Economics of The Magic Mountain

In her wonderful book "Mann's Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading" (OUP 2022), Karolina Watroba has a chapter on the economy in the novel. She naturally points out the ambiguity of the old name for tuberculosis, "consumption", also being the basis for the entire capitalistic enterprise on which the economy of Davos grew as it went from a population of under 2,00 in 1850 to 11,000 in 1930.

Consumption of vast quantities of food to offset 'protein shedding via the urinary tract or muscle wasting due to the increased metabolism in the illness' (Tim Howes, my helpful TB expert near Colchester) is, as mentioned previously, a conspicuous feature of life at the Berghof sanatorium.

Although Hans Castorp is surprised by how cheap his stay is when he receives his first bill, he does so as a member of a cosmopolitan Hamburg elite that gives him the liberty to embark on this unlimited period of personal discovery. As Watroba notes, we are alerted on the very first page to his privileged situation in life by the word "cosseted" and also by the description of his silk-lined coat and crocodile-skin bag (what's more these are colonial products and his reading matter, "Ocean Steamships", highlights the maritime ties with their origins in Africa and Asia).

Settembrini, on the other hand, occupies a small room at the back of the sanatorium and is forced to leave the Berghof when his health and finances further deteriorate.

When I visited the sanatorium-turned-hotel Schatzalp in Davos last October, I was told that in the institution's 50-year history only a handful of people had died from TB there. There's a good reason for this: an establishment that had an imperial suite always at the ready wasn't eager to have its name associated with death, so many patients had to leave for cheaper equivalents in the valley and then perhaps private lodgings, where the death rate was far higher.

Settembrini, the Italian humanist, is a grand purveyor of gossip and criticism of the shameless mechanisms of the sanatorium economy:
"And then he breathlessly reeled off the names of the other local sanatoria in a stinging tribute to their owners’ cupidity. There was Professor Kafka . . . Every year when the thaw came, a critical moment when many patients asked to leave, Professor Kafka would find himself obliged to go away for a week, promising that he would deal with discharges on his return. He would then be gone for six weeks, however, and the poor folk would wait and wait while, quite coincidentally, their bills continued to mount. People as far away as Fiume would call on Kafka’s services, yet he would refuse to travel until five thousand sonorous Swiss francs had been secured, by which time a fortnight would have elapsed. Then, a day after the celebrissimo’s arrival, the patient would abruptly die. As for Doctor Salzmann, he spread rumours that Professor Kafka did not sterilise his syringes properly and inflicted multiple infections on the sick. Salzmann suggested that Kafka rolled up on rubber wheels so his dead wouldn’t hear him coming, to which Kafka’s retort was that Salzmann’s patients were forcibly administered such quantities of ‘the exhilarating gift of the vine’—here too for the purpose of rounding up their bills—that people died like flies, not of phthsis but of cirrhosis . . ."

Counsellor Behrens, the head of the Berghof, is employed by a group of faraway investors who expect a healthy return – 'Above him and behind him were invisible forces that were largely unrepresented in the office staff—a board of directors and a joint stock company in which it would be quite tasty to hold shares for, going by Joachim credible assurances, the doctors’ high salaries and exceedingly liberal economic principles did not prevent it from paying out a juicy annual dividend to its members.' – and Behrens seems to do everything he can to keep to money coming in. He is an expert in rib resections and pneumothorax, on which Tim Howes, sent me this:

'In Murray and Nadel’s "Textbook of Respiratory Medicine" from 2000, there are nine pages dedicated to the drug treatment of TB, but adjunctive therapy is just three short paragraphs. At the time of writing of The Magic Mountain, all that was available was this desperate surgery adjunctive therapy. Bear in mind that Streptomycin only came into use in 1945, so the generation of chest physicians before me would have been actively involved in giving these adjunctive treatments.
'To quote from Murray and Nadel :-
“Currently the adjunctive therapies for pulmonary TB include surgery… Although surgery was once a mainstay of treatment for pulmonary TB since the advent of chemotherapy it is rarely indicated. Artificial pneumothorax, phrenic nerve interruption, plombage and thoracoplasty are all procedures designed to collapse portions of the lung, thereby closing cavities.”

'Closing cavities would slow local spread of TB and deprive the organism, which is dependent on an oxygen supply, of oxygen, therefore slowing progression of disease. (At least that is the theory!) Humans, in common with the majority of mammals have a virtual space between the lungs and the chest wall called the pleural space. If air is introduced into this space, the elastic recoil of lung tissue with make the lung collapse. If the entry point is left to close off, the lung with gradually re-expand as the air is absorbed.
'Some techniques were used to stop this happening. UK practice in the 1960s was to “top up" the pneumothorax on a regular operating list, usually run by the most junior doctors in the team. In France and Germany there were several patented devices with valves on them which would automatically top the pneumothorax up via a tube left in situ. This is were the whistling comes from and had some sort of valve arrangement which would make a noise with each breath. Goodness only knows what pain and discomfort these patient went through with these devices!'

Another source of revenue that Thomas Mann satirises is oxygen provided to hopeless cases or 'moribundi' as Behrens refers to them: 'But now I have to visit my moribundus,’ [Behrens] said. ‘In twenty-seven here. Final stages, you know. On his way out. He’s drained five dozen oxygen fiascos yesterday and today, the greedy-guts. Looks like he’ll be off with his ancestors by noon, though. Now then, my dear Reuter,’ he said as he entered the room, ‘how about cracking open another one . . .’ (GKFA, p. 163).

Indeed, such are the remedies readily provided to these desperate, dying patients, that their surviving relatives, either accompanying them or gathered beside their deathbed, are occasionally left indebted to the establishment and subsequently penniless.

As Karolina Watroba puts it: 'Der Zauberberg laid bare that tuberculosis had become a money-spinner in the late 19th century.' Thomas Mann became effectively persona non grata in Davos after the publication of his novel, as it had brought the town and a mainstay of the local economy into disrepute. So great did the local tourism agency consider the damage to be that they invited one of the leading German writers, Erich Kästner, the author of such timeless children's classics as 'Emil and the Detectives' and 'The Flying Classroom', and an exile from the Nazis, to produce a cheerful novel about Davos.

The result is a fragment entitled 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice', on which he began work in 1936, although it was only published in 1957 in a collection of Kästner's 'writing for adults'. Watroba describes the book as a 'doppelgänger intertext of Der Zauberberg', playing with the themes of the work whose effect it was supposed to counter – and therefore hardly the antidote to its harmful effects on the standing of Davos sanatoria.

Returning to the ambiguity of the word "consumption" as a name for TB and for the motor of economic growth, Thomas Mann himself was convinced that with "The Magic Mountain" he was writing a work of popular literature, not high art. He started promoting the book in 1913 when it was still projected to be a novella, created merchandise with the Maria Mancini cigar, and urged his publisher, Samuel Fischer, to release a cheaper paperback edition between its publication and winning the Nobel Prize in 1927..

"The Magic Mountain" has of course been a terrific money-spinner for S. Fischer publishing house to this day – but, like the sanatorium model, that particular era has almost run its course and will end in January 2026 when Thomas Mann's work comes out of copyright.

Also vaguely inspired by the novel was Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, which is perhaps the primary association nowadays when people hear the name of Davos.