Magic Mountain (German: Der Zauberberg ) is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924. Widely regarded as became one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature.
Mann began writing what became The Magic Mountain in 1912. It began as a shorter narrative that was reviewed in the aspect of the comic book Death in Venice, a novella that he was preparing for for publication. The more recent work reflects his experience and impressions during the period when his wife, who suffered from a lung complaint, was living in Dr. Friedrich Jessen's Waldsanatorium in Davos, Switzerland for several months. In May and June 1912, Mann visited him and became acquainted with the team of doctors and patients in this cosmopolitan institution. According to Mann, in the closing words which were later included in the English translation of his novel, this still inspired his opening chapter ("Arrival").
The outbreak of the First World War interrupted his work on the book. The ferocious conflict and its aftermath caused the writer to undertake a major reexamination of the bourgeois European society. He explores the destructive resources displayed by many civilized human beings. He is also interested in speculating about the more general questions related to personal attitudes toward life, health, illness, sexuality, and death. Given this, Mann felt compelled to revise radically and expand pre-war texts before finishing them in 1924. Der Zauberberg was finally published in two volumes by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin.
The broad compositions of Mann are learned, refined, ambitious, but, most importantly, ambiguous; since its original publication, has been the subject of numerous critical assessments. For example, this book combines meticulous realism with deeper symbolic tones. With this complexity, each reader is obliged to interpret the significance of the pattern of events in a narrative, a task made more difficult by the author's irony. Mann is well aware of the wickedness of his book, but offers some clues about the approach to the text. He then compares it with symphonic works that are organized with a number of themes. In a funny commentary on the subject of interpretation, he recommends that those who want to understand it should read it twice.
Video The Magic Mountain
Ringkasan plot
The narrative opened in the decade before World War I. It introduced the protagonist, Hans Castorp, the only child of the Hamburg merchant family. After the initial death of his parents, Castorp was raised by his grandfather and later, by a maternal uncle named James Tienappel. Castorp was in his early 20s, going to a career in Hamburg, his hometown. Before starting work, he travels to visit his tuberculine cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking medicine at the sanatorium in Davos, in the Swiss Alps. In the opening chapter, Castorp abandoned his familiar life and duties, in what he later learned to call the "lowlands," to visit the clear air of the mountains and an introspective, sanitary world.
Castorp's departure from the sanatorium was repeatedly delayed due to his failing health. What initially appeared to be a mild bronchial infection with a mild fever was diagnosed by the chief physician and director of the sanatorium, Hofrat Behrens, as a symptom of tuberculosis. Castorp was persuaded by Behrens to stay until his health improved.
During his long stay, Castorp fulfilled various characters, representing the European microcosm before the war. These included Lodovico Settembrini (an Italian secular and secularious humanist, a student of GiosuÃÆ'¨ Carducci); Leo Naphta, the Jew-turned-Jesuit who likes totalitarianism; Mynheer Peeperkorn, a Dutchman dionysian; and her romantic interest, Madame Clavdia Chauchat.
Castorp ended up living in a sanatorium for seven years. At the end of the novel, the war began, and the Castorp volunteers for the military. The possibility, or possibility, of his death on the battlefield is a sign.
Maps The Magic Mountain
Literary meaning and criticism
The Magic Mountain can be read as a classic example from Europe Bildungsroman - "educational novel" or "novel formation" - and as a sneaky parody of this flow. Many of the formal elements of this type of fiction are present: like the typical protagonist of Bildungsroman, the mature Castorp leaves his home and learns about art, culture, politics, human weakness and love. Also embedded in this vast novel is an expanded reflection on the experience of time, music, nationalism, sociological problems and changes in the natural world. Castorp lives in the clear air The Magic Mountain gives him a panoramic view of European civilization before the war and his dissatisfaction.
Mann describes the subjective experience of serious illness and the gradual process of medical institutionalization. He also alludes to the irrational forces in the human psyche, at a time when Freudian psychoanalysis becomes a prominent type of treatment. These themes relate to the development of Castorp characters over the time span covered by the novel. In his discussion of the work, written in English and published at Atlantic in 1953, Mann declared that "what [Hans] knows is that one must go through a profound experience of illness and death to arrive at sanity and higher health... "
Mann acknowledged his debts to Friedrich Nietzsche's skeptical view of modern humanity, and he drew from this in creating discussions between characters. Throughout the book the authors used discussions with and between Settembrini, Naphta and medical staff to introduce young Castorp into a broad spectrum of competing ideologies about the response to the Age of Enlightenment. However, while the classical Bildungsroman will conclude by Castorp has been formed into a mature society member, with his own world view and greater self-knowledge, The Magic Mountain ended with Castorp becoming obligatory military anonymous, a million, under fire on some battlefields of World War I.
