The German novelist Thomas Mann wrote his mid-career masterpiece: The Magic Mountain in 1924. This novel of disease carries traces of the violent upheavals of pre- and post-WWI Europe amid its setting, a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Alps. We spoke with Professor David Wellbery of the University of Chicago about this great work of European literature (you can listen to the podcast or read the transcript below). And if you haven’t subscribed already to WHY THE CLASSICS? you should click here — that way you’ll never miss our newsletter, hitting inboxes every Thursday.
Why the Classics: I wanted to start off by asking: what is the titular Magic Mountain?
David Wellbery: The literal reference is to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. In 1913, Thomas Mann's wife, Katia Mann, was in the sanatorium and Thomas Mann went down to visit her. He was there for a very short period of time. At that time, he came up with the idea of writing a novella, perhaps a sequel to his great Death in Venice from 1912, and that idea stayed with him for a while. We get then up into the 1920’s and, by this time, the idea has expanded (roughly between '24 and '27). It's when most of the work is accomplished. The Magic Mountain is a sanatorium, called in the novel the Berghof. This place is the centerpiece, indeed, almost the sole site where the book’s action takes place.
The novel is a diagnosis of the time. Mann referred to it himself as a novel of time, a novel about time in the double sense that it's about time itself, the strange phenomenon of time, which Mann was fascinated with, and it's about the times. In particular, it's about a very particular period of time, and that is the seven-year period leading up to the First World War. So what happens in The Magic Mountain in this microcosm of a tuberculosis sanatorium is a mirror of a large-scale social development extending from 1907 to 1914.
The novel ends in a very open way with the outbreak of the First World War and Hans Castorp, the young hero of the novel — if he can be called a hero — leaving the Magic Mountain and descending to the battlefields, and we see him in the final scene making his way across the battlefield of Flanders.
WTC: Can you talk a bit about what tuberculosis meant in European society, such that this sanatorium would be the ideal medium in which to build this microcosm that you just described?
Wellbery: Well, I can try to say something about that, but let me do it by way of a kind of detour. To read about tuberculosis and its significance as a literary metaphor and as a significance as a social phenomenon, one book that one might want to turn to is the book Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag. Sontag was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago at the end of the 1940’s when Thomas Mann was still living in the United States. He was living in Pacific Palisades, California.
She was so taken with The Magic Mountain that she traveled to California and called up Thomas Mann on the telephone and told him that she would like to meet him. I think she was 17 at the time. He invited this 17-year-old girl up for tea at his place there — quite a nice place that he had in Pacific Palisades. Recent research from a colleague of mine from Germany who dug into Susan's Sontag's archives has shown that Susan Sontag returned again and again to The Magic Mountain. Illness as Metaphor certainly draws for one of its sources of information and inspiration on The Magic Mountain.
One thing that needs to be said about tuberculosis is that it hadn't been brought under control at that time. As a matter of fact, both of my own parents spent time in a sanatorium at one point in the 20th Century, in a sanatorium in the Adirondacks. But another thing that needs to be said about the disease, and this goes back to Illness as Metaphor, is that the disease of tuberculosis is very, very strongly associated with the arts. A number of artists, of course, suffered from tuberculosis, died from tuberculosis, and died early from tuberculosis in many cases. So there's a kind of an association with that disease and with the arts, particularly moving from Romanticism across the 19th Century. One of the characteristic features of Mann's novel is a linkage between a certain cultural development that we see in the second half of the 19th Century going right up into and becoming kind of full-blown in its display, in its exposition at the beginning of the 20th Century.
That is Decadence.
With Decadence, there's a link between disease and a view of a necessary historical development and a hypersensitive aestheticization of life. One finds that in various Decadent writers — the Belgian writer Joris-Karl Huysmans would be perhaps a major example, but we can find it in other writers as well.
WTC: This leads very nicely into the next question I wanted to ask, which is about young Hans Castorp, the, as you said, not-quite hero. We'll call him perhaps a protagonist. What is it about him that makes him this ideal figure through which Mann can investigate the links that you just laid out, the strange connections between life and death and the battle between spirit and matter and all of the other difficult issues this capacious book touches on? What is it about Hans that allows him to reveal these tensions and these contradictions?
