sitting at their "Bad Russian" table. Earlier on that morn-
ing, and in the same room, there had been a family, with children, that spoke
Russian. Similarly, there is a large Russian family in the hotel lobby where
Aschenbach waits for dinner on his first day in Venice. In the novel as well as
the novella, Russians thus seem to represent fecundity. Several other people,
including Marusja and Doctor Krokowski, speak Russian at Castorp's table
that same morning. Mann's narrator later calls their language soft, as jfit were
boneless, and wildly foreign. Aschenbach, before he changes his mind and
travels to Venice instead, vacations on an island off the coast of Istria, an island
where the locals speak in Wildly foreign sounds. Presumably, these people are
speaking Serbo-Croatian. Later, Tadzio's soft and blurry language is music to
Aschenbach's ears. Tadzio, of course, speaks Polish. Mann thus uses the same
set of adjectives to describe three different Slavic languages. Joachim, more-
over, is studying Russian. He says that he hopes it will give him a professional
advantage, hut he could also use it to converse with MarLlsja, whose name
Castorp mispronounces, calling her "Mazurka." This allusion to the Polish
dance links her to Tadzio and further conflates Slavic cultures. The only Poles
in the novel are the ones who feud among themselves. Pribislav Hippe was
not far from heing Polish, though, for he emhodied a mixture of Germanic
and Wendish-Slavic blood, as Mann puts it. (The Wends are a Slavic people
 232 Ellis Shookman

who have long lived in eastern Germany.) What is more, the shape of his face
earned him the nickname "the Kirghiz," which links him to Mongolia and
thus connects all these Slavic characters to Asia. Settembrini observes simi-
lar traits when he rails against the Asian element at the sanatorium, seeing
Tataric faces wherever he looks.
Castorp has already learned that Settembrini is opposed to what he calls
the Asiatic principle, the immobility and inaction of the Orient. As Settem-
brini tells Naphta, moreover, he is a European, an Occidental. Similar empha-
sis is placed on Aschenbach's Europeanness. He has been busy with tasks set
for him by the European soul, Mann writes, and has never even been tempted
to travel beyond Europe. Aschenbach's relationship to the Asiatic, not least in
the form of Asiatic cholera, is less abstract, though, and less explicit. It is also
personal, as far as he seems to know, whereas Settembrini not only decries
Castorp's weakness for the Asiatic but also tells him that Germany will have
to choose between the East and the West. At times, Settembrini expresses such
ideas in terms so extreme that they sound ironic. He tells Castorp not to let
himself be infected by the Russians' concepts, for example, and he dispar-
ages the Russians themselves as "Parthians and Scythians."lx He is also upset
by France's alliance with Russia-that is, with "Scythian Byzantium."l9 This
phrase recalls the mortuary chapel Aschenbach sees in Munich, a Byzantine
structure. A further common motif, however, confirms that the "Asiatic" is
presented differently in The MaBic Mountain than it is in Death in Venice. In the
novella, Mann describes the Adam's apples of two sinister men: the wanderer
at the cemetery and the lead street singer at the hotel. Both are agents of
death and Dionysus, the god supposed to have come to Greece from Asia. In
the novel, Mann repeatedly describes the Adam's apple of Anton Karlovitch
Ferge, a simple salesman who has traveled all over Russia, as "good-natured."
Mann, then, despite his ethically tinged ethnography, does not always imply
that the "Asiatic" characters in his novel are likely to overrun and undermine
Europe.
The same is true of forces embodied by ancient Greek gods. Those forces,
too, appear less threatening in The MaBle Mountain than in Death in Venice. Other
classical references likewise show how the novel can seem less ominous than
the novella. The gods at issue are Hermes and-as just suggested-Dionysus.
The presence of Hermes seems obvious when Mann often calls the fluid
in Castorp's thermometer "Mercury." This god is also indirectly invoked
when Naphta teaches Castorp about the historical connection between
Freemasonry and alchemy. Castorp says he has always liked the word her-
metic, and he thanks Naphta for explaining the notion of hermetic pedagogy.
This word and this notion alike are derived from Hermes Trismegistus, that
 The Magic Mountain 233

is, Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. Naphta is also trying to wean Cas-
torp from Settembrini, who often strikes a notable pose. Several times, he
is said to stand gracefully, with his feet crossed, and to lean on his walking
stick or gesture with his toothpick. In Death In Venice, this same pose is struck
by the wanderer, who leans on his walking stick, with his feet crossed, as
Aschenbach sees him at the cemetery in Munich. His arm propped on his
side, the wanderer is also similar to Tadzio, who sometimes stands in a similar
way, for example, at the end of the novella, when Mann calls him a "psycha-
gogue"-a conductor of souls. One of Mann's notes for the novella states
that this term described Mercury, who as Hermes conducted souls to Hades.
In his frequent pose, Settembrini seems to represent Hermes, then, and thus
to conduct Castorp's soul down to a \vorld of the dead. The wanderer in Death
In Venice is sinister and aggressive, though, and he and Tadzio lead Aschenbach

toward death. Settembrini is friendlier, and he attempts to dispel Castofp's

Romantic fascination with death.
The other god that Mann invokes is, as noted, Dionysus. He seems pres-
ent in Peeperkorn, who orders and drinks much wine and champagne, and
who, one evening, directs a bacchanal. Peeperkorn is also Dionysian insofar as
he extols sex and emotion. When Castorp celebrates Mardi Gras, moreover,
and lusts for Madame Chauchat, muttering "My God!" he echoes a phrase
that occurs to Aschenbach when celebrants of Dionysus draw near in his wild
dream: "The foreign god!" The obscene symbols that Settembrini tells Castorp
adorned the ancients' sarcophagi may similarly recall the obscene symbol that
those celebrants raise, Castorp's lust and his interest in those symbols, however,
are reported in a way that makes him look a little silly, Like Peeperkorn, nei-
ther of these possible allusions to Dionysus seems meant to be taken entirely
seriously. Finally, when Castorp watches Joachim being examined, he thinks
that he was always less soldierly than his cousin, more interested in warm
baths and good food and drink. This thought parallels Aschenbach's memory
of a line from the Odyssey about the Phaeacians, whose easy life induded feasts
and warm baths. When Mann tells how only the sensual, the frosty heat of
the sun affects Castorp during his first October in Davos, moreover, readers
might recall that Aschenbach remembers a line, from Plutarch \ Hrotikos, about
how the sun turns our attention to sensual things. In Death III Velllce, these
allusions to Homer and Plutarch sho\\' Aschenbach's growing interest in, and
infatuation with, Tadzio. Their apparent echoes in The MaRie Mountain, while
germane to its story, do not seem as portentous. Like Castorp's consumption
of pomegranate juice-a bygone event that he naively announces, ignorant of
its mythological link to Persephone-these further echoes of ancient Greece
seem less foreboding, even if the forces audible in them may be as dangerous.
 234 Ellis Shookman

A last example of such similarities and differences hetween The MaHic

Mountain and Death in Venice is Hans Castorp's vision in the chapter "Snow." As
noted above, he gets back onto his skis after he has that vision, resisting the
lure of decadence-and of death-better than Aschenbach. This differ-
ence is striking, given how similar, in other respects, Castorp's vision is to
Aschenbach's own hallucinations and dreams. Even the setting in which he
has it recalls Aschenhach's story. Castorp finds life in the snow like life at the
beach. Snow resemhles sand, he reflects, and walking in snow is like walking
in dunes. The natural scene created by both sea and snow is one of primeval
monotony, moreover, and Castorp is surrounded by primeval silence and
prime\al stillness in the winter wilderness. His environment therefore recalls
Aschenhach's sphere on the Lido and Aschenbach's daydream in Munich,
that vision of a primeval wilderness. Castorp sees nothingness in the hlind-
ing snow, in fact, and heing inclined to nothingness is one of Aschenbach's
reasons for loving the sea. Each of Mann's protagonists loses his sense of
direction: Castorp as he explores the Alpine slopes, Aschenbach as he pur-
sues Tadzio through Venice. for both, this disorientation is psychological
and emotional, not simply topographical. When Aschenbach loses his way,
he sits down at the edge of a fountain, imagining he is Socrates speaking to
Phaedrus. His slack lips utter some of what goes through his mind. Simi-
larly, when Castorp realizes he is not getting anywhere, his lips are numb
and he talks to himself. Like these circumstances surrounding his vision,
that vision itself is reminiscent of what Aschenbach "sees." Castorp envisions
a luxuriantly blooming park. He hears birds singing, and it is softly raining.
He also envisions a bay and islands from which palm trees rise. This pleasant
Mediterranean seascape stands in idyllic contrast to the swamp Aschenbach
imagines in Munich. That tropical swamp is steamier and more luxuriant;
it contains stranger birds and palm trees that protrude more suggestively.
The events Castorp witnesses seem both more restrained and more exces-
sive than what occurs in Aschenbach's dream of Dionysus. The calls of the
young horsemen Castorp sees sound somehow enchanting. The flutes that
Aschenhach hears likewise sound enchanting, but in an insistent and visceral
way. The shepherd Castorp sees is standing much as Settembrini does when,
as explained ahove, he resembles the wanderer who appears to Aschenhach
at the cemetery. This shepherd, too, thus seems to embody Hermes. Like the
wanderer, he also stands in an elevated location, but like Settemhrini, he is
not threatening, for he simply watches over nearhy goats. While the frenzied
celehrants in Aschenbach's dream rip apart and devour such goats, more-
over, the hags in Castorp's vision tear apart and devour a child. On halance,
then, Castorp's vision is at least as dark as what Aschenhach "sees." It is thus
 The Magic Mountain 235

all the more remarkable that he survives it and even draws from it the lesson
that, for the sake of goodness and love, one should not let one's thoughts be
ruled by death.
This striking lesson, however, confirms that The MaH,e Mountain is a cou nter-
part-a humoristic one-to neath in Venice. Reflecting on his vision. C:a.~torp
puts death into perspective. Like the sun-people he sees. he serenely regards
it as part of life but not all of life. For a moment at least, the novel thus
surpasses the novella, a work that presents death in a different and far less
accepting way. Many of the similarities and differences adduced here lead to
this same conclusion. As noted, the two works have significantly comparahle
scenes, subjects, characters. and classical references. The novel often treats
these common elements not only at greater length or in greater detail but
also in a way that is more encompassing, balanced, reflective, abstract, or
ironic, or that appears less dire. This is the case with the subjects of form-
especially literary form-and soldierly diScipline or ascetic composure; with
Castorp's resemblances to Aschenbach, not least as a lover; with Mann's
conflation of Slavic and "Asiatic" traits; and with his allusions to ancient
Greek gods and authors. Further similarities and differences emerged in
the foregOing comparisons of Castorp's and Aschenbach's arrivals and of
Mann's remarks on time, knowledge, and psychoanalysis. The MaBie Mountain
can properly be called a counterpart to Death in Venice, then, not only in the
general sense that these two works are alike and different, but also in the spe-
cific sense denoted by the word humoristisch. The novel, that is, takes the dark
sides of life addressed in the novella as well-obsession, irrationality, illness,
and death-more philosophically, conSidering them more calmly and from
a superior point of view. It thus implies that Mann had gained a new, less
grim, outlook on human existence.
This conclusion is not contradicted by the fact that Castorp soon forgets
the humane lesson he draws from his vision or that readers lose Sight of him
as he slogs through a battlefield, unlikely to survive World War I. Mann's nar-
rator regards this final scene, and CastOfp's probable death, from a point of
view that is equally humoristic, that puts such things into perspective-in
fact, that is literally superior to the world below. The ultimate attitude of the
novel, one might say, is thus commensurate with the altitude of its setting.
In any event, that attitude seems humuristir in the serious sense of the word
humori.ltisch. Mann cannot have known in advance all that would happen in his
novel. Indeed, as so frequently in his career, he produced a work much more
ambitious than the one he planned. In the end, however, despite the changes
it underwent, The Ma8ie Mountain thus turned out to be just what Mann said he
intended in the beginning: a humoristic counterpart to Death in Venice.
 236 Ellis Shookman

Notes

1. "[Humor und IronieJ," in Thomas Mann, Crsammelte Werke, vol. II (frankfurt J.m
Main: Escher, 1(60),80\-805. This edition is hereafter cited as CW.
2. The first of these statements, made in July 1913, mentions that he was preparing
another novella, a "sort of humoristic counterpart" ("eine Art von humoristischem
CegenstUrk") to his Venetian one (letter to Ernst Bertram, July 24, 1913, yuott'd in
/)i(hter iiber Ihre f),d,tunfjfn: Thomas Mann: Teil1188<J-1917, edited by Hans Wysling and Mar-
ianne hscher (IMunich:1 Heimeran/S. Fischer, 1(75),451. This work is hereafter rited
as DiiD. Six weeks later, he added that he was working on a story set in Davos that
would be a counterpart to Death in Venice. The stvle of this new story was completely
different, he wTOte, easv and humoristic, though the love of death recurs (letter to
Hans von HUlsen, September 9, IY13, DiiD 451). In 1925, Mann noted that The MaRlc
MountUin was originally concei\'ed very modestly, as a kind of satyr play to go with Death
in Venice (letter to Oskar A. H. Schmitz, April 20, 1925, DiiD 495). He elaborated on this
idea in lY26, writing that he planned the novel as a grotesyue story in which fascina-
tion with death-a fascination that had been the theme of Death in Venice-would be
gh'en a comic twist (LUheck al.1 BeiStiBe Lehensform, in GWII: 395). In 1930, he said that he
took the easy, "English" tone of this new story as if to recover from the severity of
his novelistic tragedy about a loss of dignity. He equated this narrative tone with the
humoristic itself (LebensabriJ3 [1930], in GW 11: 125-126). In 1933, Mann recalled that he
envisioned writing a humoristic or a grotesque variation on the theme of fascination
with death, a fascination that had been presented tragically in Death in Ven/ce. He also
observed that the humoristically exact breadth of the novel's first chapters made him
fear that this new work would both be and take longer to write than he expected, and
he concluded that the grotesque novella he had planned turned out be a panorama of
its age, to have philosophical and even mystical aspects, and to be a large-scale BildunB-
sroman, a novel of personal development, that he had not originally entertained (letter
to George C. Pratt, November 24, 1933, DuD 542). In 1935, he similarly recalled how his
modestly and humoristicaUy conceived novel had turned out to show the mind and
soul of prewar Europe (letter to John C. Munson, May 30, 1935, DUD 545).
3. Mann also observed that he had almost finished Death in Venice when he went
to visit his ailing wife, Katia, at a sanatorium in Davos in 1912. The new story he
planned was to have the air of death and amusement he found there. Furthermore,
he explained that each work ,vas supposed to be a short story for Simplids.<imu.<, the
satirical magazine. Mann also spoke again of the expansive "English-humoristic" style
in which he recovered from the severity of Death in Venice, What is more, he envisioned
a simple hero and a comic conflict (bnfuhrunB in den "ZauherherB' " in GW II: 606--608).
4. Gerhard If/ahf/a: Dus wolJe deutsche Wiirternucll (GUtersloh: Bertelsmann, 1(67), s.v.
"Humnr": 'Tahigkeit, auch die Schattenseiten des Lehens mit heiterer Celassenheit u.
 The Magic Mounrain 237

geistiger Oberlegenheit zu betrachten, Uberlegene Heiterkeit, heitere seel.

