One summer’s day in 1952, Thomas Mann lined up at Cambridge University’s Senate House to receive an honorary doctorate. The ceremony passed without incident. Afterwards, an Indian man was seen sidling up to him on King’s Parade. It turned out to be Jawaharlal Nehru: the Prime Minister of India. He had also just been honoured by the university. “I would like to pay my own tribute,” Nehru announced to Mann. But to what? It was, according to witnesses, The Magic Mountain that Nehru wished so keenly to discuss with its author. “A great novel indeed,” Nehru reportedly said.
In this, The Magic Mountain’s centenary – Mann’s masterpiece was published in Germany 100 years ago this month – I have been wondering about the significance of that conversation. Mann was then Europe’s most venerated living novelist, already a Nobel Laureate but more crucially, the most influential German writer to have survived the Second World War with his conscience intact. Nehru, for his part, was the pre-eminent statesman of the formerly colonised peoples of Asia. What was it about a novel set in a Swiss sanatorium that meant it would end up at the centre of this tantalising East-West dialogue?
Davos – the alpine resort where Mann first conceived, and set, The Magic Mountain – is not today an obvious inspiration for such an exchange. On a recent visit, I was the only Asian, perhaps, in the whole valley. The café chatter was about elections across the border; Germany’s far-right AfD was tipped to make gains, and did, apparently with the support of Swiss-Germans. Terrorism perpetrated by a Syrian refugee had just stoked anti-immigrant sentiment across the German-speaking world, though there was no sign of Davos being overrun. Bounded by the Rhaetian mountains, Davos is Fortress Europe in miniature. Here, I imagined, the elite of the continent might one day retreat after some untold crisis of the future. And what was the World Economic Forum, hosted in Davos, if not a yearly trial run?
Out of just such a premonition sprang The Magic Mountain, “before the epoch”, as Mann puts it in his preface, “when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind”. His bronchitic wife Katia had checked into a sanatorium on Davos’s Schatzalp, which Mann fictionalises as the Zauberberg or “magic mountain”. Davos was then a luxury spa town, where Europe’s patrician class came up for air, fleeing from that most symbolic of plagues, the ultimate illness as metaphor: tuberculosis. What Mann witnessed on his brief visit was a civilisation struggling to breathe. Europe was incurably ill. The First World War broke out soon after.
It’s hard to sense, today, the morbid mood that induced Mann to imagine The Magic Mountain as “a microcosm of a sick Europe”, as the blurb for Helen Lowe-Porter’s classic Penguin translation used to read. The Berghof sanatorium, where the novel’s protagonist Hans Castorp and its cosmopolitan cast of characters are inmates facing death, is now a pastel-coloured, art deco Wes Anderson-scape, where I personally had a highly Instagrammable, disease-free stay. But in those dying years of the Belle Époque something about Davos screamed to writers: macabre allegory. On visiting, Conrad, too, said it was “where the modern Dance of Death goes on in expensive hotels”.
Mann’s novel begins with the young naval engineer Hans Castorp visiting his tubercular cousin in the Berghof, intending to stay only a few weeks. Thanks to his declining health, he ends up lingering for seven years. Describing the strange, spatio-temporal spell the mountain cast, Mann’s narrator reflects: “Space, like time, begets amnesia, and this it does by detaching an individual from the ties that bind, placing him in a free and pristine state – indeed, in a mere moment it can turn a stickler and a conformist into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but a change of air is a similar potion…”
The Magic Mountain, the philosophical novel par excellence, takes place in this enchanted, abstract world, whose true roots, defying earthly gravity, ascend upwards into the cloudy realm of thought. Time here feels frozen, like the looming ice caps, and way up in the mountains, the sanatorium functions like some monastic sanctuary. Having crossed its threshold, Castorp becomes a novice who must learn to examine life and the world, and guiding him on this journey are “emissaries” – in Mann’s own unembarrassed description of his fictional characters – “from worlds, principalities, domains of the spirit”.
Out of these, two predominate, two vying preceptors to the naive novice: Herr Settembrintwoi and Herr Naphta. This is a dialectical novel, and at its core are the conversations with and between this pedagogic pairing. Little action; much talk of action. Castorp’s intellectual formation swings between – again in Mann’s characterisation – “the poles of humanism and romanticism, progress and reaction, vitality and sickness”.
Lodovico Settembrini is an Italian classical scholar, a disciple of the real-life Italian poet-statesman Giosuè Carducci, now-forgotten winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize for Literature. But there is a more tangible factual inspiration for Settembrini: Mann’s own brother, Heinrich, a liberal, Francophile novelist and campaigning journalist, whom he would refer to, with spitting irony, as “civilisation’s litterateur”. But while writing The Magic Mountain, Mann was renouncing his erstwhile Prussian militarism and reconciling to his brother’s progressive, pan-Europeanist worldview. Settembrini represents the liberal spirit of Western civilisation, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the civilised values of freedom, democracy and reason that the brothers Mann were uniting behind.
Settembrini’s maddening adversary – civilisation’s enemy – is Leo Naphta, a Jewish-born Jesuit priest who preaches theocratic communism. Critics baulk at this complex thinker, both ideologue and nihilist, Jew and Christian, mystic and Marxist – but most redolent, at the time, of fascism. In truth, Naphta is ingeniously coherent. His is the spirit of counter-Enlightenment, of German Romanticism. His contradictions would have applied equally to Wagner before him and Hitler after him. Fundamentally, what the seemingly disparate strands that coalesce in Naphta have in common is the violent, authoritarian zeitgeist soon to seize Europe. And in this, Mann presages not only fascism, but its widely agreed genealogy. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin would also trace the origins of modern totalitarianism to the reactionary anti-Enlightenment German thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
But Mann reads the history of ideas with novelistic intuition, not scholarly rigour. He apprehends the mythic hinterland of Europe’s countervailing ideologies. Settembrini proclaims himself, “like Prometheus, a lover of humanity and human nobility”. Prometheus, of course, gave fire to humankind to illuminate society. But Naphta, as incendiary as his name, represents the fire that burns it back down. He is a militant, inspired by the atavistic memory of human sacrifice, hinted at in the Bible and Germanic myth, where Mann locates the earliest stirrings of revolutionary violence.