Wellbery: What there is about him is not clear to us from the beginning of the novel. From the beginning of the novel, he looks like a fairly — what should I say? A fairly superficial kind of guy. As the superficial kind of guy he is, he's going to have to go through a considerable developmental process across the novel. That developmental process takes on the form of what we might call an adventurous education. It's an education in ideas that he had never considered, an education in experiences that he had never considered, including erotic experiences. It's an education that expands his horizon of thought, of reflection, of interest immensely.
He starts off from a very narrow, bourgeois, professionally-oriented background and expands his interest, his horizon of sensibility, one might say, throughout the novel as a result of the many encounters that he has. Now, if I were going to single out one feature of Hans Castorp that is absolutely crucial for what Thomas Mann does with him in this novel, I would say it's his mediocrity. Now, mediocrity — you're laughing about that, the mediocrity, and you're right to. I mean he's not a super-talented guy. He doesn't have exceptional abilities.
He is a person who is average, who's mediocre in that sense. The translation uses the word mediocrity. In German, we have other words that are related to that, but they all center around the same idea, and it's the idea of being in the middle. It's the idea of being in a middle position, not in an extreme position, but in a middle position, a middle position in which the extremes are mediated. That now becomes crucial for understanding the novel, because a central thought of this novel is that that middle position between extremes, that middle position is the human position.
So there's something about that average kind of guy, that mediocre, not in a derogative sense, but in a descriptive sense, that standing-in-the-middle character of Hans Castorp that makes him ideal. Because what is Mann trying to do here? He's trying to explore, to find a way, to seek a path through the incredibly, incredibly fraught dialectics of his moment, find a pathway and find a kind of human identity at the end.
WTC: This, again, leads very nicely into a question that I wanted to ask you. You spoke of Hans' adventurous education. Much of that education occurs at the hands of a series of interlocutors. First of all, I'd love to hear your thumbnail description of the very fascinating array of thinkers and provocateurs of various kinds that he meets in the Berghof who, of course, have close real-life models as well. Also: it's fascinating, you mentioned this adventurous education as a process of development, and that's a process that, of course, takes place alongside the development of Hans' own illness, which goes in waves and worsens and improves and worsens and improves. I'm curious also if you could talk about that background process, which is taking place as he is being educated at the hands of these marvelously drawn characters.
Wellbery: Let's gather some of those characters together. We can learn something from that. We can learn something about the way Thomas Mann has organized the book. So the first two characters that we encounter, and they will be following us throughout the novel, are the two major physicians who are at the Berghof, Dr. Behrens, who is in charge and is the major physician in our sense of the term, and then his assistant, a man by the name of Krokowski, who is also a specialist in — let's just call it psychoanalysis.
So what we have here are two people who come to play a role as interlocutors, as figures in the novel, even as imaginary figures because they appear in Hans Castorp's dreams, who represent two fundamental directions of inquiry in the 20th Century. On the one hand, a deep, deep interest in biology. Thomas Mann had a great interest in biology. So this novel contains, and it's not the only book by Thomas Mann that does contain, it contains a good deal of medical information. Thomas Mann is capable of writing about medical states of affairs and their complex causality in ways that can actually be riveting to the reader.
On the other hand then, there's Hans Castorp's encounter with what we might call the life of the body or his encounter with a burning philosophical question at the beginning of the 20th Century: what is life itself? What is the distinction between life and non-life and how does life emerge out of non-life? These are questions that are dealt with, and it is that engagement with Behrens that prompt those. It's that encounter with disease that prompts these questions for him.
But, on the other hand, we also have that great 20th Century question of the unconscious, that Freudian question, if you will. It's that question that Dr. Krokowski is representing. Now, I don't want to make it out as if these are ideal figures. These figures themselves are representative of, what should I say? I guess maybe I'll just use the word decadent here as well. They are decadent forms of these two disciplines. Both Behrens and Krokowski appear to be somewhat ill themselves — Behrens, physically ill; Krokowski, psychologically.
But leaving that aside, they are actually unscrupulous characters in a certain respect. Behrens is really keen to keep his patients there. He's not particularly interested in healing them. In Behrens, we see a kind of anticipation of the fact that what's happening in the course of the 20th Century is the development of medical care into a huge, self-running, independent social subsystem. There's a way in which there's a pathway that leads us from Behrens, in this kind of commercial medical enterprise that he has going, up to the present day.
