The Magic Mountain — Commentary

In brief

Hans Castorp, a mild Hamburg engineer in his twenty-third year, takes the train to Davos to visit his tubercular cousin Joachim. He has booked three weeks and has a job in a shipyard waiting. A chill and a doctor’s stethoscope keep him at the Berghof, where he falls in love with a Russian woman who slams doors, is lectured by an Italian humanist and a Jesuit terrorist, sees his own bones on an X-ray screen and nearly dies in a blizzard. Seven years later the war breaks out, and the last we see of him is on a battlefield in the mud, singing Schubert.

Thomas Mann’s opening is as flat as a timetable: “An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.” The joke is in the last three words, and it takes some seven hundred pages to finish telling. The book is long, comic, talkative and much less solemn than its reputation.

The argument

Mann’s first claim is that illness educates. Hans learns nothing in Hamburg and everything in bed. Death makes him curious about biology, about love, about what a body is, and the sanatorium gives a very ordinary man leisure to become interesting. The novel is a Bildungsroman and a joke on one, since the school is a place where people go to die and the graduate is sent to a trench.

The second claim is about time. Habit swallows the days, so that a month of routine is remembered as nothing. The opening chapters crawl through hours and the later ones lose years, because that is how a patient’s calendar feels. The third is political. The Berghof is pre-war Europe with a temperature: charming, feverish, cultivated, in love with its own decay. Its talk leads straight to the thunderbolt of 1914.

My own view is that the novel’s moral conclusion matters less than its refusal to stay there. Mann arrives at his one great sentence in the snow, then has his hero forget it by bedtime. No other novel of ideas has been so honest about how little ideas change the person holding them.

The seven chapters

The structure is a trick of proportion. Chapters I to V cover seven months and take up nearly half the book. Chapters VI and VII cover the remaining six and a half years.

Chapter I. The arrival, an evening. Hans’s room, Number 34, has just been vacated: “An American woman died here day before yesterday,” says Joachim.
Chapter II. A flashback to the orphaned childhood in Hamburg and the grandfather’s christening basin.
Chapter III. The first full day, told at length. Settembrini appears, and so does the door-slamming Clawdia Chauchat.
Chapter IV. The three weeks pass, with an excursus on time and the memory of Hippe, the schoolboy whose pencil Hans once borrowed. It ends with the thermometer and a fever.
Chapter V. Hans is a patient now. He sees his hand on the fluoroscope and “looked into his own grave”, reads biology in the cold and ends at Walpurgis-Night, the Carnival evening when he finally speaks to Clawdia, in French, and borrows her pencil.
Chapter VI. Clawdia leaves. Naphta arrives, the great debates run, Snow falls, and Joachim goes down to the army, comes back and dies.
Chapter VII. Clawdia returns with the Dutch coffee planter Peeperkorn. There follow his suicide, the gramophone, a seance that summons Joachim, the duel and the war.

Settembrini and Naphta

Lodovico Settembrini is a shabby Italian man of letters and pupil of Carducci, whom Hans first takes for an organ-grinder. He believes in reason, progress, the republic and the printed word, and warns against anything that dissolves the will. Music, he says, is “politically suspect”. He is vain, poor, dying and brave.

Leo Naphta, small, ugly and consumptive, is the son of a village slaughterer from the Galician border, a Jew turned Jesuit who has had to give up the order’s career because of his lungs. In the first big exchange he defends the medieval Church, the Terror and the coming proletarian dictatorship all at once. When Settembrini points out the contradiction he answers: “It is the middling, the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other that is preposterous.”

Mann gives Naphta the better arguments, which is the point. Naphta wins nearly every round and is wrong; Settembrini loses and is, roughly, right. Their tragedy is that each needs the other in order to exist, and that Hans, the pupil they compete for, is mostly thinking about Clawdia. It ends in Hysterica Passio, when a quarrel over nothing becomes a pistol duel. Settembrini fires into the air, and Naphta shrieks “Coward!” and shoots himself in the head.