Main theme
Connection to Death in Venice
According to the author, he originally planned the Magic Mountain as a novella, a funny, ironic, satirical (and satyric) follow-up to Death in Venice he had. completed in 1912. Its atmosphere stems from Mann's "mixture of death and entertainment" when visiting his wife at the Swiss sanatorium. He intends to move into a fascinating comedy plane with death and victory over the joy of commanding life, which he has explored in Death in Venice.
The Magic Mountain contains many contrasts and parallels with the previous novel. Gustav von Aschenbach, an established writer, was matched with a talented young engineer early in his regular career. The erotic charm of the beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, corresponds to the Asiatic-rich Madame Chauchat ("asiatisch-schlaff"). The arrangement shifts both geographically and symbolically. The lowlands of the Italian coast contrast with the alpine resort which is famous for its health-giving nature.
Disease and death
The Berghof patient suffers some form of tuberculosis, which regulates daily routines, thoughts, and conversations from "Half a club of lungs". This illness ends fatal for many patients, such as the Catholic girl Barbara Hujus who is terrified of her increasing death in the terrible Viaticum scene, and Ziemssen's cousin who leaves this world like an ancient hero. The dialogue between Settembrini and Naphta addresses the themes of life and death from a metaphysical perspective. In addition to death due to a deadly disease, two suicidal characters, and eventually Castorp went to fight in World War I, and it was implied that he would be killed on the battlefield.
In the comments mentioned above Mann writes:
What Castorp is learning to understand is that all higher health must have passed through illness and death. [...]. As Hans Castorp once said to Madame Chauchat, there are two ways to live: One is common, direct, and courageous. The other is bad, leads through death, and that is the way of genius. This concept of illness and death, as an important part of knowledge, health, and life, made The Magic Mountain the novel of initiation.
Time
Closely related to the theme of life and death are the subjective nature of time, a repetitive motifotomy throughout the book - here the influence of Henri Bergson is evident. So Chapter VII, entitled "By the Ocean of Time", opens with the rhetorical narrator asking, "Can someone say - that is, tell - time, time itself, that way, for its own sake?" Mann's (and ironic) response to the question posed was, "It would have been an unreasonable effort...", before proceeding to compare the narrative with the act of making music, with both described in the same way, "... only presents itself as flowing, as succession in time, as one after another... ".
The Magic Mountain , basically, embodies the author's meditation on the tempo experience.
The narrative is arranged chronologically but accelerated throughout the novel, so the first five chapters only connect the first of Castorp's seven years in the sanatorium in great detail; the remaining six years, marked by monotony and routine, are described in the last two chapters. This asymmetry corresponds to Castorp's tilted perception of the passage of time.
This structure reflects the protagonist's thinking. Throughout the book, they discuss the philosophy of time, and debate whether "interest and novelty diminish or shorten the time, while monotony and emptiness obstruct its reading". The characters also reflect the narrative and time problem, about the correspondence between the length of the narrative and the duration of the events it describes.
Mann also reflects on the interrelation between space and time experience; time seems to pass more slowly when a person does not move in space. This novel aspect reflects contemporary philosophical and scholarly debates embodied in Heidegger's writings and Einstein's theory of relativity, in which time and space can not be separated. In essence, Castlect's perspective changes subtly on "flat ground" according to the movement in time.
Magic and mountains
The titular reference to mountain reappears in many layers. The Berghof sanatorium is located on a mountain, both geographically and figuratively, a separate world. This mountain also represents the opposite of Castorp's home, a quiet and businesslike "lowland."
The first part of the novel culminates and ends at a carnival party of a sanatorium. There, in a strange scene named after the Walpurgis Night, the setting turned into Blokberg, where according to German tradition, magicians and magicians met in an indecent orgies. This is also explained in Goethe's Faust I . At this event, Castorp seduced Madame Chauchat; Their subtle conversations are done almost entirely in French.
Another German literary topos is Mount Venus ( Venusberg ), which is called in the opera Richard Wagner TannhÃÆ'¤user . This mountain is "heaven of hell", a place of lust and neglect, where Time flows differently: the visitor loses all sense of time. Although he thought his stay lasted only a few hours, when he finally left the mountain, seven years had passed. Castorp, who plans to stay in the sanatorium for three weeks, has not left Berghof for seven years.
In general, residents of Berghof spend their days in a mystical and distant atmosphere. The x-ray laboratory in the basement represents the Hades of Greek mythology, in which the Behrens Medical Director acts as a judge and punishment of Rhadamanthys and where Castorp is a lost visitor, such as Odysseus. Behrens compares cousins ​​with Castor and Pollux; Settembrini compares himself to Prometheus. Frau StÃÆ'¶hr mentions Sisyphus and Tantalus, though with confusion.
