The Magic Mountain

Hans Castorp, a young engineer with no particular convictions of his own, travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim for three weeks and ends up staying seven years, first as a visitor and then, once a doctor detects a spot on his own lung, as a patient himself. Mann fills the Berghof with patients who have stopped living by the clock of the world below and instead measure time in fevers, rest cures, and meals, and Castorp drifts through their company absorbing two men in particular: Settembrini, an Italian humanist who wants to argue Castorp into reason and progress, and Naphta, a Jesuit trained radical who wants to argue him into submission and unreason instead. Castorp also falls for Clawdia Chauchat, a patient whose slouching, indifferent manner undoes his usual caution completely, and their brief affair becomes one more thing that keeps him from leaving. When the First World War finally breaks out in 1914, it does what nothing inside the sanatorium could: it ends Castorp's seven years on the mountain in a single stroke, and Mann sends him down to volunteer for the army and onto a battlefield where the novel leaves his fate open.

Mann uses the sanatorium as a kind of laboratory for the ideas that would soon tear Europe apart, letting Settembrini and Naphta argue for hundreds of pages over a single soul while time itself seems to stop keeping its usual pace outside the windows. The novel reads slowly and demands real patience, its scenes and arguments both stretched well past what a conventional novel would allow, and readers who give it that patience tend to describe finishing it as its own kind of achievement.

Mann began developing the material in 1912, after a three week visit to a Davos sanatorium where his wife Katia was being treated for a suspected lung ailment; her letters describing the daily rhythms of sanatorium life fed directly into the book. The war then interrupted his writing for years, and Mann revised what he had drafted before the war to strip out the more lighthearted tone he had originally planned.