Crundhaltung."
5. Duden: Deut5ch~s lJnlversaiwiirterhuch (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1(83),
s.\. "Humor": "I. ... Gabf' f'ines Menschen, der lInzulanglichkeit der Welt u. der
Menschen, den Schwierigkeiten u. Millgeschicken des Alitags mit heiterer Gelassen-
heit zu begegnen ... 2. sprachliche, kUnstlerische o. a. Aullerung einer von Humor (I)
bestimmten Geisteshaltung; Wesensart ... 3.... gute Laune. friihliche Stimmung."
6. G~rhard WahniJ Das iJ'ofie deutsche Wiirterbuch (CUtersloh: Hertelsmann, 1967), S.\'.
"CegenstUck": "zu einem Gegenstand den Cegensatz bildendes StUck. Cegensatz: zu
einem Cegenstand passendes, ahnl. StUck, Pendant"; Duden. Deutsches lJlllversaiwiirterhuch
(Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1(83), S.\'. "GegenstUck": "J.l'erson "d. Sache,
die einer anderen Person oder Sache vi)llig entspricht ... 2. Cegenteil."
7. Der Zauherher!J, edited by Michael Neumann, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: f'ischer,
2002), J: 130. Man n's von '''i8ine/lem und humoristischem Typus is rendered as "with an original,
droll face" in The MU81f Mountain, translated by John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 19(5),
82. This latter work is hereafter cited as The MaH,e Mountain.
8. Der Zauherher!J, I: 97; The Mawe Mountarn, 60.
9. Der Zauherber8, 1: 751. Woods renders Mann's verbis.len-humonstisch as "in its own
doggedly humorous way" in The MaBie Mountain, 489.
10. In 1923, he wrote that he found in Spain the element that plays a humoristi-
cally hidden role in the symbol of the starched and ruffled collar that Hans Castorp's
grandfather wears (letter to Ernst Bertram, June 10, 1923, DiiD 473). This element is
presumably extreme composure or form. In 1950, he added that the novel's humor-
istic symbolism revolved around man, around the question of the human state and
condition. That symbolism, while humoristic, thus appears meant to convey a very
serious subject. Furthermore, Mann said that the novel humoristic ally distances itself
from Settembrini's democratic rhetoric and political bel canto (Meine Zeit, in GW 11:
315--316). In 1939, he called Settembrini a "humoristic-sympathetic" character (Einfiih-
runB in den "ZauherherH," in GW 11: 613). The traits conjoined by a hyphen in this com-
pound seem antithetical. Settembrini, that is, seems laughable but likeable. In 1934,
Mann wrote that he ",'as sorry to have empoisonl'd and biased Cerhart Hauptmann
with his humoristic glorification of him in the character ofPeeperkorn (letter to Julius
Meier-Graefe, May 3, 1934, l)iiD 544). Writing to Hauptmann himself in 1925, Mann
confessed he had "sinned" by taking Hauptmann as a model for Peeperkorn, but he
thought that this word is not just weighty but also tentatively humoristic (letter to
Gerhart Hauptmann, April II, 1925, niil) 4(3). Mann seems to have meant that it
could also be used less seriously. In the same year, moreover, he explained that ein
iJ'ope.l Tier (a big cheese; literally, a big animal), a turn of phrase that he used to describe
the doctor who was the model for Behrens, was a common humoristic expression
and thus not incorrect (letter tlJ Julius Schwabe, July 7.1925, DiiD 5(3). In 1931. Mann
 238 Ellis Shook man

noted that his interest in the world of education emerges in The MaBle MOllntaln with a
kind of humoristic coyness (letter to Oskar BUttner. December 5.1931. Diil) 537).
11. In 1915. he explained that the spirit of his story is "humoristic-nihilistic." its
tendencv being toward death (letter to Paul Amann. August J. 1915. [ljjl) 455). The
word humomtisch here implies the opposite tendency linked in this compound. a ten-
dency toward life. A few months after the novel appeared. Mann said that he had
already earned some seventy thousand marks for it. for what he then dubbed admis-
sion to his "mystical-humoristic aquarium" (letter to Ernst Bertram. February 4.
1925, DuD 489). Like "humoristic-sympathetic"-which he used to describe Settem-
brini--and "humoristic-nihilistic," the expression "mystical-humoristic" conjoins
antithetical elements. The word humoristic stands in contrast to mystlcul. It thus seems
to mean the opposite of "spiritual," "divine," or "supernatural." Nine months later,
though. Mann used humoristisch to mean somt:thing greater. As he said then, The MaRie
Mountain is a book that, although it treats of death, is friendly to life. He noted that this
inner quality announces itself, externally, through humor. He also remarked that The
Ma8lc Mountain might be the only humoristic novel of its day. adding that this was no
small claim when one considers how closely the humoristic is related to the epic itself
(letter to Robert Faesi, November 21, 1925, DUD 511). He seems to have meant both
that his humor is a sign of an attitude favorable to life and that the narration of all
prose fiction is essentially humoristic. In each case, humoristisch has a connotation that
transcends what is simply nonmystical.
12. "'Der Humorist lustwandelt innerhalb der Unendlichkeit.'" Pariser Rechenschaft,
in GW 11: 65.
13. When he wrote about Schnitzler's apeq:u again in 1950, he said that it pleased
him because he felt he was foremost a humorist. He liked nothing better, he wrote,
than making people laugh (letter to Hans Mayer, June 23, 1950, DiiD 576). Given how
often Mann elsewhere used the word humoristisch in a more serious way, this statement
should not be mistaken to mean that he just liked to be amusing.
14. Der ZauberberB, 518; Woods renders Mann's petite tache hum ide as "little moist spot"
in The MaBlc Mountain, 336.
15. This role is suggested by two scholars who comment on the humor found in
Mann's other works. Regarding his short fiction, Werner HotTmeister remarks both
that Mann's humor is a significant component of his prose and that it renders inad-
equacies and absurdities of human existence acceptable and aesthetically enjoyable;
"Humor and Comedy in Mann's Short Fiction," in AppTOuches to Teat"hln8 Mann's Death
In Venice and Other Short Fiction, edited by Jeffrey B. Berlin (New York: Modern Language
Association, 1992),69-70. Eberhard Hilscher observes that Mann possessed the gift of
humoristically rising above adversity and of having a humanizing effect through his
liberating cheerfulness or serenity. Hilscher finds proof of this gift in the humoristic
tone of Mann's late correspondence. The role that humor appears to play in The MafJIc
 The Magic Moul1tail1 239

Mountain, in fact, may best be characterized by the title of Hilscher's review of that cor-
respundence, a title that refers to Mann's dealing with life humoristically: "Humorist-
ische Weltbewaltigung," Neue Deutsche Literatur 16.X (August I%X): 177···179.
16. Herman Meyer comt's dose to grasping its meaning when he explain> \\hy the
novel is Mann's first completely humoristic work; Vas Zitat in der ErziihlkUll$l (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1961), 109-111. He stresses what Mann called its "English-humoristic" style.
By addressing its readers, especially in digressions on the concept of time, he argues,
Mann's narrator encourages them to comprehend its unity of form and content.
Mann turns the act of narration into a formal element, that is, using humoristic
means to make the rcal seem symbolic. This formalistic explanation is good as far as
it goes, but it docs not convey the wider range and greater depth of Mann's humor.
Kate Hamburger does, but she excludes He Ma8'" Mountain from Mann's humoristic
works. It is an ironic and symbolic novd, according to her, not a humoristic one,
despite its humorously drawn characters such as Behrens and Settembrini; Drr HUll/or
bei Thomas Mann (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 196.'i), 47-.'i1. Similarly,
Helmut Koopmann finds The Ma8'( Mountain more ironic than humoristic, despite its
many humoristic scenes. Castorp's stance between Naphta and Settembrini is ironic,
not humoristic, he contends, and the novel shows how irony, not humor, is expressed
dialogically; "Humor und Ironie," in Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, edited by Helmut Koop-
mann (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1990),850-851.
17. Ronald Peacock notes the range of Mann's humor, for example, but also calls
The MaBie Mountain a macabre, devastating, and lurid comedy. Hans Castorp's discovery
that he has a temperature is an innocuously funny incident, Peacock thinks, and how
he sees his first dying patient and then encounters Madame Chauchat shows Mann's
visionary comic imagination. Peacock calls the latter scene a complex comedy of mis-
understanding; "Much Is Comic in Thomas Mann," in Critical Essays on Thomas Mann,
edited by lnta M. Ezergailis (Boston: Hall, 1988), 178-179, 182-183, 190. Andre Banuls,
who likewise notes the broad extent of Mann's humor, and mentions that such
humor includes sympathy for one's fellow human beings, and lists Settembrini's
noble quixotism as one type of the comical in Mann's works; "Ironie und Humor bei
Thomas Mann," in his Phantastisch zwecklos> E.I5uy.l iiher Literatur (Wlirzburg: Konigshau-
sen & Neumann, 1986), 89. Erika A. Wirtz explains Settembrini's funny yet histori-
cally accurate name, calls Hans Castnrp a tragicomic character, and describes Mann's
mock-heroic compound adjectives; "Thomas Mann, Humorist and Educator, Modern
LanBuaBes 47.4 (1966): 145-146. Finally, Hugo Siebenschein thinks that l'eeperkorn is not
the only instance of humor in Mann's novel. The other instances are presumably not
as individual or "decorative," to use Siebenschein's terms, but larger or "tectonic." He
does not enumerate them, though; "Ober Thomas Manns Altershumor," in Vollen.t-
un8 und Grolie Thomas Manns, edited by Ceorg Wenzel (Halle [SaaleJ: Verlag Sprache und
Literatur, 1962),202.
 240 Ellis Shookman

18. This bult is least obvious in the most influential of them, the interpretation
given by T. J. Reed. He considers the novel as the satyr play Mann intended, discern-
ing motifs, concepts of fate. and stylistic means that it shares with Death In Venice. That
satyr plas would have been a tour de force, he argues, since Hans Castorp's fate was
to be more than a comical echo of Aschenbach's. As Reed explains, "The humour
is not that gratuitous"; Thomas Mann. The Uses of TradItIOn. 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon,
IlJ96), 2.11. Also in Reed's '''Der Zauberberg': Zeitenwandel und I)edcutungswandel
IlJI2-1lJ24," in Besiehti!I'Jnil des 7(/uherhe~qs, edited bv Heinz Sauerel1ig (Biberach an der
Riss: \Vegc und Cestalten, 1974),87. The grotesquely cumic story that Mann intended,
morem'er, became a lllldunt/Sroman. 1ilrich Karthaus adds that the first half of the novel
both follows the pattern of the novella and resembles an actual satvr play. The theme
of Drat" In Ven,,·e is travestied, he says, in that Aschenbach's tragic passion for Tadzio
becomes Caswrp's hardlv forbidden lcwe for Madame Chauchat; "Thomas Mann: Der
7ullherheril (1924)." in Delltghe Ramane des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Paul Michael LUtzeler
(Kiinigstcin: :\ thenaum, IlJK,), lJ6, 101. Thomas Sprecher is struck by the structural
and linguistic parallels between the two works. He also writes that the novel would
h,1\ e been an artistic dead end had it remained Just a counterpart to the novella, and
he notes that the novel's social dimension, too, makes it more than a parody and con-
trafact of Death m Venice; "Davos in der Weltliteratur: Zur Entstehung des Zauberberils,"
in IJas "ZauberberR "-Symposium 1994 In Davo.l, edited by Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1994), 14,32,34. Michael Neumann observes that Mann's account,
in 1915, of his pedagogical and political intentions in the novel shows him shedding
the humoristic-parodistic grotesque he had initially imagined; Thomas Mann. Der Zauber-
berB, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 21. Quoting the same account, Michael
Beddow writes that the novel was "already something more ambitious than a comic
'cha!;er' to Death in Venice"; "The MaBie Mountain," in The CambridBe Companion to Thomas Mann,
edited by Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 138. Her-
mann Kurzke remarks that the novel, like the novella, tells of "depersonalization," of
a shattering bourgeois identity; Thomas Mann: Epoche-Werk-Wlrkunil (Munich: Beck,
1(85), ]lJ3-194, 210. Hans Wysling adds that Mann opposed his humor to a fascination
with death and that such humor, albeit only tenuously, enabled him not to be para-
lyzed by pessimism and nihilism; "Der Zauberberg," in Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, edited
bv Helmut Koopmann (Stuttgart: Kri.iner, IlJlJO), 421. Eugene Goodheart thinks The
MaRie Mountam fails to test the seriousness of its ideas. He finds its spirit comic, ques-
tioning Mann\ seriousness about representing disease and death; "Thomas Mann's
Comic Spirit," in A Companion to Th"ma.l Mann'.1 "The MUIF' Mountam, " edited by Stephen
I). ])owdl'll (Columbia, SC: Camden House, IlJ(9), 49-51. John S. Martin cites the
theme of (:ircean seduction in both works, calling it a vestige of Mann's plan to write
a "humorous companion-piece" to Death In Venice; "Circean Seduction in Three Works
hv Thoma., Mann." Modern [anilua.qr Notes 78.4 (( )ctober 1(63): .1.'i2. Kenneth Weisinger is
 The Magic Mountain 241

not surprised that the tv,o works have the same historical setting, given that The Malji(
MountaIn began as such a complementary piece; "Distant Uil Rigs and (lther Erections,"
in A CompanIOn to Thomas Mann's "The Mafjle Mountain," edited by Stephen D. Dowden
(Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999),214 n 2S. Ludwig Haeskr regards Mann's two
works as complementary variants of the myth of Orpheus. Both describe Orphic jour-
neys to the underworld, he explains, and both show perverse denials of the reality of
death; "Der Mythos des Orpheus und seine literarische Cestaltung im Tod In Venedlfj
und im ZauberberB Thomas Manns," Jahrhueh der P.lychoanalyse 44 (2002): 282-283, 288-289.
19. Most thus agree with Reed.
20. Kurzke writes that both works show a process of personal disintegration,
though, and Wysling concludes that Mann, in the novel, barely escapes pessimism and
nihilism. Neither of these scholars thinks the novel is a Iltldunfjsroman.
21. Goodheart reads The Mawc Mountain as comic and says that his doing so is in the
spirit of Mann's intention to write a counterpart to Death In Venice.
22. These are the possibilities raised by the comments of Reed, of Kurzke and
Wysling, and of Goodheart, respectively.
23. The parallels that strike Sprecher, fo:)r example, include the motif of travel, the
fact that Aschenbach's and Castorp's trips take them to extreme regions, the unusual
love stories, the fascination with death, the omnipresence of Hermes, an international
setting, and the fact that Mann says little about social and political structures,
24. Invoking Freud, for example, Erich Heller maintains that Aschenbach's inabil-
ity to leave Venice shows his true will, for which he is personally responsible, and that
Hans Castorp's remaining in Davos illustrates the same psychic concept; "Psycho-
analyse und Literatur," in JahresrinB 56/57 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1956),
76. Manfred Dierks recalls that Doctor Krokowski's name comes from Mann's notes
for Death in Venice. He also contends that the return of Aschenbach's repressed feel-
ings oflove lay at the core of Mann's conception of The Magic Mountam, in which Hans
Castorp experiences such a return; "Doktor Krokowski und die Seinen: Psychoanal-
yse und Parapsychologie in Thomas Manns Zuuherherg," in [Jas "Zauherberfj"-Symposlum
1994 In Davos, edited by Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1994),
179,181. Furthermore, Dierks thinks Mann applies Schopenhauer's metaphysics more
systematically in the novel than in tht:' novella; Sludien 21/ Mylho-, und Psy(ho{0!lle hel Thomas
Mann (Bern: Francke, 1972),43. SS, S7. Michael Maar explains how both works suggest
the proximity of the Dionysian and have characters conllating I )ionysus and Hermes.
Maar also links the ways in which Aschenbach and Hans Castorp perish, and he tells
how both works tie intellectual or poeti,- creativity to sexual procreation; Geister und
Kunst: NeuIBkeitenausdern Zauberherg(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997), 168-169, lSI, 2SS.
Hans-Bernhard Moeller says that the novella and the novel both associate Hermes
with the concept of time; "Thomas Manns vent:'zianische Cotterkunde, Plastik und
7eitlosigkeit," Deutsche Vlertet;ahrsschrtfi .fur Ltteraturwlssenscha.fi und (;elstesgeschlchte 40.2 (J une
 242 Ellis Shookman