As far as Krokowski is concerned, he's a kind of demagogical crowd pleaser. He holds lectures there, and those lectures are the lectures of a demagogue. He talks about desire. He talks about the sufferance of desire. He talks about the agony that people go through. He talks about the psychic causes of all of their problems, including their physical illnesses, in ways that create a kind of feverish — good word — allegiance to him on the part of his listeners. Thomas Mann pictures him giving one of these lectures and pictures its theatrical demagogic appeal, its capacity to hypnotize its audience.
So these two figures are incredibly rich figures because they represent, each of them, a rich intellectual background, a very important set of issues. But they're also part of that society that has lost its sense of direction, a society that has lost hold of its guidance system, if you will, and seems to be wavering around.
Let's take another pair, the other great couple of the novel: Settembrini and Naphta.
Settembrini is an Italian intellectual, a man of letters, an homme de lettres. He's actually published only one thing in his life, which was an obituary, but he is a great rhetorician.
So you see here too, we have that decadent feature. He is a representative of the European enlightenment in its flourishing into a revolutionary, political, democratically-oriented politics. That's what he stands for. He's a man of action. He's a man of enlightenment. One of the great scenes of the novel is when he comes into Hans Castorp's darkened room, as Hans is beginning to succumb to the idea that he has this disease, and turns the lights on. He's an enemy of many of the things that Hans Castorp is becoming fascinated with, for instance, a certain kind of romantic music and any fascination with death and disease. Any affirmation of death and disease is abhorrent to him.
His great antagonist emerging in the second part of the novel is the extraordinarily strange, extraordinarily fascinating figure, partially based on György Lukács, the literary critic. His name is Leo Naphta, and he's a Jesuit. He is also up there because he also has tuberculosis. He represents a completely different direction. Here, Thomas Mann has done one of his amazing things. He's combined two things that we think to be incompatible, and he shows us a kind of deep relationship between them. As a Jesuit and as a devout, devout Catholic, as a lover of the Middle Ages, as a believer that faith outdoes reason on every score, Naphta is a representative of a form of thought that had its most pronounced political expression in the Inquisition.
He actually stands affirmatively vis-a-vis the historical phase of the Inquisition — no accident that he's a Jesuit, which has its roots in Spain. But Thomas Mann then carves a bridge that goes from Spain, the most western part of Europe, to Russia. Leo Naphta is actually born a Jew. His family suffered in a pogrom. He makes a conversion later on. But he comes from Russia, and he is also a communist and a terrorist. He affirms terrorism as a political instrument.
So we have this radical bifurcation of two forms of authoritarianism in Naphta, the authoritarianism on the one hand of the Spanish Inquisition, of a kind of medieval hierarchical church-organized society, a thought that was not entirely foreign to the early phase of the 20th Century, and on the other hand, a kind of revolutionary politics, a Leninist politics. So we have a great intellectual clash between these two figures. Of course, there's an important point to be made here. The point is that neither of those oppositions, be it in terms of the Behrens and Krokowski opposition or be it in terms of the, and this is the more important one undoubtedly, the Settembrini and Naphta opposition, neither of these positions is adequate to the human being.
Hans Castorp, as the person in the middle, stands between these two, Settembrini and Naphta. So those are two of the dialectical figures that we have.
I'm just trying to think if I'm missing anybody, but I don't think so. The novel actually has six major figures in addition to Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim, who is there. I'll say something about Joachim if our discussion takes a certain drift later on. But the other two figures that need to be highlighted here are, on the one hand, Clavdia Chauchat, the dominant figure of the first part of the novel, the Russian with a French name, a Russian woman of extraordinary beauty, married, but doesn't seem to be involved in a relationship with her husband. A woman who slinks like a cat.
Her name, of course, has the word cat in it. She slinks like a cat through the rooms and becomes an object of erotic fascination for Hans Castorp. That is the great story of the first half of the novel. She returns later in the novel. She leaves after the culmination of their relationship. She immediately leaves, disappears, Hans Castorp is left waiting for her for several years, by the way. He stays up there for seven years, after all, left waiting for her. And then she returns. But she returns now with a man who is obviously her lover or obviously her former lover, but in whose companionship she is and whom she accompanies to take care of.
