The publication of The Magic Mountain turns one hundred years old, at a time when the most representative novel of the work of Thomas Mann It has echoes of the crises of the present that attract the attention of critics. “We forget to read newspapers and one day we realize that a world war has broken out,” said the critic. Volker Weiderman in a documentary on the cultural channel until dedicated to the novel on the occasion of the centenary.
In The Magic Mountain The characters live isolated from what is happening in the world in Davos, and in the end they are surprised by the outbreak of the First World War that most of them – occupied in banal hobbies and, as it is said at one point in the novel, in “ their interesting bodies” – they didn’t see it coming. The temptation to establish a parallel between 1914 and 2022, with the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine to which it alludes Weidermanit is evident. Both are moments in which a long period of peace in Europe that many believed could last forever ends.
The director of the Thomas Mann Society, Hans Wisskirchenhas said that the novel has a “double contemporaneity” and that it illuminates both the crises of the time in which it was written and published and some crises of the present. Strictly speaking, we would have to go further and speak at least of a triple contemporaneity, since the novel takes place between 1907 and 1914, but it was published in 1924 and spoke at the time to interwar Europe.
The protagonist, Hans Castorp, arrives at a sanatorium in Davos – in August 1907 – for a three-week visit and ends up staying seven years during which he experiences a transformation. The novel ends with Castorp leaving to fight in the First World War.
Thomas Mann He also experienced a transformation during the writing process that began in 1913. At first, he was a conservative defender of the Wilhelmine Empire, during the First World War he interrupted the writing of The Magic Mountain and wrote Considerations of an apoliticalan essay in which he rejects illustration.
While I was writing, Mann He changed his position, and from 1922 he became a defender of the Weimar Republic and a critic of the far-right movements that would lead to Nazism. In the novel there is a character, Lodovico Settembrini, who at the beginning was supposed to be a caricature of Enlightenment thought, but who as the plot progresses is an increasingly positive character.
Settembrini is one of Castorp’s key influences at the sanatorium and constantly tries to convince him to return to the world of work and leave Davos. She also tries to distance him from the seduction of the irrational represented by his hopeless passion for one of the patients named Clawdia Chauchat.
Another influence is the reactionary Jesuit Leo Naphta who waged dialectical disputes with Settembrini. Naptha rejects not only Enlightenment thought but all modern thought. Many critics have seen it as a precursor to fascism. In 2001 – after the September 11 attacks – the Germanist Frederik A. Lubich He saw it as a precursor to religiously motivated terrorism.
The fight “for Castorp’s soul,” as it is said at some point in the novel, ends with a pistol duel that stops Wisskirchen It is one of the decisive moments. The duel occurs in the seventh chapter in an episode that illustrates what the director of the Foundation calls double contemporaneity and which has the subtitle “Hypersensitivity.”
People fight passionately over unimportant things or make an ideological conviction part of their identity. In the sanatorium they also participate in other people’s disputes that end up being documented and translated into several languages and distributed in various parts of the world. “When I read the episode again I thought this is what social networks do today. The reason for the dispute doesn’t matter much, but everyone ends up participating in it,” he said. Wisskirchen
Hypersensitivity – from before the First World War, from the crises preceding the rise of fascism or from the crises we are experiencing now – can lead some to a sympathy for a thought like that of Napha and a rejection of democratic consensus. .
Mann He perceived this and in a letter written in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power, he came to Settembrini’s defense. “We can all laugh a little at the good Mr. Settembrini, but he is a wonderful man compared to the Naptha who now rule,” he wrote.
Source: EFE
(Photos: EFE/ José Manzaneque)
