The Magic Mountain Themes

Throughout The Magic Mountain, the novel’s omniscient narrator makes abundant, explicit references to time, focusing on time’s subjectivity in particular. The novel opens with the arrival of its protagonist, Hans Castorp, at the Berghof, a sanatorium located in the Swiss Alps, where he’s traveled to visit his cousin Joachim, who is ill with tuberculosis. Though initially Hans only plans to stay at the Berghof for three weeks, he falls ill just before…

The Magic Mountain is, at its core, a Bildungsroman—a story that traces the educational journey its protagonist undergoes over the course of their formative years. Thomas Mann’s novel follows Han Castorp, a young and impressionable engineer, as he transitions from youth to adulthood. Hans first arrives at the Berghof with minimal life experience: he’s only recently completed school and has yet to enter the workforce. Meanwhile, his philosophical ideas about life and death are…

Mann began writing The Magic Mountain in the years leading up to World War I. Published less than a decade after the war’s end, the novel functions as an allegory for Europe at the onset of World War I, narrativizing the social and political tensions that contributed to that conflict. The Berghof, located in historically neutral Switzerland, functions as a blank slate on which the competing worldviews that divided Europe play out. The facility hosts…

Throughout The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp encounters many new philosophical and scientific ways of looking at the world and finding meaning in life. This becomes especially vital—and complicated—over the course of his stay at the Berghof due to its remove from the real world. Situated in the Swiss Alps, the Berghof exists out of place and time, in a world that has no relationship to the goings on of society. Residents of the sanatorium…