THE MAKING OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

THE MAKING OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

THOMAS MANN

Translated from the German by H T LOWE-PORTER

Thomas Mann, 1875-1955.

Since it is certainly not customary for an author to discuss his own work, perhaps a word of apology, or at least of explanation, should occupy first place. For the thought of acting as my own historian I find a little confusing; and, you know, there are few impartial historians anyway. Furthermore, since my work is still in the making and, I venture to hope, still reflects the present and its problems, it would be rather difficult, if not impossible, to criticize it with scholarly detachment – even if the critic were not, at the same time, the author. ....

There are authors whose names are associated with a single great work, because they have been able to give themselves complete expression in it. Dante is the Divina Commedia, Cervantes is Don Quixote. But there are others – and I must count myself among them – whose single works do not possess this complete significance, being only parts of the whole which makes up the author’s lifework. And not only his lifework, but actually his life itself, his personality. He strives, that is, to overcome the laws of time and continuity. He tries to produce himself completely in each thing he writes, but only actually do so in the way The Magic Mountain does it; I mean by the use of the leitmotiv, the magic formula that works both ways, and links the past with the future, the future with the past. The leitmotiv is the technique employed to preserve the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment. ....

In the year 1912 – over a generation ago now – my wife was suffering from a lung complaint, fortunately not a very serious one; yet it was necessary for her to spend six months at a high altitude, in a sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland. I stayed with the children either in Munich or at our country home in Tolz, in the valley of the Isar. But in May and June I visited my wife for some weeks at Davos. There is a chapter in The Magic Mountain, entitled ‘Arrival’, where Hans Castorp dines with his cousin Joachim in the sanatorium restaurant, and tastes not only the excellent Berghof cuisine but also the atmosphere of the place and the life ‘bei un shier oben’. If you read that chapter, you will have a fairly accurate picture of our meeting in this sphere and my own strange impressions of it. ....

Davos

The idea of making a story out of my Davos impressions and experiences occurred to me very soon. ....

Now what is there that I can say about the book itself, and the best way to read it? I shall begin with a very arrogant request that it be read not once but twice. A request not to be heeded, of course, if one has been bored at the first reading. A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven. If it does not have this effect on a reader, he must put it down and turn to something else. But if you have read   The Magic Mountain once, I recommend that you read it twice. The way in which the book is composed results in the reader’s getting a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. Just as in music one needs to know a piece to enjoy it properly, I intentionally used the word ‘composed’ in referring to the writing of a book. I mean it in the sense we more commonly apply to the writing of music. For music has always had a strong formative influence upon the style of my writing. Writers are very often ‘really’ something else; they transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what not. To me the novel was always like a symphony, a work in counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical motif plays a great role in it.

People have pointed out the influence of Wagner’s music on my work. Certainly I do not disclaim this influence. In particular, I followed Wagner in the use of the leitmotiv, which I carried over into the work of language. Not as Tolstoy and Zola use it, or as I used it myself in Buddenbrooks, naturalistically and as a means of characterization – so to speak, mechanically. ....But the technique I there employed is in The Magic Mountain greatly expanded; it is used in a very much more complicated and all-pervasive way. That is why I make my presumptuous plea to my readers to read the book twice. Only so can one really penetrate and enjoy its musical association of ideas. The first time, the reader learns the thematic material; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards.

I return to something I spoke of before: the mystery of the time element, dealt with in various ways in the book. It is in a double sense a time-romance. First in a historical sense, in that it seeks to present the inner significance of an epoch, the pre-war period of European history. And secondly, because time is one of its themes: time, dealt with not only as a part of the hero’s experience, but also in and through itself. The book itself is the substance of that which it relates: it depicts the hermetic enchantment of its young hero within the timeless, and thus seeks to abrogate time itself by means of the technical device that attempts to give complete presentness at any given moment to the entire world of ideas that it comprises. It tries, in other words, to establish a magical nunc stans, to use a formula of the scholastics. It pretends to give perfect consistency to content and form, to the apparent and the essential; its aim is always and consistently to be that of which it speaks.