1%6): 14.)5. Susan Sontag writes that disease reduces Aschenbach but promotes Castorp.
In the novella, disease is the penalty for secret love, she adds, whereas in the novel it
l'xpresses such love; Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Ciroux, 1(78),37.
25. In 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of World War I, he wrote that war
would burst into the depravity described in The MaBie Mountam, as its solution. He was
also pleased to hear someone tell him that the spirit of Death in Venice is soldierly (letter
to Samuel Fischer, August 22,1914, DuD 454). Mann thus implied that both books have
a militaristic component. In 1915, he similarly said that he saw no other possibility of
concluding his novel than with the outbreak of the war. The novella, he added, con-
tained his premonition of the reality of that war (letter to Paul Amann, August 3, 1915,
DuD 455). He also described the Romantic component of both works. In 1919, he said
that the basic themes of The MaBie Mountain-Romanticism and Enlightenment, death
and virtue-were those of Death in Venice (letter to Josefl'onten, June 6,1919, DuD 459).
In 1926, he agreed the novel and the novella were both an'hromantic, also noting his
debt to Nietzsche, who had overcome Romanticism (letter to Ernst Fischer, May 25,
1926, DuD 520). In 1930, he again referred to how both works deal with the Romantic
(letter to Otto Forst de Battaglia, January 27,.1930, DuD 531-532). In the same year,
Mann also said that both had been intended as brief diversions from his work on Felix
Krull; (Lebensabrij/ [1930J, in GW II: 125). In his introduction to The MaBic Mountain in 1939,
he wrote that it was difficult and nearly impossible to talk about The MaBic Mountain
without mentioning its ties to his other works, among them Death in Venice (Einfuh-
runB in den "ZauberberB," in GW 11: 603-604). In On Myself, a year later, he explained the
specific connection between the novella and the novel. In general, he said, the old
contains elements of the new, and the new takes up and develops elements of the old.
This, he continued, was the relationship of Death in Venice and The MaBie Mountain. In
Aschenbach's story there are already traces of a post-bourgeois attitude, he explained,
and The MaBie Mountain is still, in part, a Romantic book (On Myself, in GW 13: 151-152).
Mann stated this idea again when discussing motifs that the two works have in com-
mon. In 1946, he said that the heroic motif occurs in Aschenbach as well as Joachim
(letter to Hans Albert Maier, January 18, 1946, DUD 565). A year later, he explained that
The MaBic Mountain contains all the essential motifs of his work up to Death in Venice, but
that it also, already, enters into a new world, forming a bridge between epochs (letter
to Jean Fougere, November 7,1946, DuD 566).
26. "So finde ich VergnUgen daran, wie in dem meinen [Lebensplan, E. S.J die
IX'iden Haupterzahlungen zu den groBen Romanen und diese zueinander stehen,
Tonio Krl)ger' mit 'Buddenbrooks,' 'DerTod in Venedig' mit dem 'Zauberberg' korre-
spondiert und wiederum dieser genau so das dichterische GegenstUck zu dem Roman
des H.infundzwanzigjahrigen bildet wie die venezianische Untergangsgeschichte das-
jenige dn I1nrdischen JUnglingsnovel1e." LebensubrifJ (1930), in GW 11: 135.
27. James F. White, The Yale Zauberhe~q-Manusmpt (Bern: Francke, 1(80), xvi.
 The Magic Mountail1 243

28. Der Zauberber8, 339; The Ma8ie Mountain, 220.

29. "fhe Maaie Mountain, 701. "Scythian Byzantium" is Woods's rl'lllkring of Mann's
dem /ryzantinisrhen Skythentum from Der Zauherher8, 1077.

Bibliography

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Uber Literulur, 84-·-96. WGrzburg: Kiinigshausen & Neumann. 1986.
Reddow, Michael. "The MaHir Mountain." In The Cambridaf Companion to Thomas Mann, cdit~d
by Ritchie Robertson. 137-150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Bulhof, Francis. Wartindex zu Thomas Mann, Der Zauber/lera. Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University
Microfilms, 1976.
Dierks, Manfred. Studien zu Mythos und Ps.ych%8ie hei Thomas Mann. Thomas-Mann-Studien
2. Bern and Munich: Francke, 1972.
- - - . "Doktor Krokowski und die Seinen: Psychoanalyse und Parapsychologie in
Thomas Manns Zauberbera." In Das "Zauberbera"-Symposium 1994 in [Javos, edited by
Thomas Sprecher, 173-195. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994.
Goodheart, Eugene. "Thomas Mann's Comic Spirit." In A Companion to Thomas Mann's
"The Masie Mountain," edited by Stephen D. Dowden, 41-52. Columbia, SC: Cam-
den House, 1999.
Haesler, Ludwig. "Der Mythos des Orpheus und seine literarische Gestaltung im Tod
in Venedis und im ZauberbeTa Thomas Manns." JahTbuch deT Psychoanalyse 44 (2002):
281-322.
Hamburger, Kate. Der Humor bei Thomas Mann. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshand-
lung, 1965.
Heller, Erich. "Psychoanalyse und Literatur." In Jahresrins 56/57, 74-83. Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1956.
Hilscher, Eberhard. "Humoristische Weltbewaltigung." Neue Deutsche Literatur 16.8
(August 1968): 177-179.
Hoffmeister. Werner. "Humor and Comedy in Mann's Short fiction." In Approaches to
Teachins Mann's "Death in Venice" and Other ShOTt Fiction, edited by )l'fTrl"y B. Bl"rlin, 68-76.
New York: Modern Language Association, 1992.
Karthaus, Ulrich. "Thomas Mann: Der Zauberbera (1924)." In Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahr-
hundeTts, edited by Paul Michael Liitzeler, 95-109. Kiinigstl'in: Atht'naum, 1983.
Koopmann, Helmut. "Humor und Ironie." In Thomas-Mann-/ landburh. edited by Helmut
Koopmann, 836-853. Stuttgart: Kroner, 1990.
Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Epoche-Werk · .. Wirkuni/. Munich: Beck, 1985.
Maar, Michael. Geister und Kunst: Neuiakeiten <IUS dem Z<luherhera. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1997.
 244 Ellis Shookman

M.mn, Thomas. Dichter uber ihre Dichtun8en: Thomas Mann: Teil1. 1889-1917, edited by Hans
Wysling and Marianne Fischer. [Munich:[ Heimeran/S. Fischer, 1975.
- - - . Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960.
- - - . The Ma8ie Mountain, translated by John E. Woods. New York: Knopf, 1995.
- - - . Der Zauberber8, edited by Michael Neumann. 2 \'ols. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 2002.
Martin, John S. "Circean Seduction in Three Works by Thomas Mann." Modern Lan8uaw
Notes 78.4 (October 1963): 346-352.
Meyer, Herman. Das Zrtat in der Erziihlkunst. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1961.
Moeller, Hans-Bernhard. "Thomas Manns venezianische Gt'itterkunde, Plastik und
Zeitlosigkeit." Deutsche ViertelJahrsschrift Jur Literaturwissensehaji und Geiste.lwsehidrte 40.2
(June 1966): 184-205.
Neumann, Michael. See Mann, Thomas, Der ZlIuberbers.
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- - - . Thomas Mann: The Uses oJTradition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
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Siebenschein, Hugo. "UberThomas Manns Altershumor." In Vollenduns und Grope Thomas
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Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978.
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"The Ma8ie Mountain," edited by Stephen D. Dowden, 177-220. Columbia, SC: Cam-
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White, James F. The Yale Zauberberfj-Manuscript. Thomas-Mann-Studien 4. Bern and
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mann, 397-422. Stuttgart: Kroner. 1990.
 The "Magic Mountain Malady"
Der Zauberberg and the Medical Community, 1924-2006
MALTE HERWIG

• • •

F OR MORE THAN EIGHTY YEARs,ThomasMann's1924taleoflife,disease,

degeneration, and death has both fascinated the general reader and con-
spicuously exercised the imagination of the medical professional. Indeed, not
only has this novel become a classic of twentieth-century fiction but after an
initially skeptical reception by the medical community it has been enshrined
in the canon of literary works that have become required reading for aspir-
ing physicians. I For several generations of doctors, Mann's novel has been a
part of their medical Bildunfj, as we know from numerous personal accounts
in medical journals and diaries. 2 According to Arnaldo Benini. a distinguished
physician and Mann scholar, Oer Z(./uherherR remains one of the few novels that
most physicians around the world are likely to have read.' Dietrich von Engel-
hardt and other historians of medicine have rightly noted that "Krankheit
und Heilung" playa central role in Mann's work.~ In fact, if we wanted to
catalogue all instances in his novels and stories where we encounter some sig-
nificant medical phenomenon we would end up with a rather long list.
Physicians have commented on Mann's WI Irk ti.)r a long time. Recent com-
mentators on Mann's representati()n.~ of pulmonary disease in The MaBie Moun-
tain have tended to portray them as historical snapshots of early tuberculosis
treatments at a time when medicine was not as advanced as it is today. I But

245
 246 Malle Herwig

even today, physicians on the cutting edge of their profession enjoy citing
Mann's powerfully realistic descriptions of the disease and speculating about
the medical conditions endured by his fictional patients.hThere is probably no
other work of modern fiction that gets a citation in such an unlikely place as a
paper on "Vascular Androceptors" published in 200t by the American Society
for Pharmacology and Experimental TIlerapeutics. 7
Der Zauberberg attracted the attention of the medical community immedi-
ately after its publication. In 1925 alone, at least a dozen medical journals in
the German-speaking world published reviews of Mann's highly controver-
sial satire on life in a sanatorium. Though by no means all of these reviews
were negative, Mann felt obliged to answer the attacks of some medical critics
by publishing an open letter in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, the main
organ of the medical profession in Germany, in which he defended the novel's
aim as genuinely medical (iirztlich).
It is precisely this claim by a writer who counted medicine among the
"neighboring spheres of his art" that I propose to investigate here. s I am spe-
cificallv interested in the wav Mann's fictional account of disease was received
/ J

in the medical community, whose representatives scrutinized the novel's

image of disease in the light of their own medical schooling, clinical experi-
ence, and professional interests. From this interaction between the author, his
novel, and its medical readers, there even emerged a curious new variant of
tuberculosis--the Zauberber8krankheit (the Magic Mountain disease).
The author of this famous "Davos novel» used to be regarded by more than
a few doctors as having denigrated their profession. Nowadays, however, in
an ironic reversal of fortunes, he is often invoked as one who legitimizes the
medical community as a guarantor of social status and humanistic Bildung.
Nowhere is this irony more evident than in the place where it all started-in
Davos itself. The former spa, whose thriving business, many feared, had been
threatened and even undermined by Mann and his novel, has in fact rein-
vented itself in part with the help of the very author who once scandalized
the high and mighty among the town's medical elite. The place that once
ostracized him-"in Davos we are no longer welcome," Mann confided to a
friend in 19269-now plays host, at the biennial Davoser Literaturtage, to siz-
able crowds for so-called Erlebniswochen am "ZauberberIJ."
By focusing on the area of cultural representation, I do not mean to dimin-
ish the insights into disease and health, outlined below, which Mann's writ-
ings offer in great abundance. What I am concerned with is that ironic reversal
of fortunes-something that provides a vivid reminder of the vicissitudes
in the sorial negotiation of disease. As with any process of canonization, the
classic status accorded a work of literature does not necessarily indicate some
 The "Magic Maull/ain Malady" 247

universal truth contained therein, but has to be understood in terms of its

cultural significance and its relation to other discourses at a given time, in a
given society. Although much has been written about the thematic signifi-
cance of disease in Mann's work, his confident self-portrayal as a kind of liter-
ary doctor-"among my inner possibilities there has always been that of a
medical existence"l<l-has never heen tested against the particular use medi-
cal practitioners felt his writings might have for their work.
Thus my approach is in the widest sense rezeptionswschichtlich: I shall look at
actual responses from physicians in order to show how definitions of disease
were negotiated between the medical establishment and alternative inter-
preters. Did doctors challenge the writer's authority in treating disease as a
literary topos? Did they find that lessons could be learned from the represen-
tation of disease as presented in The MaBie Mountain-lessons for understanding
a disease's significance to an individual, in a social context, for the institutional
setup and therapeutic practices associated with the treatment of tuberculosis,
or for reforming health care policy? In general terms, this case study may help
to understand the relation between medical accounts, the personal experi-
ences of suffering individuals, and the image of a disease as it exists in the pub-
lic mind. The central question is thus whether fictional narratives can usefully
enhance our understanding of disease and thereby fulfill the "medical aim"
envisaged by Mann.
The medical reviews I survey in this chapter give evidence of the complex
process by which definitions of tuberculosis not only as a biological but also
as a social and psychosomatic disease were developed or, rather, negotiated
in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. From the debate between Mann and
his medical critics, the framing of disease definition in imaginative literature
emerged as a powerful tool of cuI tural diagnosis- Kurkritik as Kulturkritik, Mann
qUipped-and social control, which competed with the authority of insti-
tutionalized medicine not least because of The MaBie Mountain's appeal to an
extraordinarily wide audience.
I also hope to show that there is more to physicians' sustained interest
in Mann's novel than their desire to legitimize their status or to assert their
authority over a medicalized society. ()ver the past two decades, it has become
common currency among social historians of medicine to understand disease
as shaped by its social, historical, and linguistic antecedents and thus to view
medical science as an interpretive practice. As Sander (;ilman writes in Disease
and Representation: "Like any complex text, the signs of illness are read within
the conventions of an interpretive community that comprehends them in
the light of earlier, powerful readings of what are understood to be similar or
parallel texts." II The place of The MUBie Mountain in the curriculum of academic
 248 Maile Herwig

medical training, and the novel's role in so-called reading therapy and as a
frequent point of medical reference, secure the status of Mann's \vork as just
such a powerful text about disease. 12 Health geographers, for instance, have a
special appreciation of the novel, as Wil C,esler has recently suggested in Health
(:'1 Place: "One of the most important ideas that can be carried away from The
MaHle Mountain, I believe, is that knowledge about disease and death, health and
life, can be gained in ways that depart from traditional positivist studies."u
One result of what we might call the humanistic turn in medicine is the
importance lent to fictional narratives for framing disease and investing it
with meaning. In Howard Brody's \vords: "The primary human mechanism
for attaching meaning to particular experiences is to tell stories about them." 14
Literature situates and contextualizes disease and invests the experience of dis-
ease with meaning. These interpretations can not only help patients to make
sense of their condition but also serve as critical correctives to prevailing
medical thought and practice. As Peter Conrad has pointed out, "new disease
designations are not solely the product of medical discovery or knowledge,
but often ... emerge from a complex interaction with sufferers and inter-
ested publics."" In this negotiation of disease between individual patients, the
medical profession, and the general public, imaginative literature like Thomas
Mann's The Magic Mountam has played and continues to playa significant role.