The Magic Mountain is ultimately not a treatise, though, it is a fully realised novel whose narrative artistry is strangely uncompromised by its philosophical weight; it manages, at times, even to be operatic. Settembrini’s first act is to switch on the light, a leitmotif thereafter associated with the Enlightenment scholar. Mann’s greatest narrative technique is his use of comic irony. Even Naphta’s darkest fantasies are evoked in this way. One afternoon in the rain, Naphta is enraged to see everyone anxiously holding up umbrellas (“vulgar effeminacy!”), and then revels in the news of the Titanic’s passengers drowning. Is he jesting? Is he serious? Mann often cited Goethe’s paradoxical description of art: “a serious jest”. The Magic Mountain is full of this.
The narrative climax is thrilling, melodramatic, and quite unexpected after 700 pages of sustained cerebralism: a duel between nemeses. Settembrini, ever the humanist, renounces bloodshed and fires into the air. Naphta shocks everyone, shooting himself in the head. It is compulsive plotting. But moreover, philosophically apt. Naphta’s martyrdom reflects the cult of death in German Romanticism. Isaiah Berlin’s definition of the latter springs to mind: “It is energy, force, will, life,” he writes in The Roots of Romanticism (1965), “it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide.” Hitler, too, would commit suicide in his bunker, an underworld Liebestod to make Naphta proud. Death and disease are the novel’s centrifugal metaphors, and they stand above all for the sickening, spreading nihilism of Naphta’s across Europe.
In unskilled hands, Naphta might be a pantomime villain. But in Mann’s portrayal, Naphta is the more seductive of Castorp’s mentors, as horrifying and convincing as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. “There are two ways to life,” Castorp reflects, wavering between Settembrini and Naphta, “the one is the regular, direct, and good way. The other is bad, it goes via death, and that is the way of genius.” Against the bland windbag Settembrini, Naphta is an otherworldly magus. Mann shows how powerless Settembrini’s rational rhetoric is against Naphta’s aesthetic appeal, his primordial imagery. Under its influence, in a chilling moment, Castorp wonders: “Don’t you love seeing coffins? I’ve always enjoyed seeing one now and then. I think of a coffin as an absolutely lovely piece of furniture, even when empty, but if there’s someone lying in it, it’s really quite sublime in my eyes.”
How many young men today, from the incel to the Islamist, feel drawn to that perverse vision, who think, “what our age needs, what it demands” – as Naphta says – “is terror”? Even I on first reading The Magic Mountain in the feverish years after 9/11, when the cult of death had re-emerged once more as the zeitgeist, Naphta’s justifications struck a sinister chord in my own disaffected mind, disaffected with the West and its hypocrisies.
Mann, with that characteristic irony, exposes this too. Settembrini boasts of being “a friend of mankind” and envisions a world republic. But it’s clear he is a paranoid racist, who smells “Asia in the air” and excludes from Western civilisation even the sanatorium’s preponderant Prussians and Russians, the latter dubbed “Mongolians”. All are “children of Asia”, of whom Settembrini warns Castorp: “Do not let them infect you with their ideas.” Above all he means sexy, Clavdia Chauchat, Castorp’s Russian love-interest, whose leitmotif are her “Kyrgyz” eyes, and Naphta, the Ukrainian Jew with the Persian-origin name. They personify, respectively, oriental sensuality and morality. Thus the Naphta-Settembrini dialectic is essentially East vs West. As Settembrini has it: “Two principles were locked in combat for the world: might and right, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge, the law of stasis and the law of ferment, change, and progress. The first one may call the Asiatic principle, the other European.”
If The Magic Mountain is, as Mann put it, “a kind of summing up of the European soul and mind”, we must also realise this encompasses, no less, Europe’s anxious encounter with Asia. Is this not what chimed with Nehru? He surely saw in Settembrini the spirit of the hypocritical coloniser who proclaimed liberal values while withholding them from the colonised, and he will have noted, too, the accompanying plunder of oil rigs in Dagestan and plantations in Indonesia, owned by the sanatorium’s patients.
Yet now the shoe is on the other foot. “Asia is devouring us,” Settembrini grumbles. And this has a new echo in the yearly gathering of Western leaders at WEF — in the very Berghof of The Magic Mountain — as Asia outpaces Europe economically and outmanoeuvres it geopolitically. This is partly the legacy of Nehru, who inherited in 1947 a ritualistic, myth-bound society birthed through orgiastic bloodshed – close to Naphta’s ideal – and set it on the path of economic and scientific progress, which is, of course, more capricious that Settembrini realised. Aspects of this story can be discerned in every country from the Middle East to the Far East.
When I visited Davos, I had gone in search of the enduring relevance of The Magic Mountain. Little did I know that the novel’s centre of gravity had mysteriously migrated. Its dialectical questions are now more alive in Asia than Europe. Today’s Settembrinis, its Naphtas, fight it out there in the manically modernising countries of the east, where the bourgeois nation-state is still making its case against the seductions of theocracy and tribalism. For us children of Asia, it feels absurd now to read of Europe as the continent of “transforming action” and Asia as that of “inertia”. It is Asia that today actively transforms itself – while Europe lies inert. History has, with its mesmeric wand, performed a magic trick on The Magic Mountain; it reversed its poles… But the spark, one hundred years on, is still undiminished.
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