That is the grand figure of Mynheer Peeperkorn, the Dutch merchant who imports various things from the East, a coffee merchant, a merchant of spices and all kinds of exotic things. Mynheer Peeperkorn is the embodiment of the principle of vital personality. As soon as he appears on the scene, even though he is intellectually not at all articulate in the way that Settembrini and Naphta are, he immediately puts the two of them in his pocket, as it were, so powerful is his personality. He's a figure of an affirmative Dionysian kind of life, an affirmation of life.
So we have in Clavdia Chauchat and Mynheer Peeperkorn, those two principles, the principle of Eros, which is going to be transformed into a higher form of love in the course of that, and the principle of vital affirmation in the figure of Peeperkorn. So that's a brief map of the pathway that Hans is making.
I didn't address the question that you mentioned at the outset of this particular segment here of our discussion, and that's the question of Hans' disease. The question of Hans' disease is a very vexed question. There is a way in which it is a malade imaginaire, to quote the title of Moliere's play.
There are signs of a little spot somewhere on his lung. The X-ray does reveal something, some kind of shadow, but it seems that his choice to stay on the mountain, his choice to withdraw from the act of life is not motivated by the fact that he is weakened by his disease. It's rather that he is somehow captivated. He's somehow captivated and held there in that life. Settembrini, the man of action, although he's terribly ill, will keep telling him to leave, leave, leave. Settembrini will be the one that bids farewell to him at the end of the novel before he departs to the battlefield.
So there's a question as to the status of the disease. This questionable status of the disease calls our attention to something very important, and that is that even as this novel is a realistic novel to a certain degree — and you can put realistic as it were in quotation marks — a realistic novel in the sense that I could show you a picture of the sanatorium, as a matter of fact, that it's modeled on. It's about a real sanatorium. It's about illness. It goes into all of those things. But the fact is that Hans' illness is probably not a real illness, quite in contradistinction to that of his cousin, Joachim.
That shows us that the illness, the world of illness, the world on The Magic Mountain that we're dealing with is, on the one hand, a medical condition. It is a real world of illness. On the other hand, it's a metaphor for a social situation. The idea of illness is not only something to be explored in and of itself, incredibly important human phenomenon. But it also is a vehicle for understanding something about society.
WTC: I wanted to bring up Joachim Ziemssen, Hans' cousin. He and Hans seem to form almost another one of these pairs. Hans is, as you put it, mediocre in the sense that you've outlaid, whereas his cousin is directed, focused. He has a life plan. He has a goal. And of course, since Hans' fate on the battlefield, there's sort of a perverse mirroring of it in what ends up happening to his cousin.
Wellbery: The reason that Hans has gone up to The Magic Mountain, the reason he's gone up to the sanatorium in the first is to visit his cousin Joachim. His cousin is a patient there. Now they're roughly the same age, and Hans has finished his studies. He has a position at a shipping firm, comes from Hamburg, of course, has a position with a shipping firm. It's that northern region of Germany that Thomas Mann comes from where shipping was big. That was really the center of economic life. That's where he comes from. He is drawn into, seduced by the Magic Mountain.
But, as I said, his disease is not altogether real. It's not locatable. That's not the case with Joachim. Joachim is literally a sick young man. But Joachim has an aspiration in life, and that aspiration is an aspiration that he holds to with the kind of purity of consciousness, a directedness that is quite singular in the entire novel, and certainly stands in stark contrast to Hans. Hans is a person in search of his identity. Joachim knows what his identity is, and that identity is to be a soldier.
He believes in a military ideal. He believes in the values of the military, the value of service, the value of heroism, the value of sacrifice. So that's an important fact to keep hold of.
But now let's fill in the story. So Hans and Joachim spend a couple of years there together. It's clear with every checkup that they go to Dr. Behrens for that Joachim is not getting better. It's clear that Joachim does not have a chance to fulfill that vocational aspiration that he has to become a soldier. At a certain point in the novel, in a kind of heroic gesture, he makes the decision to leave the sanatorium and to go down and to pursue his life as a soldier, to join the army and go into training.