The Gennan Sanatorium of Dr. Mann

During the years when he wrote The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann would
sometimes dress up as a doctor and visit hospitals, surgical theaters, and X-ray
laboratories. He would observe operations, read a considerable amount of medi-
cal literature that he had either acqUired himself or received from physician
friends, and consult with doctors about his novel in progress whenever he had
the opportunity to do SO.'h Having gone to such lengths in his attempt to ren-
der a faithful and accurate description of medical matters, Mann could be for-
given for having been initially optimistic: "All doctors and former patients who
hear about the enterprise are thirsting for the satire," he wrote to his friend
Ernst Bertram (March 16, 1920). However, when the novel came out in 1924 it
was precisely the elements of scathing satire in Mann's description of life in the
Swiss mountain sanatorium that met with fierce opposition from medical crit-
ics, who saw their profession maligned by what they considered to be a highly
negative portrayal of the sanatorium's chief surgeon and staff.
Before we consider whether such criticism was justified, it is worth asking
why doctors deemed it necessary to review in their medical Journals what was
 The "Magic Moutllain Malady" 249

a work of fiction, and on what basis they felt qualified to offer their views on the
novel. From the reviews that appeared within five years of the novel's publica-
tion, it becomes immediately apparent that the medical commu nitv did indeed
see a genuine need to assert its authority in the public debate that was generated
by Mann's descriptions of disease. Jhe MaBie Mountain had quickly reached a wide
audience, and many doctors felt they had to correct what they believed was a
misleading and biased account of tuberculosis and its treatment. One of them,
Alexander PrUssian, wrote as follows in the Miinchner Medizinische Wochenschnfi:
"In the whole of world fiction there is probably no parallel for a two-volume
novel largely treating one specific disease and its course with such an abun-
dance of technical terms. This is done in such an obvious and biased manner
that, in view of the extremely wide readership and the author's distinguished
artistic reputation, the medical community is required to take a stand."17 Simi-
larly, Curt Schelenz pointed out that even physicians who are not usually
interested in literature-and particularly those involved in the fight against
tuberculosis-ought seriously to take note of the book because it contained
a great deal of substance worthy of medical consideration. IX In the Zentralblatt
fiir innere Med,zin, G. Zickgraf wrote that Mann's book is of great importance for
doctors because its literary treatment of medical problems and institutions is
vastly superior to ordinary descriptions of disease and medical issues. 19 Calling
literature and medicine neighboring fields, as Mann had done, Erwin Loewy-
Hattendorf alerted his colleagues in the Zeitschrift Jiir iirztliehe Forthildun8 to the fact
that many medical and scientific problems discussed in specialist periodicals
are also treated "in poetic disguise" in great works of literature, among them
Mann's The MaBie Mountain, which he comments on at length. 20
Most reviewers were careful to draw a distinction between the artistic
qualities of the novel and its medical subject matter, terminology, and specific
descriptions of the disease, purporting to pass judgment only on the latter.
Consequently, nearly all physician reviewers disregarded the novel's symbolic
meaning and focused instead on the painfully realistic portrayal of the prob-
lematic state of Swiss sanatoria. While the majority conceded that Mann's
description of the symptoms, the course, and the treatment of tuberculosis was
accurate, many reviewers took issue with the medical rharallers in the book.
Hofrat Behrens, the sanatorium's director, his assistant I h. Krokowski, and the
nursing staff are frequently criticized as improbahle, l'xaggerated, cynical, cold,
and odious. Writing in Die 71Ierapie dt'f (;ew"wart, Felix Klelllperer concluded that
the disagreeable and sometimes brutal Behrens is a very distasteful colleague:
"A Is Arzt ... ein sehr wenig erfreulichef Standesgenosse."21 Alexander PrUssian,
too, criticized Mann's characterization of the medical personnel, which he
found "downright devastating." He also felt that the author dwelled too much
 250 Malee Herwig

on the repulsive and distasteful aspects of the disease at the expense of ethi-
cal values: "Reading his hook the layman will think that almost everyhody
suffering from tuherculosis of the lungs is bound to degenerate spiritually as
well as morally."22 And Curt Schelenz, one of Mann's most vociferous crit-
ics, went even further, warning of the "considerable damage" that the book
might cause: "To be precise, the greatest damage the book does is to nonmedi-
cal readers, who will form a completely erroneous picture of sanatoria and
their workings. We have nothing to hide ahout the way our sanatoria work,
but we consider it undesirable that unqualified amateurs venture to criticize
us and our patients."2.l
In Die Tuberkulose, a certain Doctor Dehoff took a similar "us versus them"
stance and condemned the "improper description and criticism of medical
measures and personalities by nonphysicians even in the form of a novel."24
Unlike more moderate reviewers such as Loewy-Hattendorf, she flatly denied
Mann the right to comment on something that he "cannot judge ohjectively"
and even accused him of inciting hostility to the medical profession-AnJemd-
unB der MedlZln. From these remarks it becomes obvious that the medical estah-
lishment--especially of course those like Schelenz and Dehoff who specialized
in tuberculosis-felt threatened by what they read as a highly critical (even
though fictional) account of the shortcomings of sanatorium care. We have
here an interesting example of what Charles Rosenberg has called the pro-
cess of "negotiating disease." According to Rosenberg, "disease definitions and
hypothetical etiologies can serve as tools of social control," which structure and
legitimize social relations. 25 Public debates about speCific diseases are such acts
of social negotiation, "in which interested participants interact to produce logi-
cally arbitrary but socially viable, if often provisional, solutions to a dispute."26
It comes as no surprise that the strongest criticism of Mann's novel came
from those who were themselves working in tuberculosis care and felt imme-
diately affected. Before the discovery of streptomycin hy Selman Abraham
Waksman and Albert Schatz in 1943, the treatment of tuberculosis consisted
mainly in often long-term sanatorium care, rest cure, and occasional surgical
intervention such as pneumothorax or thoracoplastic surgery. The sanato-
ria were dependent on a steady stream of wealthy European patients willing
to spend considerable amounts of money and time in these often luxurious
institutions. In The MaBie Mountain, Mann makes much of the elaborate meals
served in the Berghof sanatorium, and he also satirizes the frivolous games
and entertainments that the patients indulge in to pass the time. He was, in
fact, not the first one to highlight the serious institutional shortcomings to
be found in spas such as Arosa and Davos. In 1920 none other than Alexander
PrUssian had published a report in the Miinchner Medizinische Wochenschriji in which
he related his impressions of a trip to Arosa and Davos.27 PrUssian's criticism of
 The "Magic Mouncain Malady" 2')1

the conditions in these spas-especially the many distractions and entertain-

ments that the patients were allowed to indulge in-foreshad()ws much of
what we find in Mann's novel. However, it was only four years later, with the
publication of The MaBlc Mountain, that Davos felt exposed hef()re a European
public and that local doctors and administrators felt their business threatened
hy what they regarded as a defamatory caricature. Rejecting Mann's medical
view's, Davos doctors such as Dehofffeared that less discerning people may be
misled by them. 2x Schelenz spells out what Dehoff only implies, that reading
The MaBie Moulltain may deter potential patients from seeking a CUfe in I )av().';.
Their rejection of Mann's framing of tuberculosis should, therefore, be Sl'l'n
in the context of the social and professional control to which I referred earlier.
It should be seen as an attempt to assert the medical establishment's authority
over the definition of disease and its rejection of alternative definitions, such
as those offered in imaginative literature.
Mann's self-confessed lifelong obsession with disease and degeneration cer-
tainly makes him, in Rosenherg's terminology, an "interested participant" in
the negotiation of the definition of disease. Thus he did not hesitate publicly
to assert his own authority in an open letter, entitled "Vom Geist der Med-
izin," sent to the very journal in whose pages Curt Schelenz had challenged
it. In this brief text, Mann refutes criticism by invoking a number of medical
authorities who had commented favorably on the novel, and he closes self-
confidently with the prediction that it would only be a matter of time before
he would receive an honorary doctorate in medicine. Mann's stance was less
a sign of arrogance than of his sincere conviction that his aims in the MaBie
Mountain were akin to those of medicine. He therefore played down the impor-
tance his critics attributed to the surface medical narrative and emphasized
instead its pedagogical aim-"its service to life, its commitment to health, its
orientation toward the future. That means it is medical.,,24
How much the public image of tuberculosis was indeed influenced by
Mann's portrayal of the disease in The MaBie Mountain is illustrated hy an anec-
dote that the delighted author related to his translator Helen I.owe-i'orter in a
letter ofJanuary 15, 1927: "An Englishman arrives at I )avos and, still at the sta-
tion, his first question is: 'Where is the Cerman Sanatoriulll of I h. Mann?""~'

The Blaming Disease: The Doctor's

or the Patient's Fault?
Whether or not the anecdote ab()ut I h. Mann's sanatorium is true, there is
enough evidence to suggest that Mann's depiction of tuberculosis was widely
intluentiaL Moreover, despite the scandal the novel's publication had caused
 252 Maire Herwig

in large parts of the medical community, some physicians qUickly jumped to

Mann's defense and drew attention to the possible benefits the Tuherkulosero-
man could have for medicine. Klemperer assured his colleagues: "It obviously
is of use to us physicians. It is the source of much stimulus,"31 and Zickgraf
cautioned against dismissing criticism simply because it comes from outside
the medical community: "Anybody, I think, is entitled to criticize, and if it
is done in such a subtle manner we should rather think about the causes of
this criticism and whether we cannot remove them."12 Those who ,velcomed
Man n 's commentary all agreed that his description of the deplorable short-
comings of sanatorium care may have been exaggerated for literary effect but
nonetheless contained a grain of truth. On a more probing level, there was
a consensus among the novel's medical advocates that its most interesting
achievement lay in shOWing how an illness like tuberculosis affects the psyche
and, conversely, how the course of the disease is influenced by psychological
and social constraints and the harmful milieu in which the patients live. Far
from seeing it as an attack on the medical profession, Margarete Levy appreci-
ated the book as "a very serious appeal to the conscience of doctors to protect
their patients from the psychologically damaging influence of that milieu.".13
Instead of dismissing Mann's autocratic Hofrat Behrens and his dubious assis-
tant Krokowski as defamatory caricatures, Helmut Ulrici, himself the director
of a clinic, placed the blame for the deteriorating state of the Berghof sana-
torium and its inhabitants firmly on the shoulders of the two doctors rather
than their creator: "Instead of proViding a supportive example, the Hofrat's
cynical wit increases the [readers'] moral disorientation; he completely fails to
see the intellectual ruin of those in his charge, and ignores the objectionable
activities of his assistant, who explOits the patients' heightened sense of 'last
things' in order to draw them into erotic discussions and highly questionable
psychoanalytical experiments. This too is just another example of the psycho-
logical decline of the patients.".14
Unlike Schelenz and Dehoff, Ulrici and Levy appreciate the fundamental
difference between narrator and author in a work of literary fiction; their
judgment is not clouded by profeSSional misgivings, and they allow them-
selves to be drawn into the novel's argument about disease. This is all the more
important as The Ma8ie Mountain was published at a moment in time when
the psychological side effects of tuberculosis in general and sanatorium care
in particular were (as I will show below) just about to be conceptualized in
medical discourse. All positive reviews of Mann's novel draw attention to this
desideratum and make the point that fictional literature has been ahead of
clinicalllledicine in this regard. Where scientific knowledge was lacking, use-
ful insights into the psychological effects of disease might therefore be drawn
 The "Magic Mouncain Malady" 2')3

from fictional accounts, especially, of course, from the genre of the psycho-
logical novel that had been developed and fine-tuned in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Levy, writing in the Deutsche Medlzinische Wochensehriji, argues: "There is at
present very little medical literature about the relation between tuberculosis
of the lungs and psychological phenomena, whereas laymen haw for a long
time shown great interest in this problem .... This is where the doctor's work,
a sensible psychotherapy alongside and together with the actual medical ther-
apy, ought to start. Thomas Mann's novel challenges us to do just that, and
that is why doctors should see it not as an attack on them, but as a stimulus to
reflection and understanding. ".;'
Indeed, The MaBle Mountain is a classic example of a literary work that focuses
on disease to advance a social diagnosis, and that has had an impact on the
discussion of health policy and the social environment. To cite Charles Rosen-
berg once again: "Disease thus became both the occasion and the agenda for
an ongoing discourse concerning the interrelationship of state policy, medical
responSibility, and individual culpability."'1/, Insightful medical reviewers came
to realize that there was a more profound conception behind the panorama of
physical and spiritual degeneration that Mann had drawn. Thus, Ulrici drew
attention to the inner lives of the patients described in the novel: "The poet
requires a social context in order to show the powerful influence of physical
suffering on psychological development and the corrupting effects of futile
resistance against spiritual degeneration and loss of personal values."l7
In The Magic Mountain, much of the blame is put on the patients themselves,
whose egocentricity and willful seeking of pleasure and distraction or, alter-
natively, whose indifference and fatalistic self-abandon contribute much to
their decline. Medical responsibility and individual culpability are criticized
in equal measure in the novel, and both are framed within the wider context
of the sanatorium's social milieu. Mann tried to encourage this reading in
his open letter and also in private correspondence with doctors. In a letter of
November 15, 1927, to Willy Hellpach, he praised the illuminating manner in
which Hellpach's review treats the medical aspects of The Maw" Mountain, but
added that by looking solely at this aspect, the doctor's diagnosis missed an
important point. Hellpach got the criticism of the curl' (d".\ KlIrkrltische), but
not the cultural criticism (das Kulturkritische).
By combining medical and cultural frames of rell-rt'I1lT, Mann's description
of tuberculosis drew attention to the psychosomatic, s(Kial, and environmen-
tal factors that influenced the c( lurse and cvent ual (lutcome of the disease. The
ensuing debate showed how mudl tht" diagnosis and treatment of this chronic
illness was conceptualized Jlong the lines of firmly held social values, in partic-
ular notions of character, sexualitv, and work. Felix Klemperer found Mann's
 254 Maire Herwig

dl'~cription of the sanatorium as a "place of depravity and licentiousness" to be

l'xaggerated and often distasteful. but he acknowledged: "Tuberculosis and its
institutional treatment pose a psychological danger for the patient, they lead
to mental confusion and dissolution, as a consequence of which the desire to
get better is lost and the 'young people go to the dogs.' "."
One of the pioneers in this area of research was Otto Amrein, the director
of the Altein sanatorium in Arosa. In 1919 Amrein published a pamphlet called
Die Tuberkulose in ihrer W,rkung auj'Psyche und Charakter, in which he outlines the nega-
tive influence that tuberculosis can have on the patients' psyches:w Although
he touches on somatic causes (the effect of toxins generated by the disease), it
is the environmental and institutional aspects and the side effects of tubercu-
losis treatment in sanatoria to which he devotes most of his attention. Particu-
larly children and adolescents suffer when they are forced to live for months
and even years in an institution far away from home, from family, and from
school. According to Amrein, one of the greatest dangers to patients' psyches
is idleness and lack of meaningful occupation. Thus, they carelessly seek thrills
and entertainments that seriously endanger their prospects of being cured.
Alternatively, they may become indifferent and lose any interest in work and
a productive life. The corresponding states of mind-irritability or apathy-
recur literally in some of Mann's chapter headings: 'The Great Petulance" (Die
groBe Gereiztheit) and "Stupor" (Der groBe Stumpfsinn). Amrein's advice is
for patients to receive ethical guidance and for doctors to impose a strict dis-
cipline and regimen of work in their institutions, for "work is one of the best
educators of character.,,40 He also views it as very important to educate patients
about the attitude they ought to adopt toward their disease and about the
experience of suffering: "Nor should one forget ... that the patients' minds can
also be influenced by wrong ideas and wrong attitudes toward suffering."il Shortly
thereafter, in 1920, Prilssian, in his travel report from Davos and Arosa (cited
above), confirmed Amrein's observations. Many of the phenomena mentioned
by Amrein and Prilssian-inc!uding increased libido due to high temperature,
and psychological afflictions like Thermometromanie (the urge constantly to check
one's temperature )-are described vividly in The Magic Mountain. It is perfectly
conceivable that Mann was familiar with both accounts.

