Der Zauberberg (in English, The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann, is a very enigmatic novel. The pacing is deliberately slow and the main character, Hans Castorp, is maddeningly passive. Virtually nothing actually happens in the 985 pages of the book. This lethargic quality of the novel, however, leads to an almost dreamlike perception which allows the reader to create personal interpretations of the ubiquitous yet fleeting symbolism in the book. The end result is that the reader may not be entirely satisfied with Der Zauberberg as a novel, yet will remain intrigued by the ideas that Mann raises.

The premise of the novel is that Hans Castorp, an impressionable young German from Hamburg, goes to Davos, Switzerland to visit his cousin Joachim, who is convalescing at a sanatorium for those with tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. He plans on staying three weeks, but, using the excuse that the doctors found an irregularity in his own lungs, he stays for seven years, interacting with the other patients and confronting a variety of viewpoints present in European society on the eve of the First World War.

Mann, who oddly refers to his character by his full name throughout the novel, has clearly put his character in a permanent state of transition. He is suspended between sickness and health, between life and death and between reason and passion. The entire book is thus a pause, a hesitation, a gap, a transition, a Dämmerung, one might say. This state of transition is alluded to early in the novel:

Er erinnerte sich einer einsamen Kahnfahrt im Abendzwielicht auf einem holsteinischen See, in Spätsommer, vor einigen Jahren. Um sieben Uhr war es gewesen, die Sonne war schon hinab, der annährend volle Mond im Osten über den buschigen Ufern schon aufgegangen. Da hatte zehn Minuten lang, während Hans Castorp sich über die stillen Wasser dahin ruderte, eine verwirrende und träumerische Konstellation geherrscht. Im Westen war heller Tag gewesen, ein glasig nüchternes, entschiedenes Tageslicht; aber wandte er den Kopf, so hatte er in eine ebenso ausgemachte, höchst zauberhafte, von feuchten Nebeln durchsponnene Mondnacht geblickt. Das sonderbare Verhältnis hatte wohl einen knappe Viertelstunde bestanden, bevor es sich zugunsten der Nacht und des Mondes ausgeglichen, und mit heiterem Staunen waren Hans Castorps geblendete und vexierte Augen von einer Beleuchtung und Landschaft zur anderen, vom Tage in die Nacht und aus der Nacht wieder in den Tag gegangen. – p. 215

He remembered a solitary boat trip in the evening twilight on a lake in Holstein, in the late Summer, some years ago. At seven o'clock it so happened that the sun was already setting, and the almost full moon in the East had already risen over the bushy shore. There, for ten minutes, while Hans Castorp rowed through the quiet water, a confusing and dreamlike constellation held sway. In the West it was a bright day, a glassy sober and unambiguous daylight, but when he turned his head, he looked into a just as complete moonlit night, entirely magical and brimming with damp fog. The unique circumstance had likely lasted for a brief quarter hour, before it resolved itself in favor of the night and the moon, and Hans Castorp’s dazzled and vexed eyes had gone from one lighting and scenery to the other, from day in the night and from night back into the day. (All translations are my own, loose translations)

Castorp is thus a passive character, though he is passive not because he cannot make a decision, but because he has issues to resolve. His physical health is a reflection of his mental health, a point that is made by the sanatorium’s Dr. Krokowski, who engages in primitive psychiatry as well as medicine. Hans is haunted by his past, a past filled with death and an obsession for a schoolmate named Přibislav Hippe. Mann refers to his own conflicted sexuality, a theme that he had previously dealt with in his shorter work, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice). It is clear from Der Zauberberg that Mann was uncomfortable with his homosexual feelings, at one point having Castorp assert bei der Verliebtheit kommt das ästhetische Vernunfturteil sowenig zu seinem Recht wie das moralische (in love, aesthetic considerations are just as disregarded as moral considerations). Castorp replaces his past attraction for Hippe with an attraction to Clawdia Chauchat, a fellow patient who reminds him in many ways of the boy he was obsessed with.

Although Castorp has transferred his homosexual desires by equating them with a woman, his attraction is still portrayed as irrational, unnatural and “wrong”, because Clawdia is married, she is Russian (and Mann draws a sharp contrast between Russian and German sensibilities in his novel), and she is uninhibited. Every time Hans approaches her, his temperature rises the next day, which seems to equate her with illness.

The inability of Hans Castorp to take deliberate action seems, however, to be a positive trait in Mann’s eyes. Although he has one of the characters, the Jesuit reactionary Naphtha, state Gegensätze mögen sich reimen. Ungereimt is nur das Halbe und Mediokre (opposites can make sense together. Only the halfway and mediocre cannot), it seems that Mann feels that Castorp’s inactivity keeps him from falling into any of the extreme alternatives that surround him. At his moment of greatest clarity, caught in a snowstorm, Hans Castorp muses:

Tod oder Leben – Krankheit, Gesundheit – Geist und Natur. Sind das wohl Widersprüche? Ich frage: sind das Fragen? Nein, es sind keine Fragen, und auch die Frage nach ihrer Vornehmheit ist keine. Die Durchgängerei des Todes ist im Leben, es wäre nicht Leben ohne sie, und in der Mitte ist des Homo Dei Stand – inmitten zwischen Durchgängerei und Vernunft – wie auch sein Staat ist zwischen mystischer Gemeinschaft und windigem Einzeltum. – p. 679

Death or life – illness, health – spirit and nature. Is this all a contradiction? I ask: are there questions? No, there are no questions, not even the question regarding their refinement. The pathway through death is in life, there would be no life without it, and in the middle is the place of the Homo Dei – in the midst of this passage and reason – just as his state is between mystical community and windy individuality.

The extremes to Castorp’s centeredness are very vivid. Settembrini, the Italian “voice of reason”, is a radical anti-religious voice representing not only the ideas of the Enlightenment, but also the radical renunciations of traditional society that were seen in the French Revolution. Naphtha, who is introduced later on, represents a radical reactionary force, filled with contradictions and hatred, a proto-fascist or proto-communist (it matters not which one, as both philosophies were ultimately driven by hate, resentment and envy). Still yet later on, Mann introduces Mynheer Peeperkorn, who is a caricature of Nietzsche and his ideas on the Übermensch, a wildly irrational and life-affirming personality reveling in the immediateness of experience, who nonetheless kills himself.

Mann’s order of presentation for these main characters is telling – it is a chronology of Europe’s intellectual development – Enlightenment, Reaction, Postmodernism – and it is further telling that, following the suicide of Peeperkorn, Castorp and the rest of the patients descend into diversions, from listening to the new gramophone to spiritualist seances. It is as though, after Peeperkorn has reduced Settembrini and Naphtha to insignificance, the relativism of thought has corrupted society and made it ready for the coming Great War. This interpretation of the causes of the war seems at variance with the high-minded idealism that seemed to have driven the initial enthusiasm for the war, but it does properly show how the Nietzschean philosophy destroyed everything that had come before it and helped to usher in the modern world.

Castorp is portrayed as a modern-day Tannhäuser, trapped on the Venusberg, or Odysseus in the arms of Calypso. It is finally only when war breaks out that his spell is broken and he goes down, out of the mountains, to fight with his countrymen. There, we are made to understand, he dies.

The book defies attempts to neatly define it or encapsulate it. Certainly, some brief sections are dated. A few truisms are held out with a sort of reverence that they probably do not deserve. The ending is drawn out beyond several logical endpoints and seems weaker than the rest of the novel. However, Der Zauberberg is a profound book filled with nuance, and one that certainly is worth reading at least once.