Read The Magic Mountain Online
Authors: Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain (118 page)
is a very German book, and that might be the reason foreign critics very much underestimated its universal appeal. A Swedish critic, member of the Swedish Academy, with a decisive voice in the Nobel Prize awards, told me in public, and very decidedly, that nobody would dare to venture a translation of this book in a foreign language, as it was absolutely unsuited to such a purpose. That was a false prophecy.
The Magic Mountain ha
s been translated into all the European languages, and, so far as I can judge, no other of my books has had an equal success—I may say with pride that this is especially the case in America.
Now what is there that I can say about the book itself, and the best way to read it? I shall begin with a very arrogant request that it be read not once but twice. A request not to be heeded, of course, if one has been bored at the first reading. A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have this effect on a reader, he must put it down and turn to something else. But if you have read
The
Magic Mountain
once, I recommend that you read it twice. The way in which the book is composed results in the reader’s getting a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. Just as in music one needs to know a piece to enjoy it properly, I intentionally used the word “composed” in referring to the writing of a book. I mean it in the sense we more commonly apply to the writing of music. For music has always had a strong formative influence upon the style of my writing. Writers are very often “really” something else; they are transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what not. To me the novel was always like a symphony, a work in counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical motif plays a great role in it.
Buddenbrooks
, naturalistically and as a means of characterization—so to speak, mechanically. I sought to employ it in its musical sense. My first attempts were in
Tonio Kröger
. But the technique I there employed is in
The Magic Mountain
greatly expanded; it is used in a very much more complicated and all-pervasive way. That is why I make my presumptuous plea to my readers to read the book twice. Only so can one really penetrate and enjoy its musical association of ideas. The first time, the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards. I return to something I spoke of before: the mystery of the time element, dealt with in various ways in the book. It is in a double sense a time-romance. First in a historical sense, in that it seeks to present the inner significance of an epoch, the prewar period of European history. And secondly, because time is one of its themes: time, dealt with not only as a part of the hero’s experience, but also in and through itself. The book itself is the substance of that which it relates: it depicts the hermetic enchantment of its young hero within the timeless, and thus seeks to abrogate time itself by means of the technical device that attempts to give complete presentness at any given moment to the entire world of ideas that it comprises. It tries, in other words, to establish a magical
nunc stans
, to use a formula of the scholastics. It pretends to give perfect consistency to content and form, to the apparent and the essential; its aim is always and consistently to
be
that of which it speaks.
(Steigerung)
. This
Steigerung
is always referred to as alchemistic. You will remember that my Hans is really a simple-minded hero, the young scion of good Hamburg society, and an indifferent engineer. But in the hermetic, feverish atmosphere of the enchanted mountain, the ordinary stuff of which he is made undergoes a heightening process that makes him capable of adventures in sensual, moral, intellectual spheres he would never have dreamed of in the “flatland.” His story is the story of a heightening process, but also as a narrative it is the heightening process itself. It employs the methods of the realistic novel, but actually it is not one. It passes beyond realism by means of symbolism, and makes realism a vehicle for intellectual and ideal elements.
THE book, then, both spatially and intellectually, outgrew the limits its author had set. The short story became a thumping two-volume novel—a misfortune that would not have happened if
The Magic Mountain
had remained, as many people even today still see it, a satire on life in a sanatorium for tubercular patients. When it appeared, it made a stir in professional circles, partly of approval, partly of the opposite, and there was a little tempest in the medical journals. But the critique of sanatorium therapeutic methods is only the foreground of the novel. Its actuality lies in the quality of its backgrounds. Settembrini, the rhetorical rationalist and humanist, remains the protagonist of the protest against the moral perils of the Liegekur and the entire unwholesome milieu. He is but one figure among many, however—a sympathetic figure, indeed, with a humorous side; sometimes a mouthpiece for the author, but by no means the author himself. For the author, sickness and death, and all the macabre adventures his hero passes through, are just the pedagogic instrument used to accomplish the enormous heightening and enhancement of the simple hero to a point far beyond his original competence. And precisely as a pedagogic method they are extensively justified; for even Hans Castorp, in the course of his experiences, overcomes his inborn attraction to death and arrives at an understanding of a humanity that does not, indeed, rationalistically ignore death, nor scorn the dark, mysterious side of life, but takes account of it, without letting it get control over his mind. What he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health; in just the same way that one must have a knowledge of sin in order to find redemption. “There are,” Hans Castorp once says, “two ways to life: one is the regular, direct and good way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius.” It is this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life that makes
The
Magic Mountain
a novel of
initiation.