But its pretensions are even more far-reaching, for the book deals with yet another fundamental theme, that of ‘heightening’, enhancement (Steigerung). This Steigerung is always referred to as alchemist. ....

The book, then, both spatially and intellectually, outgrew the limits its author had set. The short story became a thumping two-volume novel....

For the author, sickness and death, and all macabre adventures his hero passes through, are just the pedagogic instrument used to accomplish the enormous heightening and enhancement of the simple hero to a point far beyond his original competence. And precisely as a pedagogic method they are extensively justified; for even Hans Castrop, in the course of his experience, overcomes his inborn attraction to death and arrives at an understanding of a humanity that does not, indeed, rationalistically ignore death, nor scorn the dark, mysterious side of life, but takes account of it, without letting it get control over his mind.

What he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health; in just the same way that one must have knowledge of sin in order to find redemption. ‘There are’, Hans Castorp once  says, ‘two ways to life: one is regular, direct and good way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius.’ It is this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life that makes The Magic Mountain a novel of initiation.

I read a manuscript by a young scholar of Harvard University, Howard Nemerov, called ‘The Quester Hero. Myth as Universal Symbol in the Works of Thomas Mann,’ and it considerably refreshed my memory and my consciousness of myself. The author places The Magic Mountain and its simple hero in the line of a great tradition that is not only German but universal. He classifies it as an art that he calls ‘The Quester Legend’, which reaches very far back in tradition and folklore. Faust is of course the most famous German representative of the form, but behind Faust, the eternal seeker, is a group of compositions generally known as the Sangraal or Holy Grail romances. Their hero, be it Gawain or Galahad or Perceval, is the seeker, the quester, who ranges heaven and hell, makes terms with them, and strikes a pact with the unknown, with sickness and evil, with death and the other world, with the supernatural, the world that in The Magic Mountain is called ‘questionable’. He is forever searching for the Grail – that is to say, the Highest: knowledge, wisdom, consecration, the philosophers’ stone, the aurum potabile, the elixir of life. ....

The Quester of the Grail legend, at the beginning of his wanderings, is often called a fool, a great fool, a guileless fool. That corresponds to the naivete and simplicity of my hero. ..Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – is he too not a guileless fool? To a great extent he is identified with his creator; but even so, he is always the object of his irony. Here we see Goethe’s great novel, too, falling within the Quester category. And after all, what else is the German Bildungsroman (educational novel) – a classification to which both The Magic Mountain and Wilhelm Meister belong – than the sublimation and spiritualization of the novel of adventure? The seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the Sacred Castle, has to undergo various frightful and mysterious ordeals in a wayside chapel called the Atre Perilleux. Probably these ordeals were originally rites of initiation, conditions of the permission to approach the esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge, wisdom is always bound up with the ‘other world’, with night and death.

In The Magic Mountain there is a great deal said of an alchemistic, hermetic pedagogy, of transubstantiation. And I, myself a guileless fool, was guided by a mysterious tradition, for it is those very words that are always used in connection with the mysteries of the Grail. Not for nothing do Freemasonry and its rites play a role in The Magic Mountain, for Freemasonry is the direct descendant of initiation rites. In a word, the magic mountain is a variant of the shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life. ....

Perhaps you will read the book again from this point of view. And perhaps you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest reward, for which not only the foolish hero but the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the chapter called ‘Snow’, where Hans Castrop, lost on the perilous heights, dreams his dream of humanity. If he does not find the Grail, yet he divines it, in his deathly dream, before he is snatched downwards from his heights into the European catastrophe. It is the idea of the human being, the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death. The Grail is a mystery, but humanity is a mystery too. For man himself is a mystery, and all humanity rests upon reverence before the mystery that is man.

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