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 residents from different countries across Europe, and each represents the ideals of their home country.
In particular, the novel underscores the conflicting (rather simplified) worldviews at the time between the West (represented most notably by the Italian Settembrini) and the East (represented by Clavdia Chauchat, Dr. Krokowski, and Mynheer Peeperkorn, among others). The novel, in turn, represents Western ideals as embracing rationality, progress, and individual freedom, while it portrays Eastern ideals as regressive, superstitious, and irrational. The German Hans Castorp exists in between these opposing worldviews, reflecting Germany’s geopolitical status at the center of Eastern and Western powers (at the start of World War I, Germany was the leader of the Central Powers, positioning them against Russia, Italy, and the Allies).
One notable way the novel emphasizes this tension between the West and the East is through Hans Castorp’s gradual abandonment of his rational, bourgeois sensibilities for the allure of decadence and general moral decay he experiences at the Berghof, a transition that largely coincides with his ill-fated romance with Clavdia Chauchat, a Russian woman who lives at the sanatorium early in Hans’s stay. At first, Clavdia’s lethargy, disheveled appearance, and poor manners disgust Hans—he finds them an insult to the ideals of honor and industriousness that his bourgeois German sensibilities have taught him to value. But the longer he stays at the Berghof, the more suspectable he grows to Clavdia’s charm, and the more he starts to embrace Clavdia’s supposedly “Eastern” ideals, ultimately becoming so indifferent to society that he stops sending letters home, stops reading the paper, and spends his days playing meaningless games of solitaire and resting in his private room. In this way, The Magic Mountain uses Hans’s experience at the Berghof to convey the opposing social and cultural forces and political powers that divided Europe in the years leading up to World War I. In a broader sense, the novel establishes a duality between rationality and irrationality—bourgeois sensibilities and godless decadence—to reflect historical anxieties about the moral decay of modern society, which the novel implicitly associates with certain supposedly “Eastern” ideals.
Related Themes from Other Texts
East vs. West ThemeTracker
East vs. West Quotes in The Magic Mountain
On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagining how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace—and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.
Illness is, rather, a debasement—indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration—imprint that on your minds!—an aberration and the beginning of all intellectual aberrations.
One could no longer say that it thudded on its own accord, for no reason, and without any connection to his soul. There was a connection now, or at least it would not have been difficult to establish one—a justifiable emotion could easily be assigned to his body’s overwrought activity. Hans Castorp needed only to think of Frau Chauchat—and he did think of her—and his heart had a suitable emotion to make it pound.
“The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. […] Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind.”
And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness […] he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die.
“Analysis is good as a tool of enlightenment and civilization—to the extent that it shakes stupid preconceptions, quashes natural biases, and undermines authority. Good, in other words, to the extent that it liberates, refines, and humanizes—it makes slaves ripe for freedom. It is bad, very bad, to the extent that it prevents action, damages life at its roots, and is incapable of shaping it. Analysis can be very unappetizing, as unappetizing as death, to which it may very well be linked—a relative of the grave and its foul anatomy.”
“Just listen, and tell me if it isn’t the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.”
“Oh, love is nothing if not foolish, something mad and forbidden, an adventure in evil. Otherwise it is merely a pleasant banality, good for singing calm little songs down on the plains. […]”
“Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?”
“Oh, you and your learning! You’re always learning up here—about biology and botany and slippery turning points. And you started in on ‘time’ your first day here. When what we’re here to do is to get healthier, not more clever—healthier, until we’re truly healthy, so they can finally let us go free and send us back to the flatlands cured.”
His form is logic, but his nature is confusion.
“Yes, you’re cured. The spot at the upper left isn’t worth talking about. Your temperature has nothing to do with it. I can’t tell you what causes that. I assume it’s of no further importance. As far as I’m concerned, you may leave.”
And that was the end of the attempt by the flatlands to reclaim Hans Castorp. The young man admitted quite openly to himself that such total failure, which he had seen coming, was of decisive importance for his relationship to the people down there. For the flatlands it meant a final shrug, the abandonment of any claim; for him, however, it meant freedom finally won, and by now his heart no longer fluttered at the thought.
Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill.
Death is a great power. You take off your hat and tiptoe past his presence, rocking your way forward. […] Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love—there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death—it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. […] Oh, what a clear dream I’ve dreamed, how well I’ve ‘played king’! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.
There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