The Naming Disease: The "Magic

Mountain Malady"

Felix Klemperer, in his review, identifies "the psychoanalysis of tubercu-

losis and its treatment" as the central idea in Mann's novel~2-an idea he
 The "Magic Moul1Iain Malady" 255

commends as medically incisive, useful, and important: "Finally, I find bril-

liant confirmation and justification of the 'psychologist' Thomas Mann in
a book on The Psyche of the Tuberculosis Patient' by Professor !:rich Stern,
which has only recently been published-months after Mann's MUf/I( Moun-
tarn; whether and to what extent it is influenced by the novel I cannot say. In
his chapters The Psychology of the Chronic Tuberculosis Patient' and The
Influence of Sanatorium Life on the Patient' Stern completely mirrors Mann's
views and reaches the same conclusions."" Even though he cannot say so jilr
sure, Klemperer, it is interesting to note, at least considers the possibility that
Stern's medical text may have been influenced by the noveL 4' Like Loewy-
Hattendorf, Ulrici, Lickgraf, and Levy, he finds Mann's book immensely
useful in its description of the patients' attitudes toward their disease. That
emphasis on the individual experience (Erleben), according to Klemperer, is
one of the most important lessons for doctors to take away from the novel.
He asks rhetorically whether current therapeutic measures-rest cure,
long-term institutional treatment-may not have become too schematic
and one-sided by focusing too much on disease instead of health. Using The
MaBie Mountain to strike a blow for the patient, Klemperer argues: "We ought
to treat the patient, not the disease.'>45 He negotiates between what Arthur
Kleinman has defined as illness as experienced by the patient and the disease
as defined by the medical profession.· 6
The impact on the medical community of Mann's psychological and social
framing of tuberculosis is evidenced most strikingly by the term ZauberberB-
Krankheit (the "Magic Mountain malady"), which came into use only a few
years after The MaBie Mountain's publication to describe the psychological side
effects of tuberculosis care. At the ninth Internationale Arztliche Fortbildung-
skursus in 1927, Willy Hellpach delivered a lecture that was reprinted under
the title "Die Zauberberg-Krankheit" in Die Medizinisehe Welt. Hellpach had
made a name for himself with a study of social pathology, which he defined
as the influence of the social environment (mitmenschliche lTmwelt) on the occur-
rence, manifestation, and development-in qualitative as well as quantitative
terms-of an individual's pathological disposition or disease. In his article, he
presents Mann's novel as a sociopathological panorama of the detrimental
effects that a milieu such as the traditional sanatorium can have on a patient's
attitude toward his sickness. This is how Hdlpach charaderizes Mann's fram-
ing of the "Magic Mountain Malady": "It is not the physical aspects of tuber-
culosis of the lungs alone, it is that psychological component that, perhaps
in conjunction with every tuhercular disposition or primary infection, is fos-
tered hy the hothouse atmosphere of the sanatorium and now itselfhecomes
a silent but constant psychosomatic source of continued, indeed exacerbated,
 256 Malte Herwig

physical illness, and eventually presents an insuperable barrier to recovery.

The sanatorium milieu systematically paralyses the anti-tubercular will to get
well, and it generates a pathological slothfulness: this is the Magic Mountain
maladv."47
In the absence of scientific research on the psychology oftuberculosis, Hell-
pach declines to say for sure whether this disease, as pictured by Mann, really
exists. Like Levy in 1925, he declares that the psychosomatic effects of tuber-
culosis have not been sufficiently conceptualized by clinical medicine, which
means that the doctor's judgment is based to a large degree simply on his
ability to judge human nature (Menschenkenntnis). What Hellpach does affirm
is Mann's unique ability to describe the causes, symptoms, and characteris-
tics of the ZauherberB-Krankhelt, that is, the geopathological effect of the Alpine
setting and the psychopathological social environment of the sanatorium,
both of which contribute to ensnare the patient in the psychological trap his
disease has become. 4x In 1930, Hellpach elaborated these psychosomatic ideas
in a lecture on the "Heilkraft des Geistes" (the healing power of the mind),
in which he emphasized the importance of the patient's will to become well
again. To foster this will, the doctor cannot rely on biomedical science alone
because "the patient must never be merely a scientific case, he must be cured
by the physician with or without science, with a lot of science, or only a little
of it. "19 Hellpach was not averse to criticizing the economics of institutional
care (Mann himself was heavily criticized for caricaturing the profit motive
that played a role in luxury sanatoriums). Furthermore, he stressed that an
important factor on the road to recovery was the patient's ability to eman-
cipate himself from his doctor and to turn his mind to a normal, healthy
life. 50 Thus, Hellpach takes the central message of The MaBie Mountain--what
Mann called its Lebensdienst (service to life )--as a call for institutional reform
and change in health policy. By forcing patients to contribute to the cost of
their treatment one could not only protect the system more effectively from
unnecessary claims but also encourage patients to stay in a sanatorium only
as long as absolutely necessary, and thereby minimize the psychological side
effects caused by long-term care.
Hellpach's intervention marks an important point in the debate about
tuberculosis. a point at which, inspired partly by imaginative literature such as
1he MaBie Mountain and Klabund's story Die Krankhelt. 51 medical thinking about
the disease turned toward broader conceptualizations of tuberculosis, which
included social and moral values. If. as Randall McGO\ven writes. medicine
emerged during the nineteenth century "as one of the dominant paradigms
used to think ahout the nature and destiny of humanity."'z this process has to
be seen as a multilateral negotiation between the various strands of cultural
 The "Magic Mountain Malady" 257

knowledge to which both imaginative literature and medical thought have

contributed.

Showcasing Disease: Thomas Mann

and the Canon of Medical Humanism

Thomas Mann once remarked about Cerhart Hauptmann that one of the
1110st humane characteristics of his art was its penchant for the pathologi-
cal, its inclination to view the human condition in terms of illness-he it
social. psychological, or physical.)' In his novels, stories, and essays, Mann
himself adopted this medical paradigm of the human condition, and as his
texts hecame canonicaL so did the philosophy of disease and health they
espoused. In a eulogy on the occasion of Mann's eightieth birthday in 1955,
a writer for the Pharmazeutlsche Zeilung celebrated Mann as the "nosographer of
our epoch."'" Inspired perhaps by Mann's remark about music and medicine
as neighboring spheres, Hanns Rudolf Fromm described the author's several
medical narratives as comprising a four-movement "Symphonia pathologica."
Curiously omitting Buddenhrooks, he included The Ma8ie Mountain ("Tuberculosis
Pulmonum"), Doctor Faustus ("Lues Venera" and "Meningitis Cerebrospinalis")
and, finally, The Black Swan ("Carcinoma Uteri") and described the medical
paradigm of the human condition as the fundamental chord (Grundakkord) of
Mann's ceuvre.
Since Mann's death in 1955, The Magie Mountain and its author have become
regular objects of celebration in the medical community. One incidence
of this, in medical training, is the frequent reference to (and reverence for)
Mann's works. To give just two examples: in 1965 the Zeitschnfifiir iirzlilt'he Farl-
hi/dung printed an anniversary article on Mann and the "spirit of medicine,""
and in 1974 the Deutsche Medizinist'he Wochenschrift reprinted Mann's 1925 essay,
"Vom Geist der Medizin," together with a commemorative article by Heinz
SauereBig;1Ii These articles continue the favorable lines of argument devel-
oped by some of the early reviewers, particularly the Illedical paradigm of the
human condition. Sauerellig writes that tuhernilosis "is, after all, a kind of
illness particularly suited to making clear the relatio/l of man and society to
illness as such.",17 The articles also emphasi".l· the relevance of Mann's novel to
current debates in medicine and health policy. ()n the occasion of a congress
on "Prevention, Therapy and Rehahilitatioll," held in Davos in 1970, Albert
Schretzenmayr, writing in the Deutsche.1 iir:leh/all, declared that it is "the symp-
tomatology and psychology of the Magic Mountain malady that today we doc-
tors are more interested in than ever before."" Schretzenmayr acknowledged
 258 Malle Herwig

a r('cent resurgence of the disease, which Mann had framed "with such narra-
tive skill and eloquence," in the form of what he called Sozwlkur-Krankheit, that
is, the habit of ordinary patients, encouraged by the opportunities offered by
national health insurance schemes, of taking for granted regularly repeated
cures, for even when these are not medically indicated. Like Hellpach in 1927,
Schretzenmayr takes ammunition from The MaBie Mountain to argue in favor of
reforming of medical welfare and in favor of higher financial contributions to
by the patient: w 'Thomas Mann is right! Doctors and makers of social policy
ought to read the novel a second time, especially today-on the eve of deci-
sive health-insurance and welfare reforms. Such a rereading could open the
reformers' eyes: encouraging individual responsibility for their own health
both on the part of those who are well and those who are sick is the antihiotic
against the modern contamination with Magic Mountain malady."") What
Schretzenmayr, unlike Hellpach, fails to mention is that in Mann's novel
part of the blame is also put on the profit motive that motivated the medical
institutions and practitioners. Had Mann written his book in the 1970s, Hofrat
Behrens and Co. would surely have been all too happy to welcome a great
number of over-insured, middle-class patients to their so-called well ness
establishments.
To illustrate the extent to which Mann has become idolized and instru-
mentalized by parts of the medical community, one need only look at some
of the more recent articles published in medical journals. Already in 1970
Schretzenmayr used a drawing of the author and colorful reproductions of
paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to illustrate his article, which bore the
Technicolor title "Der Zauberberg in Farbe" (The Magic Mountain in Color).
This ornamental showcasing of the author is taken even further in Richard
Carter's "The Mask of Thomas Mann (1875--1955): Medical InSights and Last
Illness," which was published in the Annals of Thoracic Sur8ery.61 In his richly illus-
trated article, which includes a picture of Mann's death mask, Carter offers
a brief summary of Mann's life and work, especially his death, and their rel-
evance for medicine, referring to the author as "one of the most medically
perceptive writers of the century."02
Drawing on an interview with Professor Christoph Hedinger, who per-
formed the autopsy on Thomas Mann at the Zurich Cantonal Hospital, and
on Hedinger's autopsy report of August 1955, Carter concludes that Mann's
death was "caused by a spontaneous rupture of the left common iliac artery
about a centimeter heyond the aortic hifurcation," and relates in clinical detail
how a "massive exsanguinating internal hemorrhage" occurred just before
"the literary giant qUietly dropped off into his final rest at ten minutes to
8 p.m. on the evening of August 12, 1955."0.1 For good measure, Carter throws
 The "Magic Mounlain Malady" 259

in the anecdote that the hospital's chief surgeon, Professor Wilhelm Loffler,
"attended two Nobel laureates during their final illness<:s--James Joyce and
Thomas Mann."M
In a very physical sense then, this famous literary patient has entered medi-
cal lore as a frequent point of reference. As recently as 2003, the authors of an
article on "ruptured abdominal aneurysms" in the Wiener Klinische Wo(henschriji
refer to Thomas Mann and to Albert Einst<:in, whose death was also caused by
that condition. no We have over the last thirty years been able to read the ten
volumes of Mann's diaries, published from 1977 to 1995, but only now have we
literally been allowed a voyeuristic glance into the guts of the great man. By
treating the "literary giant" as a patient, the medical profession appropriated
him as one of their own."" In other words, the author's death has itself become
a text now \voven into the cultural narrative of medicine.

Notes

l. Recently Mann's novel was cited in Pablo Gonzales Blasco, "Literature and
Movies for Medical Students," Family Medicine 33 (2001): 426-428.
2. For a recent example, see Hans Helmut Jansen, "Letzte Krankheit und Tod von
Thomas Mann (1875--1955)," Hessisches Arzteblatt 11 (2002): 651-{)54: "Induziert durch die
Lektiire des 'Zauberberg' unternahm ich nach dem Wintersemester 1950/51 ... eine
Studienreise zu den Lungensanatorien von Davos" (651).
3. Arnaldo Benini, "Die Faszination des Todes bei Thomas Mann aus der Sicht eines
Arztes," Praxis: Schwelzerlsche Rundschau fiir Medlzm 95 (January 11,2006): 35--39, here 35.
4. "Krankheit und Heilung bei Thomas Mann," Praxis: Schweizerische Rundschau fiir
Medlzin 95 (January 11. 2006): 13-21, here 13.
5. Peter Humphreys, "The Magic Mountain-A Time Capsule of Tuberculosis
Treatment in the Early Twentieth Century," Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 6 (1989):
147-163; Ludwig K. von Segesser, "From the Magic Mountain to Rocket Science in
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery," Tnteractive Cardiovascular and Thoracic ,\'urBery 2 (2003):
217-218; Jose A. Ainsa, Carlos Martin, and Brigitte Cicque\, "Molecular Approaches to
Tuberculosis," Molecular MicrobioloBY 42.2 (2001): 561-570.
6. For instance, Bodo Crimbacher, Steven M. Holland, and Jennifer Puck specu-
late that Hanno guddenbrook may have suffered from Hyper-lgE Syndrome: "Hyper-
IgE Syndromes," Immunolo[jlcal ReVIews 203 (2005): 244-250.
7. Serafim Cuimaraes and 1hnid Moura, "Vascular Androceptors: An Update,"
Pharmacolo[jical ReVIews 53 (200 I): 319-356.
8. Thomas Mann, "Vom Ceisl der Medizin," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrifi 51.29
(1925): 1205--1206, here 1205. Thomas Mann, Essays t1 1914-1926. edited bv Herman
 260 Malre Herwig