Both have real origins. Settembrini began as a caricature of the liberal Zivilisationsliterat Mann had attacked in his wartime Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), a type he associated with his brother Heinrich. As Mann came round to the Weimar Republic, with his speech On the German Republic in 1922, the caricature began to speak for him. Naphta has often been read as a parody of Georg Lukács, who later wrote admiringly on Mann.

Snow

Snow is the novel’s centre and the place to start if you read only one chapter. Hans takes up skiing on the quiet, goes out alone, is caught by a blizzard, walks in a circle and sinks down by a hay-hut. He dreams first of a southern sea and a people of grace and courtesy, then of a temple where two grey old women tear a child apart. Half-awake, he thinks his way past both of his teachers, and Mann sets the result in italics: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.” The German is plainer: “Der Mensch soll um der Güte und Liebe willen dem Tode keine Herrschaft einräumen über seine Gedanken.”

The chapter was written in 1923, the year after the speech on the Republic, and the sentence reads as Mann’s own decision against the death-worship of his earlier work. Then comes the best stroke in the book. Hans skis home and eats a huge dinner: “What he had dreamed was already fading from his mind.” Wisdom has been reached and mislaid within a single evening, and the novel has nearly a third of its length still to go.

The voice

The narrator is a courteous, ironic presence who keeps stepping forward. His foreword teases the reader about how long this will take: “Heaven forbid it should be seven years!” Chapter VII opens by asking “Can one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?” At the end he bids farewell to “Life’s delicate child” and admits a “pedagogic weakness” for a man he has spent the book mocking.

Mann composes like Wagner, with motifs that return changed. A pencil lent in a schoolyard comes back from Clawdia’s hand at Carnival, and the shared Kirghiz eyes of Hippe and Clawdia tell you before Hans knows that he has been in love with one person twice. The climax of the romance is held in untranslated French, which Lowe-Porter keeps.

The people

Hans Castorp

Mann calls Hans “simple” and means it as a compliment and a provocation. He is the perfect student because he has no opinions. Readers often find him dull for a hundred pages and then discover that they are worried about him.

Joachim Ziemssen

Hans’s cousin wants only to get down and be a soldier. He obeys everything, deserts the cure out of duty, and returns to die. His death is the most moving passage in the novel, written with almost no irony.

Clawdia Chauchat

Clawdia is a Russian married woman with Asiatic eyes and bad manners. She is less a character than a weather system until Walpurgis-Night, and much sharper than Hans when she returns, when by a late and funny turn the two of them make a pact over her new lover.

Mynheer Peeperkorn

Peeperkorn arrives late and overwhelms everyone with a presence that never finishes a sentence: “Very well. Very well indeed. Very. Settled.” After hundreds of pages of articulate men, the inarticulate one wins by personality. Mann drew him from the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann.

Behrens and Krokowski

Hofrat Behrens, the blue-cheeked director who paints in oils, runs the place with loud good humour. Dr Krokowski, his assistant, lectures on love as a cause of disease and ends up running seances in the basement.

How it was made

In the spring of 1912 Katia Mann was at Friedrich Jessen’s Waldsanatorium in Davos with a chest complaint suspected to be tuberculosis. Thomas Mann visited her in May for three weeks. As the New York Review of Books tells it, following Morten Høi Jensen’s recent study, he caught a cold, the director thumped his chest and found a worrying spot, and advised him to stay. Back home his own doctor dismissed it: “You would be the first one to be examined in Davos who did not have some spot or other.” Mann left on schedule. Hans Castorp did not.

Mann began the story in 1913 as a comic companion piece to Death in Venice. The war stopped it. He spent those years writing nationalist essays, then took the manuscript up again in a changed mind and with a much larger plan. S. Fischer published it in two volumes in November 1924, with the break after Walpurgis-Night, the point the free German text still marks.

English, and what is free

The legal position differs by language and by country.

