Taken-Away to Mann’s Magic Mountain

This article attends to things “taken-away” in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (). I take my cue from Mann’s description the novel’s own “diseased element”: its narrative time, out of which “something has been taken-away, like the spring from a corrupted clock” (etwas hinweggenommen gewesen wie die Feder einer verdorbenen Uhr), and I extrapolate this to consider its relation to many other things taken-away in and from the novel. I ask the question, what is lost and, more importantly, produced in being taken-away? In order to develop this question, I rely on insights from psychoanalysis (especially Lacanian) into the relationship between lack and desire. I end with an attempt to historicize this by questioning the politics of taken-awayness, especially in relation to the First World War.