One Hundred Years of Zauberberg

(above: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "Davos with Church (Davos in Summer)", 1925, Kirchner Museum Davos.)

For a week from Monday 5 August 2024, Thomas Mann experts gathered at Kulturplatz theatre in Davos to discuss all things Zauberberg, culminating in a lecture by Olga Tokarczuk on the Friday night about her latest novel, "Empuzjon", a fascinating take on "The Magic Mountain" which I discussed here:
https://shorturl.at/tJwWG

I'd been to Davos for the first time back in October 2024 to shoot a short film for the Thomas Mann Archive's centenary celebrations, but this was a chance to collect some important contextual information for my translation from people who have made Thomas Mann's work and his most famous novel their life's work.

Proceedings were inaugurated in eye-twinkling fashion by the doyen of Thomas Mann studies, Professor Helmut Koopmann from the University of Augsburg, who sought to answer the question of whether "The Magic Mountain" was the pinnacle of the author's work. He quoted Mann's personal assessment of the novel as a "Mittel- und Wendepunkt" – "a central and turning point" when he was, by his own account, "at the climax of his life"; he added in 1954 that it was a "Scheitelpunkt" or "watershed". Although Thomas Mann was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature explicitly for "Buddenbrooks" (we were later shown a slide of the certificate with the comment that this motivation was at odds with the Nobel Prize's mission to recognise an author's life's work), the Swedish academy was probably swayed by the huge success of "Der Zauberberg".

The novel breaks with the Bildungsroman, in that it offers no moral lesson or conclusion; its uncertainty is the condition and the proof of its Modernism. Begun in 1913 and concluded only in 1924, the novel charts Thomas Mann's political and philosophical development away from the nationalist-conservative sympathies he expressed in his "Reflections of a Non-Political Man" during the First World War towards a humanist and republican stance that would persist, unshaken, until his death.

Instead, it is "composed of ambiguities", a close relative of Thomas Mann's fragmentary novel "Felix Krull", which "parodies and dispenses with the Bildungsroman". Koopmann noted that the narrator was more present than in "Buddenbrooks" and the reader's only guide through the uncertainty, a fixed pole. If we cannot trust the narrator, then whom can we trust? And yet the narration of "The Magic Mountain" drips with irony...

Professor Friedhelm Marx from Bamberg University talked about "Europa im Zauberberg, Der Zauberberg in Europa", highlighting the diverse geographic origins of the main characters and of the sanatorium residents (French concierge, Austrian aristocrat, but also the American lady who died in Hans Castorp's room and her British husband, and even a Mexican patient). The residents of the cemetery in the novel, so many of them aged around twenty, also hail from all four corners of the world.

What Friedhelm Marx pointed out, however, was that the novel describes no French guests at the Berghof sanatorium: Clavdia Chauchat is actually Russian, and Madame Tous-les-deux speaks French with a Hispanic accent. When Mann was writing the novel, Francophobe sentiment was high, rife with stereotypes about the French being radical and superficial, and the same was alleged of their language; indeed Thomas Mann himself commented in the "Reflections" (1919) that the use of French in Russian novels was always negative. Continuing the novel after the war, as his convictions changed, stereotypes, tensions and alliances are subtly blurred and dismantled and, for example, Hans Castorp's favourite records, in the gramophone chapter, are all by French composers.

The rivalry between Germany and France also played out in the reception given to the novel on its publication. Whereas various right-wing German critics railed at the book – Ernst Bertram made anti-Semitic notes in the margins of his 1924 copy and underlined expressions in French and other languages as "mistakes"; Friedrich Georg Jünger called it a novel "for mollycoddled, effeminate souls" and called for troops of valiant young men to storm the Zauberberg! – French critics read it as a Francophile book. Thomas Mann even travelled to France when Maurice Betz's French translation was published in 1931 (late in comparison with other international editions), in part to bely for his anti-French stance in the "Reflections".

Beat Rüttimann, Emeritus Professor of Medical History at the University of Zurich, traced the development of Davos as a place of convalescence for lung patients from the first "bathing therapies" in the 1820s and the housing of children above cowsheds so they might receive the benefits of the rising ammoniac (!) tthrough the use of heliotherapy (exposure to the sun on south-facing balconies) to the establishment of sanatoria. Of these there were two main kinds: public (patients sent by Swiss cantonal health departments) and private (paying, cosmopolitan guests). The former, represented early on by the Kurhaus, were open establishments, whereas the private sanatoriums followed diverging approaches. The Sanatorium Dr. Turban, founded in 1889 by Karl Turban, who had been trained by Robert Koch, espoused a far more restrictive, "closed" regime than others such as the Schatzalp, although the diet of rest cure, eating and bathing described in "The Magic Mountain" are fairly representative.

Altogether, Professor Rüttimann's lecture showed that the world Thomas Mann created in his novel may be dreamlike and in many ways hermetic, but it was also highly realistic. Especially fascinating were his explanations of how Davos acted as a testing ground for new medical discoveries. Although Robert Koch identified and demonstrated the existence of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882, this had no therapeutic consequences, and tuberculin served as a diagnostic aid, not a cure. Bacteriology did, however, have a huge impact on sanatorium life, leading to an emphasis on hygiene: fumigation and strict laundry procedures; exhaustive dusting; the importance of ventilation and the installation of central heating; special furniture, no curtains, wipeable surfaces, white walls, disinfectants, etc.

Official regulations for sanatoria, 1900. (Source: Private collection of Benjamin Miller, Davos)

Until the discovery of streptomycin in 1943, the Davos medical community also pioneered various kinds of operative treatments for tuberculosis. Last but not least, less than three months after Wilhelm Röntgen discovered x-rays in November 1895, a Polish amateur photographer and mountaineer by the name of Alexander Rzewuski (1861-1943) gave a talk on 10 February 1896 about his experiments with Röntgen's new technique in his private photographic laboratory.

The burning question, Professor Rüttimann concluded, was whether all the sanatoria and disinfection protocols and rest cures and operations had any therapeutic effect. Did they cure people? Dr Turban's definition of healing was a patient being free of symptoms for two years. Dettweiler, the inventor of the "Blue Henry" sputum flask profiled in an earlier post, denied that TB could be healed (this was of course pre-1943), and the Basel sanatorium evaluated that after four years there was a "Besserung" or "improvement" in 20-64% of cases. Hmm...

Rüttimann postulated that the real benefit of Davos and other places of convalescence was one that we witnessed during Covid: the isolation of those infected, especially the most severe cases. The decline in the death rate from TB prior to the discovery of streptomycin was partly due to surgery and largely due to better nutrition and an improved economic situation down in the flatlands.

Within thirty years of the Zauberberg's publication, the world it so memorably depicted had virtually disappeared.

(The text is illustrated with photos I took of posters used to advertise the virtues of Davos as a tourist demonstration.)