Davos today is synonymous with the gathering of global elites at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. They come together to focus on issues ranging from the “fourth industrial revolution” to lab-grown meat and to develop our ambitious global health and education agendas. It is a noble gathering, but also haunted by the specters of 21st century autocracies and conflicts that undermine its motto “to improve the state of the world.”
A hundred years ago, the same Alpine town was the scene of a literary masterpiece whose echoes are striking today. In November 1924, the German novelist Thomas Mann published his long, evolving story, The Magic Mountain. A century may seem like a long time in literature, but this novel, of all Mann’s prodigious output, speaks to us with a clarity that seems as modern as it is rooted in its own turbulent world.
It was written before and after the Great War and is imbued with a sense of pervasive conflict that feels newly relevant as the battlefields of Ukraine and Russia’s war of attrition resemble the bloody work of the First World War and divisions are growing in Europe on the question of how far. confront or appease the attacker.
The echoes, however, travel beyond war and peace: The Magic Mountain features a cast of characters worried about the modernity in which they live and torn between noisy ideologies, who meet in the liminal world of the Berghof tuberculosis sanatorium.
In Mann’s Bildungsroman, Hans Castorp, a Hamburg engineer and “a simple but pleasant young man”, ends up spending seven years in the sanatorium after a chance and dubious diagnosis of a propensity for tuberculosis. There he lands in a panopticon of temperaments, philosophies and arguments that reflect the bourgeois intellectual life of the early 20th century, in the conflicting wake of Hegel, Marx, Weber and Freud.
The novel is also a mischievous comedy of manners, with a host of stereotypes and clever European national interactions – from the intellectual to the carnal. On this last point, Mann’s bold treatment of sexuality holds up surprisingly well to the century.
He channels his own bisexuality when Hans, attracted to the oriental temptress Madame Chauchat, is moved by memories of a schoolboy crush on another Slavic temptation, his classmate in Hamburg, Pribislav Hippe, who lured Hans with his narrow eyes and its seductive charm of “oriental decadence”. He finds this intoxication in Chauchat, with his “Asian relaxation”. The critics naturally had a field day.
What began for Mann as a piquant reflection on the differences in European thought and style, the carnal ambiguities and the lure of death wish, which figured in his early work. Death in Venice and – decades later – his farewell Doctor Faustevolved when he took his wife Katia to Davos for treatment for bronchitis in 1912.
In this snowy refuge, favored for its dry and invigorating air, he conceived the idea of a story mixing different nationalities and temperaments. However, the planned plot grew darker as war threatened.
It is in this vein that the echoes are now most acute. The rejection of rationalism and the rise of seductive extremism, challenging an Enlightenment model of what we would today call liberal democracy, appear in many forms in the novel, from lengthy debates to the clash of values during sessions, suicides and even an absurd and fatal duel. .
Create characters, who are in essence spokespersons for the worldviews, which also feel alive and real in their faults and passions, show the novelist’s skill both in expressing his own controlled Hanseatic disposition and in caricaturing others. Mann’s seriousness and rationality are wonderfully embodied by the preachy Italian professor Lodovico Settembrini, Hans’s educator. This is a representation that we can easily recognize today in the rules-based mentality of Eurocrats or think tank bosses.
But agreement and conciliation prove elusive – then as now. Settembrini argues with his flamboyant roommate, Leo Naphta, who sees humanity’s progress embracing more fundamentalist roots. Jordan Peterson, the prolific Canadian provocateur, could audition for a new incarnation, but so could proto-Marxist hardliners (hello Jeremy Corbyn) with their insistence on authority overriding individual preferences.
High on the Magic Mountain, the social order is suspended, time becomes elastic and the characters steeped in playful nominative determinism intertwine. The exuberant troublemaker who has a strange erotic charge, monopolizes attention, never finishes a sentence and leaves destruction in his wake is Mynheer Peeperkorn (“His Lordship Pepper”). Boris Johnson could offer a plausible replacement.
And Mann’s description of his native country is certainly apt: here via Mme Chauchat, both flirting and trolling Hans as a model of Germany’s complacent view of its own virtues: “A bourgeois, a humanist and a poet – behold, Germany is whole. all in one, as it should be! »
But it’s a thin thread of humor, thrown across a chasm of darkness emerging beneath the mountain. Mann saw how societies can inexorably slide from stability to political confusion – and war – because they fail to agree on what they stand for.
Towards the end of the novel, we leave Castorp, after his “healing”, staggering in the trenches, his Europe prey to destruction: “Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, delicate child of life! . . . and if you live or die! Your prospects are poor. A century later, the cast of The Magic Mountainwe then realize as their ghosts disappear from the page, it’s all of us.
Anne McElvoy is the author of “The Saddled Cow: The Life and Legacy of East Germany.”
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