A Visit to Davos
Thomas Mann began thinking about The Magic Mountain in 1912, after visiting his wife, Katia, who was being treated for a lung problem at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. He stayed a few weeks, and the doctors, examining him, advised him to stay longer; he went home. The episode made its way into the book: in the section The Thermometer, it is Dr. Behrens who examines the visitor, finds a damp spot in his lung and sends him to bed. Mann at first imagined a short, ironic novella, a comic counterweight to Death in Venice, which had come out that same year. The text grew, and Hans Castorp's three-week visit, which begins in The Arrival, became seven years of narrative.
The War That Split the Book in Two
The war of 1914 interrupted the work, and Mann only resumed it afterwards. The novel was finished in 1924 by an author who had lived through the war and Germany's defeat, and this shows at once in the opening: in the Purpose, the narrator says the story is old because it takes place before the Great War, which opened a rift between two worlds. In 1918, Mann had published Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, in which he defended German culture against the idea of democratic civilization that he attributed to his brother, the writer Heinrich Mann. The duel of ideas between Settembrini and Naphta, which occupies the center of the book, echoes that quarrel.
Tuberculosis and Sanatorium Life
When the story begins, tuberculosis was one of the diseases that killed most in Europe. The bacillus had been identified by Robert Koch in 1882, but there was no cure, and antibiotics only arrived in the 1940s. The treatment was the rest cure: pure high-altitude air, abundant food and long hours lying outdoors. Davos, at about 1,600 meters, was one of the great centers of this method, and it is this routine that Hans learns in the first weeks, with the seven-minute thermometer and the rest on the balcony, in Subtlety of Thought. There were also harsher treatments, such as pneumothorax, in which the doctor causes the diseased lung to collapse so that it can rest, a technique created by the Italian Carlo Forlanini at the end of the nineteenth century; Joachim explains it to Hans on the first walk. X-rays, discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, already helped with diagnosis: Hans sees his cousin's skeleton in the dark room of the X-ray scene.
Europe Before 1914
The sanatorium is international, and in it converse the currents that would lead Europe to war. Settembrini, the Italian humanist, inherits liberalism and the Enlightenment: his grandfather was a Carbonaro, and he calls himself a disciple of the poet Giosuè Carducci, whose hymn to Satan from the 1860s hailed reason against the Church, as can be seen in Satan. Naphta, the Jesuit, defends a mixture of medieval faith and social revolution: for him, the economic principles of the ancient Church return in modern communism, in Of the City of God and Redemption Through Evil. In The Great Irritation, he cites the sinking of the Titanic, in 1912, as an event of edifying effect. At the end, the war of 1914, triggered by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, reaches the Berghof with the first mobilizations, and it is this that expels Hans from the mountain, in The Thunder.
Publication and Reception
The book came out in November 1924, in two volumes, from the publisher S. Fischer of Berlin, and its length fulfills the promise to tell everything in detail, made in the Purpose. It was well received by readers and the press. Five years later, in 1929, Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy's citation mentioned mainly Buddenbrooks, the author's first novel, and not The Magic Mountain.