The Magic Mountain be
cause I have been much helped by foreign criticism and I consider it a mistake to think that the author himself is the best judge of his work. He may be that while he is still at work on it and living in it. But once done, it tends to be something he has got rid of, something foreign to him; others, as time goes on, will know more and better about it than he. They can often remind him of things in it he has forgotten or indeed never quite knew. One always needs to be reminded; one is by no means always in possession of one’s whole self. Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of unusual clarity and vision do we really know about ourselves. As for me, I am glad to be instructed by critics about myself, to learn from them about my past works and go back to them in my mind. My regular formula of thanks for such refreshment of my consciousness is: “I am most grateful to you for having so kindly recalled me to myself.” I am sure I wrote that to Professor Hermann Weigand of Yale University when he sent me his book on
The Magic
Mountain
, the most fundamental and comprehensive critical treatment the work has received.
The Magic Mountain
and its simple hero in the line of a great tradition that is not only German but universal. He classifies it as an art that he calls “The Quester Legend,” which reaches very far back in tradition and folklore.
Faust
is of course the most famous German representative of the form, but behind Faust, the eternal seeker, is a group of compositions generally known as the
Sangraal
or Holy Grail romances. Their hero, be it Gawain or Galahad or Perceval, is the seeker, the quester, who ranges heaven and hell, makes terms with them, and strikes a pact with the unknown, with sickness and evil, with death and the other world, with the supernatural, the world that in
The Magic Mountain
is called “questionable.” He is forever searching for the Grail—that is to say, the Highest: knowledge, wisdom, consecration, the philosophers’ stone, the
aurum potabile
, the elixir of life.
Bildungsroman
(educational novel)—a classification to which both
The Magic Mountain
and
Wilhelm Meister
belong—than the sublimation and spiritualization of the novel of adventure? The seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the Sacred Castle, has to undergo various frightful and mysterious ordeals in a wayside chapel called the Atre Périlleux. Probably these ordeals were originally rites of initiation, conditions of the permission to approach the esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge, wisdom, is always bound up with the “other world,” with night and death.
The Magic Mountain
there is a great deal said of an alchemistic, hermetic pedagogy, of
transubstantiation
. And I, myself a guileless fool, was guided by a mysterious tradition, for it is those very words that are always used in connection with the mysteries of the Grail. Not for nothing do Freemasonry and its rites play a role in
The Magic Mountain
, for Freemasonry is the direct descendant of initiatory rites. In a word, the magic mountain is a variant of the shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life. And my Hans Castorp, the
Bildungsreisende
, has a very distinguished knightly and mystical ancestry: he is the typical curious neophyte—curious in a high sense of the word—who voluntarily, all too voluntarily, embraces disease and death, because his very first contact with them gives promise of extraordinary enlightenment and adventurous advancement, bound up, of course, with correspondingly great risks.
About the Author
Gefallen
, he gave up office work for the study of art and literature at the University of Munich. Then came one year in Rome, and from that time on, Thomas Mann devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Doctor Faustus
and
The Holy
Sinner
. In 1949 Thomas Mann made a brief visit to Germany, his first contact with his native land in sixteen years; in 1952 he returned to Europe to take up permanent residence in Switzerland. He died at Zurich on August 12, 1955.
,
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
,
The Transposed Heads
,
Confessions of Felix Krull
,
Doctor Faustus
and
Letters of Thomas Mann
are available in Vintage Books.
