Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Four. Illness as Enchantment: The Magic Mountain

65 CHAPTER FOUR Illness as Enchantment: The Magic Mountain I In “The German Republic,” written in 1923 while he was completing The Magic Mountain, Mann argued that his fascination with the symbolic significance of disease and concern with death in his fiction were essentially humanistic: “Interest in death and disease, in the pathological, in decay, is only one form of expression for interest in life, in the human being, as the humanistic faculty of medicine shows. He who is interested in organic life is particularly interested in death; it might be a good subject for a novel concerned with the education of the human being to show that the experience of death is in the last analysis an experience of life; that it leads to the human.”1 Mann sets his novel in the particular and artificial atmosphere of a tuberculosis sanatorium, where the most dramatic disease of the period is treated, and places his young German hero in a remote yet cosmopolitan group of sufferers. Despite the extreme differences in nationalities and languages, the cosmopolitan characters are bound together by their serious illness and threat of death.2 Just before Hans Castorp begins his shipbuilding career in a Baltic seaport, he’s transported to the top of a mountain in a landlocked country. The Alpine mountain casts a potent spell and magically transforms everything from cigars, fever, weather and time to ideas, love, disease and morbidity. The sanatorium fulfills Hans’ death wish and prepares him for the horrors of the coming war. Though Hans is not an artist, Mann’s characterization of his hero is self-reflective. His purpose is to anatomize his country’s mentality and consider the problem of being a thinking German during a time of international disorder. The novel uses realistic clinical details for satiric and tragic effect, portrays a medical institution and relates this special world to the ideological crises that led to the carnage of 1914. The novel considers whether this state of anxiety and uncertainty (symbolized by disease) is abnormal or normal, whether it is inherent in European society (symbolized by the Alpine milieu) or subject to cure. Hans’ fascination with the pleasurable, ennobling and spiritualizing aspects of disease, his association of illness with distinction, refinement and genius, is the vehicle of Mann’s ironic criticism of the German Romantic view of sickness and death. Mann links and contrasts the main characters to portray the intellectual polarities of the novel: the engineer Hans Castorp and the soldier Joachim Ziemssen, the doctors Behrens and Krokowski, the Russian women Clavdia Chauchat and Marusja, the ideological adversaries Ludovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. Settembrini, the rational humanist, provokes the central debate in the novel by arguing against this Romantic infatuation with disease. He maintains that sympathy with death is an aberration of the spirit: “Illness was an accentuation of the physical, it did throw man back, so to speak, upon the flesh and to that extent was detrimental to human dignity. It dragged man down to the level of his body. Thus it might be argued that disease was inhuman.” But this enlightened view is opposed by his intellectual adversary, the reactionary terrorist Leo Naphta, who echoes Nietzsche’s definition of man as “the sick animal” and insists: “Disease was very human indeed. For to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man.” Naphta’s provocative argument develops Rimbaud’s theory that the artist’s deliberate derangement of the senses is a self-destructive sacrifice for the benefit of society: “The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. . . . All progress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone. In other words, to genius, which was the same thing. . . . Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and 66 chapter four abnormal act of sacrifice.”3 The democratic Settembrini believes that man is essentially good and society perfectible; that disease, which restrains man’s freedom, is abnormal. The totalitarian Naphta believes that man is basically evil and society corrupt, and that illness, which reflects this depraved condition, is normal. As Naphta tries to steal Hans, Settembrini’s prize pupil, their combat becomes...