This tome is considered by most to be Mann’s magnum opus. It would be fair to say it is a philosophical novel. It has little in the way of action, although it might be unfair to say it has absolutely no plot. There is intrigue, clandestine love affairs, and even a near death experience in a blizzard. But most of the story takes place inside a tuberculosis sanatorium up in the mountains. Mann introduces the novel’s protagonist with a philosophical flair, “A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries…. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”
Mann’s novel plays with the idea of the subjectivity of time. “Looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long. It seemed everything to him, in fact, except how it really was—always presuming, of course, that time is part of nature and that it is therefore permissible to see it in conjunction with reality.” Castorp originally had intended to merely visit his cousin Joachim, who was a patient at the sanatorium, for a three week vacation, but Castorp ends up staying for quite awhile longer, after being admitted as a patient himself. “We would like to suggest that Hans Castorp would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.”
While staying at the sanatorium, Castorp meets a fellow patient, an Italian humanist named Settembrini, who takes him under his wing and warns him of the dangers of staying too long up in the mountains. A bit of a pedagogue, he also tries to impart a bit of his enlightened rationality and humanist philosophy on his young pupil. Settembrini expresses, “A man of the West, despite all other propositions, has only one concern: reason, analysis, deeds, progress.” His sparring partner, a Jesuit named Naphta, attempts to sway Castorp in a different direction, “Allow me to remark, that every sort of torture, every bit of bloody justice, that does not arise from a belief in the next world is bestial nonsense. And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the teachings of nineteenth-century science and economics have omitted nothing, absolutely nothing, that seemed even vaguely useful for furthering such degradation, beginning with modern astronomy—which turned the focal point of the universe, that sublime arena where God and Satan struggled to possess the creature whom they both ardently coveted, into an unimportant little planet.” Debate after debate between the two combatants ensues and, needless to say, things eventually become a little more heated. Herr Settembrini will have the last word, “The duel, my friend, is not just any ‘arrangement.’ It is the final arrangement, a return to the primal state of nature, only slightly moderated by certain chivalrous, but purely superficial rules. The essence of the situation remains what it has been since the beginning, a physical struggle, and it is each man’s duty, however far he may be from nature, to keep himself equal to the situation. Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.”