It doesn't last very long. After a while, he's going to return. His return is his return in order, finally, to die. It's one of the most moving passages in the novel, the death of Joachim, because one of the things that has come through in the novel is a sense of Joachim's, if I can put it this way, his soulful goodness. He is a good person. He's an upright person. There's something very beautiful about his relationship with his cousin, Hans. It's a distant relationship, but that distance is overcome with a kind of unspoken faithfulness, devotion between the two of them that emerges.
Joachim sees that his cousin has been seduced by the Magic Mountain, that he's not facing responsibility. He urges him to leave this world. But, of course, Hans stays until the end. When Joachim returns, it is Hans who accompanies him that final way that he has to make, the final pathway to his death. So this is an incredibly important and gripping plot line. Now, how are we supposed to approach this? How are we supposed to think about this? One way we can think about this is to recall the fact that I mentioned at the very beginning, to recall the fact that this novel is a novel about the period 1907 to 1914.
It's about the pathway to the massive European and, indeed, more than European disaster that was World War I. Now, what was World War I? Well, many things could be said about what World War I is. But one thing that World War I certainly is is the end of the idea of military heroism and glory. This is incredibly important. Joachim represents an ideal. The ideal is leading us, in his figure, up to that moment of 1914. He's going to die a little beforehand, of course. It's going be leading us up to that just as a kind of military ideology centered around the Kaiser, centered around the emperor in Germany, glorified war.
Indeed, there were several German intellectuals who glorified the idea of war. When 1914, the war broke out, they thought this was going to be the great cleansing. That idea quickly disappeared. We've forgotten today how horrible the First World War was. One of the reasons it was horrible was because of the introduction, of course, of the use of gas. The trenches and the gas were the great instrument of dehumanization. That's what our novel is leading up to. In a certain sense, the novel gives us an heroic military ideal in the figure of Joachim that is on the brink of its complete destruction, demise, its exposure as a lie with the outbreak of the First World War. So that's part of what's going on with that.
You would then say, "Well, why did he choose to represent the cousin as a soldier?" Well, the reason he chose was that is because it had something very, very powerfully to do with the historical issue that the novel is dealing with. In a certain sense, the novel's dealing with a question: how did we get there? How did we get there to 1914, and then the 1914 to 1918, the period of the First World War, the entry of the United States in 1917, and the end of the war in 1918 and the complete collapse, of course, of Imperial Germany? A political chaos that follows from that, a political chaos that, although the government had stabilized in the Weimar Republic to some degree was still chaotic and out of control.
WTC: I wanted to take a step back from The Magic Mountain for a moment and talk about disease as a theme that winds through Mann's work, from the typhoid that kills Hanno Buddenbrooks to the cholera that is infecting Venice in Death in Venice to the occult, Hell-borne syphilis that claims the life of Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus.
What is it that Mann sees in disease that draws him back to it again and again and again, always from a different angle, always mining a new vein? How do you see this working within his books and within him as an artist?
Wellbery: I think part of the reason that we're having this discussion, of course, is because it seems worthwhile to think seriously about a novel and to think along with a novel in the particular moment that we're living in. Here, I think it's helpful to step back even a little bit further than you are, although I want to get to the issues that you are raising as far as Mann's career is concerned. What we find if we look at the Western tradition, the only tradition that I'm really familiar with, is a remarkable range of major works that deal with massive epidemic phenomena.
You mentioned cholera and I'll come back to that. But the role of the plague in literature is vast: one could start with Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, the background of that process, the tragic process that we go through. In the background of that, of course, is the plague. The Decameron, the Journal of the Plague Year by Defoe, Manzoni in the 19th Century with his great novel The Betrothed. The bestselling novel in Europe since the COVID epidemic broke out is not The Magic Mountain, but Albert Camus' novel The Plague.
So what we have here is we have here an amazing history. One thing that I would point to: if you were a novelist and you were writing your first novel, if your first novel is going to come out in 1900 and you're a novelist with great aspiration, where are you going to look? Where is it that Thomas Mann looked? Thomas Mann understood that the greatest predecessors that he had in the immediate 19th Century, as far as art of the novel is concerned, were Tolstoy, on the one hand, and Dostoevsky on the other, a polarity that very much appealed to him.