KLlrzke et a!., GKFA 15.1 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Escher, 20(2): 9%-1002. Unless stated
otherwise, all translations are my own.
9. Unpublished letter to Philip Witkop. April 2, 1926; Die IlrlfF Thomas Manns.
1{eResten und ReR,ster 1: 1889-1933, edited by Hans BUr~in and Hans-Otto Mayer (Frank-
furt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976),437-438 (26/45).
10. Letter ofJLlly 5, 1919, to the neurologist Gustav Blume; Thomas Mann, BrreF
11. 1914-1923, edited by Thomas Sprecher. Hans R. Va~et, and Cornelia Bernini (Frank-
furt am Main: Fischer, 2004), 298.
II. Sander L. Cilman, Disease and RepresentatIOn: 1mages <1' Illness from Madness to Aid.1
(Ithaca, NY: CornellUniyersity Press, 1988),7.
12. Renate G. justin, "Medicine as Business and Patient Welfare: Thomas Mann
Dissects the Contlict of Interest," L,terature and Med,c,ne 7 (1988): 138-147; Wim Dekkers
and Peter van Domburg, "The Role of Doctor and Patient in the Construction of the
Pseudo-Epileptic Attack Disorder." Med,CINe. Health Care U Philosophy 3.1 (2000): 10. Por
Mann's status as a classic writer of medical fiction, see Dietrich von Engelhardt and
Fritz Hartmann, "Klassiker der Medizin," Journal oJthe History of Medicine and AllIed Sciences
47.2 (1992): 231-232.
13. Wi! Gesler, "Hans Castorp's Journey-to-Knowledge of Disease and Health in
Thomas Mann's The MagIC Mountam," Health C1 Place 6 (2000): 125-134, here 132.
14. Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (New Hayen, CT: Yale University Press, 1987),5.
15. Peter Conrad, "Medicalizations," Science 258 (1992): 334-335, here 335.
16. Cf. chapter 3 in Malte HerWig, Bi/dun8sbiir8er auf Abwe8en. Naturwissenschajt im Werk
Thomas Manns (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 20(4).
17. "In der gesamten schongeistigen Weltliteratur dUrfte kein Analogon dazu
zu linden sein, daB ein zweibandiger Roman sich mit einer Uberftille von Fachaus-
drticken zum groBen Teil nur mit der Schilderung einer bestimmten Krankheit und
deren Verlaufsformen beschaftigt. Und zwar geschieht das in einer so auffallenden
und einseitigen Weise, daB in Anbetracht des Uberaus groBen Leserkreises wie des
hohen ktinstlerischen Rufes des Verfassers auch von arztlicher Seite zu seinem Werk
Stellung genom men werden muB." Alexander PrUssian, "Der Zauberberg," Miinchner
Medizinische WOc/len5chriji 51 (1925): 696-697, here 696.
18. H. Schelenz, "Thomas Mann: 'Der Zauberberg' vom Standpunkt des Tuberku-
losearztes aus gesehen," Deutsche Medizinische Woehenschrrft 51 (1925): 831-832, here 832.
19. G. Zickgraf, "Noch tine arztliche Kritik Uber den Zauberberg," Zentralhlatt jlir
Innm Medizin 46 (1925): 869-876, here 869.
20. Erwin Loewy-Hattendorf, "Arztliche Probleme in der modernen Dichtkunst,"
ZeitschTl.ttfiir iirztflche Forthifdung 22.19 (1925): 603--606, here 603.
21. ':elix Klemperer, "Arztlicher Kommentar Lu Thomas Manns 'Lauberberg.'
Ein Beitrag :iur Psychologie der Lun~entuherkulose," Die Therapie drr GegenlVart (1925):
601--606, here 602.
22. PrUssian, "1 )er Zauberherg," 696.
 The "Magic MOllntaill Malady"' 2(1I

23. "Und zwar "ehe ich dt:'n Schaden darin, dall das lli,hLir/.tli<,h~ l.esepuhlikum
sich aus diesem Roman ein ganz falsches Bild Uher I kilst;itt"1l lIlld das Innenleben
in diesen Heilstatten machen wird. Wir hahen nichts (ihn dl'1l I ic'il.st'ittenhetrieb
zu verheimlichen, und trotzdem ,'V-erden wir es nil' fUr \\ (ills,hl'IlS"l'rt halten, daB
urteilslose Laien Kritik an uns und unsern Krankt:'n Uben werdl'Il." S,IH'kllz. "Thomas
Mann: 'Der Lauherberg,''' 832.
24. E. DeholT. "Der Zauberberg (Kritisches Referat)," D,,' Tulwrk"I"-,,, 4 ( 1'l2,')) 42 45,
here 45.
25. Charles E. Rosenberg, "haming Disease: [Jlness, Society, and llistnrv," ill h,,,,,
inA /)lSease,' StudIes In Cultural History, edited by Charles E. Rosenberg alld JaIll'1 I VIlIH'
Colden (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1992), xiii--xxvi, xvi.
26. Ihid., xxi.
27. Alexander l'rlissian, "Arztliche ReiseeindrUcke aus Arosa LInd Davos," Miilidl/lI'r
Medlzimsche Wochenschnfi 46 (1920): Y39tT.
28. Dehoff. "Der Zauherherg (Kritisches Referat)." 44.
29. "Sein Dienst ist I.ebensdienst, sein Wille Gesundheit, sein Lie! die /ukullft.
Damit ist es arztlich." Mann. "Yom Ceist der Medizin." 1205.
30. Letter to Helen T. Lowe-Porter. January 15. 1927. cited in John C. ThirlwalL II/
Another Lan8uage. A Record of the ThITty- Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His EnAiIsh
Translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf. 1966), 14.
31. "DaB es uns Arzten Nutzen bringt, liegt auf der Hand. Yielfache Anregungen
gehen von ihm aus," Klemperer. "Arztlicher Kommentar," 605.
32. "Kritik darf meines Erachtens jeder uben, und wenn sie in dieser feinen Weise
getibt wird, dann sollte man sich vielmehr besinnen, ob die Ursachen der Kritik nieht
vorhanden und abzustellen sind." Zickgraf. "Noch eine arztliche Kritik Uber den Zau-
berberg," 875.
33. "einen sehr ernsten Appell an das Gewissen der Arzte. ihre Kranken vor
dem psychisch schadigenden EinfluB dieses Milieus zu hewahren." Margarete I.evy.
"Bemerkungen zum 'Zauberberg' von Thomas Mann." f)~utsrhe MeJ,zim.'.-/H' Wo"henschTIli
51 (1925): 1166.
34. "Statt mit dem Eindruck der einheitlichel1 l'~rsiil1lichkl'it l'il1L'l1 RUckhalt zu
gewahren, vermehrt des Hofrats geistvolier t:yni~mus dil' sittliclll' Vl'rwirrung und
seinem Schariblick entgeht volikommen der gl'istigl' Ruin Sl'illl'r S,·hutzhefohlenen.
ja sogar das widerwartige Treiben seines Assistt'l1zarztl's, dn dil' sclll'inhare Scharfung
der Sinne fUr die letzten Dinge ausnul'Lt, die Krankl'11 tihl'r spiritistische Wirrnis in
erotische ErUrterungen und hedenklichstl' psyc"i1Oanalvtisdll' hperimente hineinzuz-
iehen; auch das ein Heispiel des psychisclll'n Ahgkill'llS sokher Kranken." Helmuth
Ulrici, "Thomas Manns '/auberberg,''' KIiIlI.I"iI" \'(/(J.-/Iens.-/mli 4.32 (1925): 1575.
35. "Die medizinische l.iteratur tiber den /usammenhang von Psyche und Lun-
gentuberkulose ist bisher nur sehr sparlich, wah rend Laien schon seit langer Zeit dieses
Prohlem mit grl1J)tem Interesse verfolgt hahen .... Hier sollte die Arbeit der Arzte. eine
 261 Malle Herwig

\TrnLinftige Psychotherapie, nebcn und mit der eigentlichen medizinischen Therapic

einsetzen. Dazu forden der Roman von Thomas Mann geradezu hefaus, und deshalb
sollten die Arzte ihn nicht als einen gegen sich gerichteten Angriffbetrachten, sondern
als Mahnung zur Erkenntnis und Einsicht." Levy, "Ikmerkungen zum 'Zauberherg'
von Thomas Mann," 1166 n. 33.
36. Rosenberg, "Framing Disease," xxii .
.17. "Den machtigen Einflull ki:irperlichen Leidens auf die sl'clische Entwieklung
und die korrumpierende Wirkung vergeblichen Ringens gegcn haltloses Versinken
und gegen den Verlust del' Persiinlichkeitswerte LU zeigen, bedarf del' Dichter der
gesellschaftlichen Zust~inde." Ulrici, "Thomas Manns 'Zauberberg:" 1.,)7.'\ .
.;8. "Die Tuberkulosekrankheit und ihre Anstaltsbehandlung ist eine C;cfahr fUr
die Psyche des Kranken, fUhrt zu einer seelischen Verwirrung und Entgleisung, in
welcher der Cesundheitswille vcrloren geht und das "junge Yolk verlumpt." Klempner,
"Arztlicher Kommentar," 603.
39. Otto Amrein, O,e Tuberkulo.<e In ihrer Wirkun!J auf Psyche und Charukter(Basel: Schwabe,
1(19).1 am indebted to the library of the Arztlicher Verein in Hamburg (Arztekammer
Hamburg) l(lr kindly making a coPy of Amrein's treatise available to me.
40. Ibid., 6.
41. "So mufl auch nieht vergessen werden (Toxinwirkung hin oder her), dall die
Psyche der Patienten auch durch eine falsche AuffassunB und Einstellun!J des Leidens [sic]
mitbeeinfluflt werden kann." Ibid., 10.
42. Klemperer, "Arztlicher Kommentar," 603.
43. "Die glanzendste Bestatigung und R~chtfertigung des Psychologen Thomas
Mann schlieBlich finde ich in einem Buche von Prof. Erich Stern (Gieflen) Uber die
'Psyche des lungenkranken', das vor kurzem erst erschienen ist-Monate nach
Manns 'Zauberberg'; ob und wieweit es von diesem beeinflullt ist, weill ich nicht. In
seinen Kapiteln 'die Psychologie des chronisch Lungenkranken' und 'der EinfluB des
Sanatoriumslebens auf den Kranken' geht Stern vollkommen mit Thomas Mann par-
allel, kommt zu den gleichen SchlUssen und Erkenntnissen wie dieser." Klemperer,
"Arztlicher Kommentar," 604.
44. Erich Stern, Die Psyche des Lunllenkranken: Der ElnflUfi der Lunwntuherkulose und des Sana-
tonumslehens Qu(die Seele des Kranken (Halle: Marhold, 1925).
4.'\. "DaB wir den Kranken behandeln sollen und nieht die Krankheit." Klemperer,
"A rztlicher Kommentar," 605.
46. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narrati"fS: Sufferin!J, Healm!J and the Human ConditIOn
(New York: Basic Books, 1988).
47. "/:s ist nieht die rein physische Lungentuberkulose; es ist jene seelische Kom-
ponente, die Isiehl, vielleicht mit jeder tuberkulCisen Disposition oder I'rimarinfektion
verbunden, elurch die Sanatorillmsatmospb~ire zu Uppiger rUlle entfaltet und nun
ihn:rseits zu einem leisen, aber unermiidlichen psychophysischen Antriebsmotor
 The "Magic MaulI/a;n Malady" 2()")

des kiirperlichen Krankbleibens, des Kriinkenvndl'ns, zu "inn illliller unUberstei~li­

cheren Barrikadc vor der Ceneslln~ win.!. Die systl'lllatisdll' Lihl11un~ des anti-
tuberkuliisen Gesundungswillens durch das Kurmilieu; dil' svstl'lllatisc\ll' ZUchtun~
der tuberkuli.isen Krankheitsindolenz durch das Kurmilil'u: das ist dil' /auberberg-
Krankheit." Willy Hellpach, "Die 'Zaubcrberg'-Krankheit," [I,,, M",hz/II/I.-II" Welt 1.38
(1927): 1425-1429, here 1427.
48. "Den Befallenen in dieser lImwelt und dam it in seiner Kranklll'it kstzu-
hallen." Ibid.
4lJ. "Der Kranke darf dem Arzt nil' zum bloll wissenschaftlichen Fall werden, der
Kranke soil vom Arzt ~eheilt werden, mit oder ohne Wissenschaft, mit viel odn Illit
wenig Wissenschaft." Willy Hellpach, "Die Heilkraft des Geistes," Schwmerlsche Med-
izinischc Wochenschn.fi 60.25 (llJ30): 573-579, here 577.
50. "Der Genesende muB \10m Arzt loskommen sich den Menschen und Dingen
der gesunden Lebenssphare zukehren." Ibid., 575.
51. Klabund [pseudo Alfred HenschkeJ, Die Krankhea Ene Erziihlun£l (Herlin: E. Reiss,
(917).
52. Randall McCowen, "Identifying Themes in the Social History of Medicine,"
journal of Modern History 63.1 (1991): 81-90, here 84.
53. Thomas Mann, "Zur BegrUBung Gerhart Hauptmanns in MUnchen [1926J,"
Gesammelte Werke in drelzehn Biinden, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Il)l)O): 215-220,
here 217.
54. Hanns Rudolf Fromm, "Symphonia Pathologica. Zum 80 Geburtstag von
Thomas Mann, dem Nosographen unserer Epoche, am 6. Juni 1955," Pharmazeutische
Zeituna 100 (1955): 597-5l)l).
55. R. Stein, "Vom Geist der Medizin-und vom Geist der Uteratur. Vier Jah-
rzehnte Zauberberg," Zeitschrijt fUr iirztliche Forthilduna 62 (1965): 82-89.
56. Heinz SauereBig, "Uteratur und Medizin. Zu Thomas Manns Roman 'Der
Zauberberg'," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 99.36 (1974): 17S0-17S6.
57. "1st schlielllich ein Krankheitsgeschehen, das sit'h l1l's()nders eignet, den
Menschen und die Gesellschaft in ihrer Ikziehung zur KrClnklll'it zu charaktcrisie-
ren." Ibid., 1780 n. 56.
58. "Die Symptomatologie und I'sydloiogie der /.aubL'r\K'rgkrankheit, die uns
Arzte heute mehr denn je intl'ressil'rt." Albert S,'hretzl'nmavr, "I ler /auberberg in
Farbe. Einfi.ihrung zum I. Somnll'rkongrdl in I )avos vom 20. Juli his zum 8. August
1970," Deutsche.1 Arztl'b/utt67.13(1970): 10.,4 1042, here 10.,5.
59. Schretzenmayr lilerallv writl's that, l"I>nn'rning soda I welfare, social policy,
and psychology, the novel is "highly topilal and e'plosive material in the battle
between the advocates of statl' wl'lfan' and till' dl;lmpions of the greatest possible
freedom for doctor and patient" ("ein h'KhaktuL'lIer sozialpolitischer, sozialmed-
izinischer und ps),chologischer /U ndstorf im Kampf zwischen den RefUrwClrtern ciner
 264 Malle Herwig