The German. Published in 1924 and public domain in the United States since 2020. Mann died on 12 August 1955, so it has been free in the EU since 1 January 2026. Project Gutenberg has the Fischer text in two volumes: Erster Band and Zweiter Band, with all seven chapters and all fifty-one sections. This is the only complete text here that is free on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lowe-Porter’s English. Knopf published it in 1927, so it entered the US public domain in 2023. Standard Ebooks has a careful complete edition, but says it makes no claim outside the United States. Helen Lowe-Porter died in 1963, so on the ordinary EU term of life plus seventy years her translation runs to the end of 2033. Some member states may shorten that for American works under the rule of the shorter term, but that is untested for this book, so EU readers should treat it as protected.

Quotations on this page are from Lowe-Porter in the Standard Ebooks text, which is also what our chapter links open. It is complete: section for section it matches Mann’s fifty-one. It also has weaknesses, which she was the first to name. Her note calls the version “lame” and says “It seemed better that an English version should be done ill than not done at all.”

Critics have taken her at her word. From the 1950s doubts grew about her German, culminating in Timothy Buck’s verdict that her Mann consists of “grossly distorted and diminished versions”, and David Horton’s 2013 study then argued that she was working to the norms of her day. The problems are easy to see from the contents page alone. Die große Gereiztheit, the great irritability, becomes the literary Hysterica Passio, and Der große Stumpfsinn, the great stupor, becomes The Great God Dumps. Near the end Mann’s story is weder kurzweilig noch langweilig, neither diverting nor boring, a pun on short and long; she writes “neither short nor long, but hermetic”, keeping the words and losing the sense. Against that, her English moves. Its rhythm and period voice suit this narrator.

Woods’s version won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 1996 and is the accurate one, much closer to Mann’s long syntax. Anyone who has German should read the free original.

Readers and critics

The Swedish Academy gave Mann the Nobel Prize in 1929 and named Buddenbrooks in its citation, not this book, though Mann himself thought the success of the English Magic Mountain had helped. Lukács’s essays made him the great Marxist case for bourgeois realism, despite Naphta. Susan Sontag used the novel in Illness as Metaphor (1978) as a late monument of the romantic idea that tuberculosis makes one interesting. Her complaint stands, but Mann got there first: Settembrini mocks exactly that idea.

The standard objection is that it is too long and too talkative, and that is partly true. The debates of Chapter VI are hard going for anyone who is not enjoying the people arguing. Mann’s defence is built in, as boredom is one of the book’s subjects.

Afterlives

Davos has a Thomas Mann Way and plaques from the novel, and hosts the World Economic Forum, a coincidence Mann could have used. The film and television record is thin: a 1968 German television version, and Hans W. Geißendörfer’s 1982 film with Christoph Eichhorn, Marie-France Pisier and Rod Steiger as Peeperkorn. Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium (2022) answers it from a Silesian health resort, with the men’s talk about women held up to the light. Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness (2016) took the setting and added eels. Jo Salas’s novel Mrs. Lowe-Porter (2024) gives the translator her own story.

How to read it

Choose the text first. With German, use the free Fischer volumes. In the United States, use the free Lowe-Porter and allow for her. In the EU, the honest English choice is Woods from a library or a shop.
Give it the first hundred pages. The slow first day is the method: you are meant to feel three weeks as a long time so that you feel seven years as a short one.
Read the French aloud or look it up. Walpurgis-Night is the emotional climax of the first half and is not translated.
Do not try to pick a winner. Enjoy Settembrini and Naphta as you would two brilliant bores at dinner, and watch Hans instead.
Read Snow slowly and then watch it vanish. The forgetting is as much the point as the sentence.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901). The family novel that made him famous, and the Hanseatic merchant world Hans comes from.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912). The tragedy to which this novel began as the comic companion.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). The other great novel of the period about what time does to a mind.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1930–43). Pre-war Europe talking itself to death, without the sanatorium and without an ending.
Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium (2022). The same setting a century on, written as a reply.