Just think of the vision of Raskolnikov near the end of Crime and Punishment. After he's passed through a terrible disease himself just before his turn, his change of life, his conversion, if you will, he has a dream which is a dream of a universal plague. The dream of the universal plague is no different, no different than the background that we see in Oedipus, the background that we see in Boccaccio, the background that we see in Camus. It's the conception of the plague or the conception of an epidemic not merely as a biological, not merely as a medical condition, but as a social condition. That's what's happening in The Magic Mountain as well.
That illness, that atmosphere of illness in the sanatorium is also an atmosphere of social dissolution, of ideological differences, of the inability to have a unified sense of purpose. The novel begins to bend toward the war with chapters near the end called “The Great Dullness,” for instance, where people actually have no interest, no interest any longer, no sense of purpose, or “The Great Petulance,” where all it takes is a single word to set someone off. The differences, the ideological differences become aggravated to the point that there is no communication possible.
That is the condition that we might say is the condition of disease. It's exactly the same thing as Raskolnikov describes in his dream of a worldwide plague. As a metaphor for that, Thomas Mann takes us with these two ill representatives of two major ideological directions, Settembrini and Naphta, and brings them to the point at the end of the novel where they stand face to face with one another to have a duel. We come to a point of shooting at the end of the novel. Of course, it's shortly after that that the war breaks out. So that's one of the things to think about in terms of this interest in disease.
The other thing though is more peculiar to Mann himself. First of all, one of the great tensions in Mann's work was a tension that he himself described as the tension between life — that is to say the vital affirmative sphere — on the one hand, and spirit, geist — mind, culture, art — on the other. He sees these two forces as constitutive of his personality, of his experience, of society, and he constantly returns to that issue. So again and again, what we have in Mann is a confrontation with disease and decay.
Remember the subtitle of his first novel Buddenbrooks. It's “The Decline of a Family,” the phenomenon of devitalization. But it goes hand in hand with a kind of hypertrophy of the spirit, of the artistic, of the aesthetic. He sees these things in a kind of antagonistic relationship. You see how Mann always is thinking in terms of these polarities and how to negotiate them. That's part of the reason that we see the structure of The Magic Mountain working itself out in terms of this kind of dialectical structure in Hans Castorp's effort, let us say, only momentarily successful to negotiate a pathway through there.
So the disease that we have in Death in Venice is indeed the cholera epidemic, just to take that great example. But it's also the collapse of Gustav von Aschenbach, the hero, a man who had represented letters, a man who had represented ideals, a man who was, in a certain sense, the moral conscience of his moment, the most respected living writer at the time. We're in 1912 right now, the year of Death in Venice. We have this great figure and, at the same time, what we see is him falling apart, him succumbing. Succumbing to what? Succumbing, on the one hand, to the temptations of Eros, his homoerotic fascination for the young boy, Tadzio, and, on the other hand, finally succumbing to the cholera that's invading Venice.
But the cholera in Venice is a function of the whole Venice tourist industry as well. They're keeping it a secret. They're trying to hold onto their tourists, much as Behrens is trying to hold onto his patients. It's a symbol also of the corruption of society. It's a symbol of a kind of disintegration. That's the key idea of decadence, of course, is the idea of disintegration, the incapacity. The incapacity to have shaping unities, direction given unity any longer. So that, I think, is part of the reason. I also think that Thomas Mann was a slightly, we might say, slightly hypochondriac in his interest.
Thomas Mann, of course, became an American citizen. He came to the United States shortly after Hitler came to power. He became an American citizen. He was extraordinarily active in working for the defeat of Germany, made radio broadcasts, from the United States that were broadcast back to the German people. So here he is. He's in the United States, and he's going into his 70’s. It's the end of the war. He's still here. He's living in Pacific Palisades, his beautiful home out there, and he's ill.
So he comes to Chicago to have an operation. This is at the time when he is writing his book Doctor Faustus. One of my favorite lines is that Doctor Faustus is the greatest American novel of the 20th Century. It was written by an American citizen in California. That's something to keep in mind, anecdotally. It happens to have been written in German, but that's beside the point. We're a multilingual country, after all. We can accept Doctor Faustus as part of our canon as well.
Thomas Mann's experience in the United States enters into his novels. The great figure of Joseph in the fourth volume of his Joseph tetralogy, is based on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The references in Doctor Faustus to his time in California are a subject of considerable research. So this is all significant as far as thinking about who Mann was. But in any case, he came to Chicago and he had a very serious lung operation. It was the beginning of the end for him, as it turned out, although he did live for a number of years after that. He actually had cancer. If you want to read something interesting, read his little book called—
WTC: The Genesis of a Novel?