SI;lahmedizin und den Verfechtern einer miiglichst weit gehenden freiheit von Arzt
u nd Patient"). Ibid., 1036.
60. "Thomas Mann hat recht l Arzte und Sozialpolitiker solltcn den Roman zum
zweitenmal lesen, gerade heute-am Vorahend \ior den entscheidenden Reformen
der sozialen Krankenversicherung! Die J.ekttire konnten den Reformern die Augen
Mfnen: Hirderung der Selbstverantwortung des Gcsunden und des Kranken fUr seine
Gesundheit und seine Cesundung ist das Antihiotikum gegen die moderne Kontami-
nation mit der Zauberberg-Krankheit." Ibid., 1036.
61. Richard Carter, "The Mask of Thomas Mann (11175-1955): Medical Insights
and Last Ulness," Annuls of ThoraCic Surwrv 65 (1998): 578-585. Carter, like Jansen ("Letztc
Krankheit und Tod \ion Thomas Mann"), was perhaps inspired hv the annotated pub-
lication of the original report of Mann's postmortem examination by Thomas Spre-
cher and Ernst O. Wiethoff, "Thomas Mann's letzte Krankheit," Thomu,-Mann-Juhrhu(h
10 (1997): 249-276.
62. Carter, "The Mask of Thomas Mann," 578.
63. Ibid., 583-584.
64. Ibid .. 583.
65. I'rusa Teufelsbauer et a!., "Rupturierte abdominelle Aortenaneurysmen:
Status quo nach einem Vierteljahrhundert Behandlungserfahrung," Wiener Klimsche
Wochenschnft 115.15-16 (2003): 584--589.
66. One of the first to write knowledgeably about Mann's diseases was the Davos
pneumologist Christian Virchow: "Geschichten urn den 'Zauberberg,'" Deutsches Arz-
teblau 64.5 (1967): 263-265; "Medizinhistorisches urn den 'Zauberberg.' 'Das gHiserne
Angebinde' und ein pneumologisches Nachspiel," AUBsburBer Umversitiitsreden, vol.
26 (Augsburg: Universitat Augsburg, 1995); "Thomas Mann und 'the most elegant
operation,'" Yom "Zauberber{' zum "Doktor Faustus ": Die Davoser LiteraturtaBe 1998, edited by
Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 20(0): 47--62; "Wiedersehen mit
dem 'Zauberberg,' " Deutsches Arzteblatt 67.1 (1970): 61--65. Writing about the operation
for lung carcinoma that Mann underwent 1946 in Chicago, Andreas Naef puts Mann
the patient in illustrious company by stating that the lobectomy performed on him
by Professor William E. Adams deserves to be added, along with Nelson's leg amputa-
tion, the empyema drainage on King Ceorge V, and others, to the list of "historically
famous operations." "William E Adams, Thomas Mann and the Magic Mountain,"
Annuls ofThoraClC Surwry 65.1 (1998): 2115-287, here 285.
 Suggested Reading
• • •

Scholarly Resources

Bulhor. Francis. Wortindex zu "Der Zauberberg" Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Micro-
films. 1976.
Mann, Thomas. Briefe 11; 1914-1923, edited by Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget, and
Cornelia Bernini. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004. CroBe Kommentierte
Frankfurter Ausgabe (hereafter GKFA) 22.
- - - . Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. Selected and translated by Richard and Clara
Winston; introduction by Richard Winston. New York: Knopf, 1971.
- - - . Tasebiicher 1918-1921, edited by Peter de Mendelssohn. Frankfurt al11 Main:
Fischer, 1979.
- - - . Thomas Mann Diaries 1918-1939. Selection and f'Hl'word h, I "'rman11 Kestl'n,
translated by Richard and Clara Winst011. Nl'W York: l\h"I111'. Il)K2.
- - - . Thomas Mann Selhslkommenlure. ner '/UII/",rI'I'~I/, l'ditl'd hv Ilans Wysli11g. hankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 1993. A coliedio11 or Ma1111's O"'l1l0I11ml'l1ts oil P.., Luuhalwrs,
drawn from letters and autobiographil'al writi11gs.
- - - . Der Luuh..,he~~. '/~xl lind 1\,"'III/('III,lr, edited h,' Midlal·1 Neumann, Frankfurt am
Main: Fischt'r, 2002. (;K/-il .'i,1. 1.
Ridley, Hugh, 711(' 1'",I>Il'lIIull .. HOII/H""/,\; 'i1t'1'1I111'liI ('1'1111/1'\' (,'f1l1mlll "II '/hmnas Mann's "Buddell-
b,ooks" und ''The Mu,~/" Mtl/llliu/Il" (:oitlillhi'l, S(:: (:amde11 House, 1994,
Sprecher, Thomas, J)<IV", /III "/"I/I"('r"(,~'I" /'1"'111<1,\ I'v/.II/I/j I\Ol1llln IIIU/ sei" Schaupla/:. LUrich:
Verlag der Neuen LUrcher /eitung, 1l)l)6.

265
 266 Suggested Reading

/h,.""". Mann-Handbuch, edited by Helmut Koopmann. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Alfred Kri\ner,
2001.

Biographical

Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann. l.ife as a Work of Art: A BIOWaphy, translated by Leslie
Willson. Princeton: Princeton Univcrsity Press, 2002.
Prater, Donald A. Thomas Mann: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
't'homas Mann Chrol1lk, compiled by Gert Heine and Paul Schommn. hankfurt am Main:
Klostermann,20(H.
Yager, Hans Rudolf. "Confession and Camouflage. The Diaries of Thomas Mann."
Journat of English and (;ermanic PhlioloHY go (1997): 567-590.
- - - , "Mann and His I)iographers." Journul of EnBlish und Germanic PhiloloB} 96 (1997):
591--601.

Criticism (Chronological)

Weigand, Hermann J. Thomas Mann's Novel "Der Zauberberg" New York: D. Appleton
Century, 1933; reprint Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
Ziolkowski, Theodor. Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969,68--98.
Dierks, Manfred. Studien zu Mythos und PsycholoBie bei TIwmas Mann. An seinem Nachlass orienti-
erte UntersuchunBen zum "Tad in VenediB, " zum "ZauberberB" und zur 'Joseph "-TetraloBie. Bern:
. Franke, 1972.
Reed, T. J. Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974; 2nd ed. 1996.
Heftrich, Eckhard. Zauberber8musik: Uber Thomas Mann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1975.
Hatfield, Henry H. From "The MaBlc Mountain": Munn's Later Masterpieces. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1979.
Frizen, Werner. Zauberlrank der Melaphysik. Quellenkritische Onerlfljungen im Umkreis der
Schopenhauer-Rezeplion Thomas Manns. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1980.
Frizell, Wcrner. "Die 'hraunliche Schi\ne.' Clher 7igarren und Verwandtes in Thomas
Manns '"Zauherherg.''' Deutsche VierteUahrsschriji fiir Literaturwissenschajt und Geistes-
W"hi(hle 55 (19SI): 107-1 IS.
lehnert, Herhert. "Leo Naphta lind sein Autor." Ornis LiUerarum 37 (1982): 47---{)9.
Ikddow, Michael. The Flctwn of Humaml". Siudies !II the Bildungsroman from Wieland 10 Thomas
Mann. Clmhridge: Camhridge Universitv Press, 1982,230-284.
 Suggesced Reading 207

Karthaus. I Jlrich. "Thomas Mann. 'Uer Zauberbcrg.· .. In 111'111."/'" I{omant' des 20. Jahrhan-
der/s. Neal' InterpretatlOnen, edited hv Paul Michael I.i.ilzeln. Kiilligslcin: .A.thenaum,
1983. 95-l09.
Kowalik. Jill A. '''Sympathy with Death': Hans Castorp's Nic\Zscill'an RCSL'ntment.'·
German Quarterly 59 (1985): 27-48.
Biihm. Karl Werner. "Die homosexuellen Elemente in Thomas Manns lJer Zauher-
be~q" In StatlOnen der Thomas-Mann-Forsehanfj. edited by Hermann Ku rzke. Wlirz.bu rg:
Kiinigshausen & Neumann. 1985.
Bnman. Russell A. The Rise of the Modern German Novel. Cambridge, M A: Harvard II ni-
vcrsity Press. 1986.261-286.
Wisskirchen. Hans. :ieitHesehichte im Roman. Za 7homas Manns7auberberfj" and "Doktor Faustus"
Bern: Franke, 1986.
Harle, Cerhard. Die Gestalt des Sehiinen. Untwurhunfj zur Homo5exualitiitsthematik In 1110mas
Manns Roman "J)er Zaaberherg" Kiinigstein: Athenaum, 1986.
Bloom, Harold. ed. Thomas Mann's 'The MaBie Mounlain." New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Lehnert. Herbert. "Langemarck-historisch und symbolisch." Orbis Litterarum 42 (1987):
271-290.
Hoschenstein, Bernhard. "Ernst Bertram und der ZaaberberB." In Heinz Gockel et al..
ed .. WaBner-Nielzsche-Thomas Mann. Festschrift fiir Eckhard HeJtrich. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1993,298-309.
Koc, Richard. "Magical Enactments: Reflections on 'Highly Questionable' Matters in
'Der Zauberberg.'" Germanic Review 68 (1993): 108-117.
Lubich, Frederick A. "Thomas Mann's Sexual Politics-Lost in Translation." Comparative
Literature Studies 31 (1994): 107-127.
Minden, Michael, ed. Thomas Mann. London: Longman, 1995. See especially Michael
Beddow, "The Climate of The MaBie Mountain," 148-159; J. P. Stern, "Relativity in
and around The MaBlc Mountain." 160-174; Tochen Horisch, '''The German Soul up
to Date.' Sacraments of Media Technology on The MaBic Mountain," 175-187.
Maar, Michael. Geister und Kunst. NeuiBkeiten aus dem ZauberberB. Munich: Hanser, 1995.
An analysis of the intertextual references to the fairy tales of Hans Christian
Andersen.
Galvan, Elisabeth. "Bellezza und Satana. Italien und ltaliener bei Thomas Mann."
Thomas Mann.lahrhuch 8 (1995): 109-138.
Wisskirchen. Hans. "'!eh glaube an den Fortschritt. gewill.' Quellenkritische Unter-
suchungen ZLI Thomas Manns Settembrini-hgur." In nas "ZauherberB"-S),mposium
1994w Davos, edited byThomas Sprecher. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. 1995,
81-116.
King. John S. "'Most Dubious': Myth. the Occult and Politics in the 'Zauberberg.'"
MonatshrJte 88 (1996): 217·236.
Toseph, [rkme. Nietzsche im "Zallherhe~'i'" Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. 1996.
 268 Suggesled Reading

Sprl'd1er, Thomas ed. Auf dem WeB 3um Zauberbera: Davoser Literaturtaw 1996. "rankfur-
tam Main: Klostermann, 1997. See especially Hans Rudolf Vaget, '''Ein Traum
von Liebe': Musik, Homosexualitat und Wagner in Thomas Manns Der Zauner-
berB," 111-141; Hans Wisskirchen, "Der Einfluss Heinrich Manns auf den Zuu-
herherB," 142-164; Thomas Sprecher, "Kur-, Kultur- und Kapitalismuskritik im
ZauhernerB," 187-250; Ruprecht Wimmer, "Zur Philosophie der Zeit im Zauber-
berB," 251-272; Helmut Koopmann, "Der ZauberberB und die Kulturphilosophie
der Zeit," 273-298; T. J. Reed, "Von Deutschland nach Europa: Der ZauberberB im
curopaischen Kontext," 299-318.
Minden, Michael. The German Bildun85foman Incest and Inheritance. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997,205-244.
Dowden, Stephen n, ed. A CompanIOn to Thomas Mann's "The Mallie Mountuin." Columbia,
SC: Camden House, 1999. Includes Joseph P. Lawrence, "Hans Castorp's Uncanny
Awakening," 1-1.1; Stephen D. Dowden, "Mann's Ethical Style," 14-40; Eugene
Goodheart, "Thomas Mann's Comic Spirit," 41-52; Olker Ciikberg, "War as
Mentor: Thomas Mann and Germanness," 53-79; David J)lumberg, "From Muted
Chords to Maddening Cacophony: Music in The Ma!l'( Mountain," 80-94; Edward
Engelberg, "Ambiguous Solitude: Hans Castorp's Sturm und Orang nach Osten,"
95-108; Stephen C. Meredith, "Mortal Illness on the Magic Mountain," 109-140;
Michael Brenner, "Beyond Naphta: Thomas Mann's Jews and German Jewish
Writing," 141-157; Karla Schultz, "Technology as Desire: X-Ray Vision in The MaBie
Mountain," 158-176; Kenneth Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs and Other Erections,"
177-220; Susan Sontag, "Pilgrimage," 2?1-239.
Swales, Martin. Mann. Der ZauberberB. London: Grant & Cutler, 2000.
Robertson, Ritchie, ed. The CambridBe Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002. See especially Michael Beddow, "The Magic Mountain,"
137-150; Timothy Buck, "Mann in English," 235-248.
Lehnert, Herbert, and Eva Wessell, eds. A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Roches-
ter, NY: Camden House, 2004. See especially Eva Wessell, "Magic and Reflections:
Thomas Mann's The MaBle Mountain and His War Essays," 129-146.
 Index
• • •

Adorno Theodor W., 5, 13,58 Bergson, Henri, 47, 53

Alps, the, 95, 100-105, 107-109 Bertram, Ernst, 22,24, 76,80-81
Amann, Paul, 19 letter to (March 16, 1916),248
letter to (August 3, 1915), 19,32, 152 letter to (June 2,1922), 146
Amrein, Otto, 254 letter to (AprH29, 1924),27
Amundsen, Roald, 110 Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mytholosie, 76
anarchism, 73 Beta, Ottomar, 187
Anschau, Frank, 104 "Bildung," 81
anti-Semitism, 73-74,172,175 Bismarck, Otto von, 73, 79, 136
Augustine, Saint, 183 Bizet, Ceorges, 129-\3()
Carmen, \30-- \31
Bab, Julius, 148 Hlu(k Swall, '1'111',2.'\7
letter to (September 5, 1920), 14S 111(011), Harold, 7
Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 74, S3 III ii 1ll'1', Ifans, n-7S, S I. S5
Balzac, Honore, 203 I h,' [{ol/,' .11'1' /:'n'lik ill ,/", miinnli(hen
Barthes, Roland. 51-54 (;"Wl/;(/'II/I, 77
Baudelaire, Charles, 203 J )I'III;'-/"'s [{I'lcil, judl'ntulII und
Beddow, Michael, 87 S"~I,,llslIIlI_', 77

Benini, Arnalda, 245 IIlulllt', (;ustav

Benjamin, Walter, 7, 46--47, 51. 53-54, 66 Iemr to (July 5, 1919),246
Benn, Cottfried, 160 lIolshevislll, 152
"Bergfilm," 9,101,104-105, 108 bonding, male, 75, S7, 105
 Index

I\iiiik, Martin, 28 Doctor Faustus, 5,1.1,27,51,88,124,150,161,

I\ooth, Wayne, 212 219,2.)7
I~oy-Ed, Ida Donnington, Robert, 132
letter to (December 5, 1922), IS!} Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 147, 163
Brecht, Bertolt, 158 Downing, Eric, 8
Leben des Galilei, 158 DUrer, Albrecht, 77
Brehmer, Hermann, 103
[)rody, Howard, 248 Eicken, Heinrich von, 184
Buddenbrooks, 4, 13,28,31-33,40,82, 128, fin Elender, 227
219,224,257 Einsiedel, Wolfgang von, 98
Byrd, Richard E., 112 Einstein, Albert. 259
Einstein, Johann Carl, III
Carter, Richard, 258-259 Ellsworth, Lincoln, 112
cartography, 95 Elsaghe, Yahya, 9
Catholic Church, 159 Engelhardt, Dietrich von, 245
Chatman, Seymour, 202 Erzberger, Matthias, 149
Code of Maimonides, The, 180 Experience in the (krult, lin, 24
Cohn, Donit, 10,50
communism, 73, 148, 153 Fanek, Arnold, 104, 109, 111
Conrad, Peter, 248 Eternal Dream, The, 105
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 97-98 Peak of Fate, 104-105
Stru8lJle with the Mountain, 105
Darwinism, social, 160 fascism, 152
David, Claude, 144 Felix Krull, 18,25,51,219
Davos, 16-17,22, 100,246,250 Fiedler, Leslie A., 6
Death in Venice, 10, 17-18,21,23,31-32,40, Fischer, Ernst, 42
42,51,81,220,223-235 letter to (May 25, 1926),42
Debussy, Claude, 130 Fischer Samuel, 24-25
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, 130 letter to (August 22,1914),209
Dehoff, E., 250 Flaubert, Gustave, 203
democracy, 20, 38 L' EducatIOn sentimentale, 203
rejection of, 77 Fliess, Wilhelm, 64
De Qincey, Thomas, 203 franklin, Sir John. 110
Deut.lche M edzzinische Wochenschrzji, 246, 257 frederick II of Prussia, 76, 81
"Deutsl-hland, Deutschland Uber Frederick the Great und the Grand Coalition, 76
alles," 134 Freemasons, 85
diaries of 1918-1921,71 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 47, 51, 64, 84
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 36 Moses and Monotheism, 47
Dionysus, 232-2.H Rem/ana and Repression, 47-48
Dix, Otto, I 1.1 Friedrich, Caspar David, 102, 110-111
 Index

