What It Is
The sanatorium in Davos where almost the whole novel takes place, and the "magic mountain" of the title: the place above the plain where time stops running and whoever climbs up falls ill. Davos is a real place; the Berghof is the novel's invention and matters for what it means.
Where It Appears
From the first dialogue on, Joachim Ziemssen separates the time up here from the time down below.
Joachim answers by relativizing the same measure, and it is here that the vocabulary of the sanatorium enters the conversation for the first time.Three weeks mean almost nothing to us up here, but for you, who are only visiting and intend to stay just three weeks, it is a considerable portion of time. [...] "Going back in three weeks" is an idea from down below.
Fast or slow, as you like [...] It doesn't pass at all, you know? Here there is no time and no life; there is simply nothing at all
In Chapter III the sanatorium appears as a liturgy: the seven tables, the five meals, the rest at a fixed hour.
There were seven tables in the room, most of them lengthwise and only two placed crosswise. They were large tables, each with room for ten people, although not all of them were fully occupied.
Joachim's fellow patients, companions in his fate, all sick on the inside, chatting and taking their breakfast
In Chapter IV Dr. Behrens says that the air here is good against the illness and good for it.
Well, the air we have here is good against the illness. [...] But at the same time this air is also good for the illness; do you understand? At first it speeds up its course, revolutionizes the body, fosters the eruption of the latent disease, and that eruption is, with your permission, your catarrh, The Thermometer
In Chapter VII the place rots into the great boredom, and the thunder of war makes it explode.
With Peeperkorn dead and Clavdia gone once more, the Berghof enters a state that the narrator names in plain words.Hans Castorp looked around him [...] He saw disquieting, pernicious things, and he knew what he saw before him: it was life without time, life without cares or hopes, life as abjection that moves as it stagnates, dead life.
The narrator describes the effect on the Berghof with the same image of the sleeper that opened the chapter's initial digression:
the thunder we all know of rumbled, that deafening detonation of the sinister mixture of boredom and irritation long accumulated [...] and the thunder that, for us, however, makes the magic mountain explode and casts our sleeper, none too gently, before its gates.
What It Means
The Berghof is at once the setting and the disease: it is the place that holds you through routine, through the air, and through the diagnosis, and the novel leaves it only through an event from outside, the thunder. The plain, "down below," always appears as what was left behind, up to the last words of Lodovico Settembrini, who sends him back down.
The Critical Reading
Carpeaux shifts the subject of the novel from the sanatorium to the continent: the mountain is a sick Europe before 1914.
On The Magic Mountain in particular, Carpeaux offers two theses that are worth more than any plot summary. The first is about what the book is:
Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) sums up all the earlier works, but with a new orientation. It is the novel of a decline, like Buddenbrooks, but not of a German family; it is of all of Europe.
Relationships
- Core themes: Illness, Time, Individual and Society.
- Related symbols: the thermometer and the clock, the measures of time from up here.
- Critical source: A Concise History of German Literature.