Wellbery: Yes, exactly.
WTC: A remarkable book.
Wellbery: So he tells the story about writing it. He tells the story about living in California, and he tells the story about that operation. There's a beautiful two-page hymn to the nurse who took care of him, but it also has a remarkably detailed account of exactly what it was that was going on with him medically. Another thing that we might mention here is the very late controversial novel called The Black Swan, which also has a medical motif in it. It's cancer there of a female character.
I don't know if one can say enough about disease. But what I would emphasize is that it's not just about disease. It is about it in a remarkably concrete way, but it's also about society. It's also about the culture. It's also about psychological conditions and so forth. He's working in all of these registers at the same time.
WTC: I have just two more, I think, questions of slightly smaller scope. The first is about The Magic Mountain. Is there a translation you recommend, particularly for those who do not read German?
Wellbery: Yeah, for sure. I mean there's the new translation by John E. Woods. I think that that's more approachable than the earlier translation. I can't remember the woman's name who was translating Mann's work. She did most of the first translations.
WTC: Helen Lowe-Porter, I believe it is.
Wellbery: Right, right, right. Porter-Lowe. She did him a great service. She really devoted herself to the translation of his work. But we have a new one out now by Woods, and I think that that's a much more approachable one. I would definitely recommend that. If I were going to recommend something else, I would recommend to people something called The Magic Mountain Casebook. There's a series published by Oxford of casebooks on great works of literature. It's a collection of articles on The Magic Mountain that are very good. That's edited by Hans Rudolf Vaget. That is a good place to start.
For those who are interested in reading a good book on The Magic Mountain, I would recommend the first book that was written on The Magic Mountain. It was written by someone who was a professor at Yale University. His name was Hermann Weigand. You can only get it out of libraries now: Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. In Mann’s own lecture on The Magic Mountain that he delivered at Princeton, he refers to Weigand's book. Weigand, as I say, was a professor at Yale. He was retired when I studied at Yale myself, but I nonetheless had the opportunity to meet him. He was a terribly, terribly impressive person. And then the best overall treatment of Thomas Mann is the book by T.J. Reed, the great British German scholar, T.J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition.
WTC: I don't know if our present moment of epidemic and also, more recently, of a kind of shuddering in some of the social and political structures that we have come to regard as stable have prompted you to return to this book. They've definitely prompted me to take it up again. Have you taken it up? And if so, have you found new resonances in it, reading it in this unnerving and unclear moment that we as a nation are moving through?
Wellbery: I took it up four years ago. I decided to teach a lecture course here at Chicago. My motivation actually had to do with the fact that I felt that students today are tied to texts of extraordinary brevity, that students today and the generation of students today has lost that great experience that was the experience of so many people's youth that I know, which is the experience of sinking into a novel and letting that great novel sink into you.
How many people haven't had a novel that really is a kind of shaping factor in their life, that really it's something that they inhabit on, something that they sort of think of their own life in terms of and in relationship to? I was worried that that form of experience was disappearing, that students today were not interested in reading and really sinking into this. The rhythm of their lives is different. It's much more rapid. It's much more punctuated, as it were. So I wanted to offer an opportunity there. The reason I turned to The Magic Mountain for that is not only because it's a great novel and has that effect, but also because it is a kind of summa, if you will, of Western culture up to that point.
It is a kind of encyclopedic work. It belongs among the encyclopedic novels of the 20th Century. So it's a great vehicle for unfolding, for exploring and giving students a kind of synthetic account of European culture, especially of the last 200 to 300 years. So that was the original motivation. I just finished the class and it was March 2020. Suddenly, this novel took on a new resonance for me, and that came through in some of the students' final papers. You could see that the experience that was breaking in upon us was something that the novel had made them think about in particular ways.
So yes, it has great relevance for us today. That wasn't a motivation for me now, but that a good reason why I would recommend it. If people have less time than an 800-page novel requires, I would recommend Death in Venice. If they have sufficient time, then I would recommend The Magic Mountain.
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Podcast: David Wellbery on The Magic Mountain