Friedrich, Ernst, 113 I kllp,"h. Willi. 25.\. 2.\~ 2V',258

Fromm, Hanns It udolf. 257 1l'IIl'r \() (;\j""'I\1I)('I' 1.\ 1927),253
Fucik, Julius, 125 Hl'TIlll's. 2.>2. 2.14
Herwig, ~hlll', 10
Gartenlaube, Die, 73 Hesse, Hermann, 74. 7S. ii2
Gedanken 1m KrIeH, 78 Demlan, 74. 71>, 1>2
gender relations, 72 Hindenburg, Paul \(In. 1.\7 I.IS, 1·1-1
Cenette, Gerard, 202 Hirschfeld, Magnus, M
geography, 100, 114 Hitler, Adolf, 4, 15,20,27 2ii, I.\S. I ~')
Ceorge, Stefan, 80 Hofmann, Ludwig \'on, 9tl
C;ermun Letter I, 24 homosexuality, 63, 82, 87
German T.etter 111, 27 Hlirisch, Jochen, 62-63, 66
German Republi(, The, 24, 75, 80, 98-99, 150 humanism (new), 21-22, 32, 86
Germanness,98 humor, 219-221, 223, 235
C;esanH vom Kindchen, 20
C;esler, Will, 248 identity, German, 79
Gewissen, Vas, 151 Ignatius of Loyola, 11>4-·185
Gide, Andre, 98 Inquisition, 183
letter to (August 22, 1924),98 irony, 219
Gilman, Sander, 181,247 [ser, Wolfgang, 171
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7-8, 26, 64
Faust, 22,64,86 James, Henry, 203
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 8, 15, Jens, Walter, 97
36,82 Jeremiah, Prophet, 184
Goethe and Tolstoy, 22 Jessen, Dr. Friedrich, 22
Gounod, Charles, 129 Jesuit, Jewish, 184-190
Faust, 129-131 Jesuit Order, 162, 183, 185, 187-188
Cregory the Great, Pope, 148, 184 Jewish Question, The, 22
Crenville, Anthony, 9, 100 Joseph and His Brothers, 88, 219
Cross, Otto, 73 Joyce, James, 3--4, 6, 259
Grube, A. w., 109 Ulysses, 4, 206
JUnger, Ernst, 74, 78, 159
Hackert, Carl, 103
Haller, Albrecht von, 104 Kafka, Franz, 6
Hanney, Itoxanne, 5 1,63 Kant, Immanuel, 157
Harbou, Thea von, 106 Kapp, Wolfgang, 149-150
Hatfield, Henry H., 6 Keller, Gottfried, 36
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 23, 25--28, 257 Green Henry, 36
Hedinger, Christoph, 258 Kerr, Alfred, 177
Hcilbut, Anthony, 7 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 251\
 272 Index

k:ittler, Friedrich, 97 Lukacs, Joseph von, 23

k:labund (Alfred Henschke), 256 Luxemburg, Rosa, 14Y, 155
Die Krallkheit, 256
Klages, Ludwig, 73 The MaHlc MIluntwlI
Kleinmann, Artur, 255 Albin, Herr, 35
Klempner, Felix, 249, 252-255 androgyny, 65
Kluger, Ruth, 190 Behrens, 22, ,)2-<)3,37,48--49,55,
Knights, Teutonic, 162 58--60,83-84, 12Y, 222, 249, 252
Koch, Kohen, 16 "Bildung"Jself-formation, 36-37,
Koestler, Arthur, 154 46,48--4Y,54,56-57,60-62,64-68,
Kontjc, Todd, 9 80-81
Kracaucr, Siegfried, 52 Bildungsroman as, 8,15,19,36,42,45,
"Kultur," Cerman, 20, 78, 146-147 67-68,81-82,85,98,223
Kun, Bela, 23 Castorp, Hans l.orenz, 52-53
Chauchat, C1avdia, 22, 34, 39, 41,
Lang, fritz, \06 52-54,56-61,63, Sl-84, 96, 1)7, III,
The NlbelullBs, 106 129,131, 221-223, 227, 229-230, 23,)
Lehar, Franz, 125 cinema, I), 16, 106
Lehnert, Herbert, 144 Danse macabre, 106
Lenin, Wladimir I1jitsch, 147-149, 151, death,31-33,35-37,40,43,88
155--156 Engelhart, Miss, 222, 230
LeSSing, Gotthold Ephraim, 177 "Entwicklung" /development, 48-50,
LeSSing, Theodor, 177 53--54,61, 67
Levien, Max, 150 Ferge, Anton Karlovitch, 232
Levin, Harry, 4 Fullness of Harmony, 21, 27, 123, 131-137
Levine, Eugen, 150 genesis of, 8, 13--18
Levy, Margarete, 252-253,255--256 Good Soldier, A, 24
Liehknecht, Karl, 149 gramophone, 9, 16,21,42, 130
Llule Herr Frredemann, 31 Great Petulance, The, 27, 254
Locke, John, 46 HIghly Questionable, 24
Loewv-Hattendorf, Erwin, 249, 255 Hippe, Pribislav, 34, 52-54, 57, 62-63,
Liiftler, Wilhelm, 259 67,83-84, Ill, 131,229,231
Loose, Gerhard, 145 homoeroticism, 63-64
/.ovecraft, H. 1'., 110 Joachim Ziemf3en, 33, 58, 60, 67,
Atthe MOlllltains of Madness, 110 125-126, 131,175,177,222,228
Lowe-Porter, Helen T., 3, 7 Krokowski, Dr. Edhin, 37, 45--46, 49,
letter to (January 15, 1927),251 55-56,58,67,176--177,227,231,
l.ubich, I'rederick A., 111 249,252
Ludendorff. Erich, 187 literary character of, 4-5
Lukacs, Ceorg, 2:l, 145, 152, 177 literarv fortunes of, 3-7
I1l.lt(1)' and Uu,\,\ Con.lolllI.illess, 23 love, 56
 Index

lubeek, 177-178 winter sp""". II>

method of composition, 15-16 "Zeitroillan" "S. 1'1.1. 21H 20.\ 207.
music,42,123-141 210-211
Naphta, Elia, 179, 181, 183, 186, 189 Mahler, (;usta\, LlO
Naphta, leo, 9, 15,22-23, 38-41, 43, Making ..f..TheMailI(M ••"Il.III ... 14. XI,
55,58,67,85,96,126, 143, 145-\46, 211-213,220
148-165, 177-178,182-186, Man and H,s 0"8, A, 20
188-189,209 Manet, Edouard, 83
Oedipal, 62-64, 66 Mann, Elisabeth, 20
OperatlOne" Sp'rltuale", 179-182 Mann, Heinrich, 20. 25, 80, 150, 159
parapsychology, 16 Der Unlertan, 159
Peeperkorn, 23, 25-26, 27, 35, 41-42, Mann, Katia, 1&-17,71, 104
58,62,66,84-85,126,233 Mann, Klaus, 71
photography, 8, 37, 45-48, 52, 58 Mann, Thomas
psychoanalysis, 15,37,46 anti-Semitism, 80, 182
"regieren," 34, 57, 62 cult of music, 9
satire, 10 diagnostician of his age, 4
Settembrini, lodovico, 20, 37-43, 4&-51, fondness for the United States, 5
55-60,63-65,67,85-86,9&-97, 100, and masculinity, 8-9, 71-72
1\4,125-128, \35, 137, 143, 14&-147, and music, 5
150-151, 156, 163-164, \78, 184-185, mythographer of sexual desire, 7
209,221,224,228-229,232-234 winner of Nobel Prize, 4
Sickness/disease, 33, 3&-38, 43, 56, Marcus-Tar, Judith, 145
24&-248,251-259 Mario and the MagIcian, 4
Slavic languages, 231 Marquardt, Franka, 9
Slavs, 231-232 Marx, Karl, 77, 154-157, 187
Snow, 24, 38-40,66,88,96,99-101, 105, Communist Manifesto, 154
107-108, 111, 126, 132, 164, \78, 190, Zur judenfraflf, 187
206,225,234-235 Marxism, 145, 153-154, 163
Sonnenschein, 175-176, 181 masculinity, cult of, 80
Stro/1 by the Sea, A. 27, 201-208, McGowan, Randall, 256
210-212,214 Meinecke, Friedrich, 150
Stupor, 254 Miller, D. A., 47
Thunderbolt, The. 112, 209 misogyny, 74, 76, 82
time as leitmotif, 9, 34, 204 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 147, 149,
tuberculosis, 16,24&-248,251-259 151-152,157,161, 163
Tivo Grandjathers and a Tw,[ii/ht /loat Das dritte Reich, 149
Ride, 21 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 82
Vorsatz, 20 Anton Reiser, 82
Walpuri/'-I Nli/ht, 22, 61, 63, 66 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 129
Wiedemann, 27,173-175,181 Die Zauberjliite, 129
 274 Index

Muller, CUnther. 202 Rememhrance Ij'IhwHS Past, 4

murder, ritual, 181 PrUssian, Alexander, 249, 254
Puccini, Ciacomo. 129
names, Jewish, 175 La Boheme. 129
National Bolshevism. 151. 160
National Socialism, 124 Radek, Karl, 151
nationalism. 148 Rathenau. Walther. 24.149-150
Naum. Cabo. 55 Reed. Terrence James. 15,86
Nehamas. Alexander, 57 Reflections ofa Nonpolitical Man. 7. 19,24,
Nenno. Nancy, 9 78-80.86-87.99. 134. 146
Neue Rundschau. 18 Renger-Patzsch. Albert, 51
Neue ZUrcher Zel!Uns, 21 Revolution, Bavarian, 20,149-150
Nietzsche, Pried rich ,9. 18-19.32,37,73. Revolution, Rolshevik. 147
75-76.79-80,124-125,127-128, LH. Revolution. conservative, 74, 147
136,147, 159 Revolution, November 1918, 148
Beyond Good and Evil. 76 Riefenstahl, Leni. 106
Birth oJTrasedy, The, 74, 83 Blue LiSh!, III
Ecce Homo, 127. 136 Triumph oJthe Will, 106
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 7~74 Rohling, August, 187
Twilisht oj the Gods, 127 romanticism, 32, 38, 43,131-132,
Nobile, Umberto, 112 134--137, 163,224
Novalis (Friedrich Freiherr von Rosenberg, Charles, 250-251, 253
Hardenberg), 24, 80,160 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 104
'Royal Hishness, 172-173
Offenbach, Jacques, 129
Les Contes d'HoJJmann, 129 Sagave. Pierre-Paul. 145
On Myself, 14, 220 letter to (February 18. 1953), 153
Orwell, George, 158 Salomon, Ernst von, 160
Nineteen Eishty-Four, 158 SauereBig, Heinz, 257
Saussure, Benedict de, 102. 108
Paccard, Michel-Gabriel, 108 Schatz, Albert. 250
Paul III, Pope. 188 Schelenz, Curt. 249, 251
Peary, Robert E., 110, 112 Schlageter, Leo, 151
I'etrarch, Francisco, 101 Schlegel, Friedrich,S
Pius IX, Pope. 102 Schnitzler. Arthur, 222
Prescott, Orville,S, 124 Schonberg. Arnold. 13
Pringsheim. Hedwig. 17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19,32,36-37,
['roblem o( (;erman-French Relations, The. 22 79. 157
Protoco/.l oj the Elder.' o(Z.on, The, 187 Schretzenmayr. Albert, 257-258
Proust. Marcel. 3, 6. 47. SO-51, 63 Schubert. Franz, 42. 134
 Index 275

Ocr Undenhaum, 42,114,129-130,132-1.17 Ulrici, Helmut, 252. 25')

Die Wintmeise, 132 Urry, John, IO.~
SchUddekopf, Otto-Ernst, 14.1
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 82-83 Verdi, Guiseppl', 129
Shelley, Mary, 110 AIda, 129--131
frankenstein, 110 11 Trovatore, 129
Shookman, E\lis, II Yom Gmt drr Med,zin, 257
Simmel, Ceorg, 102-103
Sketch of My Lije, 14 "Wacht am Rhein, Die," 133 134
slaughtering, kosher, 179-180 Wagner, Richard, 5,16,18-19,26,37,79,
socialism, 73 124, 127-12S, 136-137
Sontag, Susan, 6 GOllerdiimmeruni/, 133
Illness as Metaphor, 6 Die Meistersinwr von Niirnher8, 130
Spartakus uprising, 149 Siea/ried, 22
Spengler, Oswald, 21, 77, 85, 97, 149, Tannhiiuser, 18, 129
156-157,159 Tristan und Isolde, 137
The Dec/ine of the West, 21, 77, 97,149 Waksman, Selman Abraham, 250
Preussentum und Sozialismus, 77 Waldteufel, Emil, 125
Stephen, Leslie, 103 Wiilsun8enblut, 171
Stifter, Adalbert, 36 Weber, Carl Maria von, 129
Indian Summer, 36 Der Freischiitz, 129
Story of a Novel. The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, Weigand, Hermann J., 3, 5, 16,99,
13-14,26, 125 123,204
Strauss, Johann, 125 Weimar Republic, 24, 144, 149
Strauss, Richard, 129 Weininger, Otto, 64, 73
subculture, homosexual, 73 Weisinger, Kenneth, 83
Weiss, Richard, 102
Theweleit, Klaus, 74 Whitman, Walt, 24, 75, 85
Tischrede bei der Feier des fiinfzii/sten Wolfram von I'schl'nbach, lH
Geburtstai/s, 32 l'uwvul,84
Tobin, Robert, 82 Woods, John 1'.,7
Tonio Kroi/er, 15,23,31,36,8 I Woolf, Virginia, 206
Travers, Martin, 8 Mr_,_ J>.tll"w,,-y, 206
Trenker, Louis, 105 World War I, 14--15, 18,43,67,125,147,
Tnstan, 17-18 224,226
Tnstan und I.lolde (scenario for a Ii 1m), 25 World War II, 15, 125
Troeltsch, Ernst, 21, 163
/ickgral, (;.,249,252-253,255
Obcr die Ehe, 64-65, 80, 86 "/ivilisation" (French), 19,78-80,147
Udet, Ernst, 105 Zur BewiifJuni/ Gerhart Hauptmanns, 36