The culmination of the second part of the novel is probably still - episodic - a chapter from the Snowstorm's nightmare castorp (in a novel called "Snow"). The protagonist enters a sudden snowstorm, initiates a death-filled sleep, dreams of a beautiful pasture with flowers and loved young people on a southern coast; then a scene that reminds us of the strange events in Goethe's Faust I ("wizard kitchen", again in "chapter Blocksberg" Goethe); and finally ended up with a dream of extreme cruelty - the slaughter of a child by two magicians, a priest of a classical temple. According to Mann, this represents the destructive and natural forces of nature of nature itself.
Castorp awakens in time, escapes from a blizzard, and returns to "Berghof". But rethinking his dream, he concludes that "because of love and love, man should never allow death to rule one's mind." Castorp soon forgot this sentence, so for him the snowstorm event remained a distraction. This is the only sentence in the novel highlighted by Mann with italics.
There is a frequent reference to Fairy Tales Grimm, based on European myths. This sumptuous meal compared to the magic and self-laying table "Table, Donkey, and Wand", Frau Engelhardt's quest to learn Madame Chauchat's first name reflects the queen in "Rumpelstiltskin". The name given by Castorp is the same as "Clever Hans". Although the ending is not explicit, there is the possibility of Castorp dead on the battlefield. Mann left his unfinished fate.
Mann used the number seven, often believed to have magical qualities: Castorp was seven years old when his parents died; he lived seven years in the Nighttime Walpurgis night scene after seven months, the two cousins ​​had seven letters in their last name, the dining room has seven tables, Castorp's room number 34 (34) added up to seven , the name Settembrini included seven in Italian, Joachim kept the thermometer in his mouth for seven minutes, and Mynheer Peeperkorn announced suicide in group seven. Joachim died at seven o'clock.
Music
Hans Castorp loves music from his heart; it works for him just like his porter's waiter, with a soothing calming effect, tempting him to sleep.
There's something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that he, by his nature, is vague. I will not go so far as to say that he is politically suspicious. (Herr Settembrini, chapter 4)
Mann provides a central role for music in this novel. People in Berghof listen to "Der Lindenbaum" from Winterreise through modern gramophones. These two pieces are full of sorrow in the sight of death; the latter signals an invitation to commit suicide. Castorp became very involved in such music. With Franz Schubert's last song on his lips, the protagonist was instructed to go to the battlefield of World War I. Some elements suggest that Castrop fantasizes about being faun, as in Debussy's symphonic poem Prà ©  © lude ÃÆ' l'aprÃÆ'¨s-midi d'un faune .
Character allegorical
Mann used the main characters of the novel to introduce Castorp to the ideas and ideologies of his time. The author observes that all characters are "intellectual district, principle, and world intellectual exponents, representatives and messengers," hoping that he does not make them wander the allegories.
Castorp
According to the author, the protagonist is a questing knight, the "pure fool" who seeks the Holy Grail in the Parzival tradition. However, he remains pale and ordinary, representing a divided German bourgeoisie between conflicting influences - capable of achieving the highest humanistic ideals, yet at the same time vulnerable to stubborn philistinism and radical ideology. As usual, Mann selects his protagonist's name carefully: Hans is a German generic first name, almost anonymous, but also refers to the fairy tale of Hans im GlÃÆ'¼ck and the apostle. St. John ( Johannes in German), Jesus' favorite disciple, who saw Revelation ( Offenbarung des Johannes in German). Castorp is the name of a prominent historical figure, Hinrich Castorp of Mann's hometown, LÃÆ'¼beck. The "torp" is Danish, unexpected on the north coast of Germany.
On the one hand, Hans Castorp can be seen as a merger of the young Weimar Republic: Both humanism and radicalism, represented by Settembrini and Naphta, try to win his heart, but Castorp can not decide. His body temperature is a subtle metaphor for his lack of clarity: Following Schiller's fever theory, Castorp's temperature is 37.6 Â ° C, which is unhealthy or ill, but the midpoint. In addition, the outside temperature at Castorp's residence is unbalanced: too warm or too cold and extremes tend to (eg snow in August), but never normal.
Settembrini: Humanism
Settembrini represents the active and positive ideal of Enlightenment, Humanism, democracy, tolerance and human rights. He often finds Castor literally in the dark and turns on the lights before their conversation. He compares himself to Prometheus from Greek mythology, which brings fire and enlightenment to Humans. His own mentor GiosuÃÆ'¨ Carducci has even written a hymn to another lightbringer: to Lucifer, "la forza vindice della ragione." The ethics are bourgeois and labor values. He tries to fight Castorp's terrible appeal with death and illness, warning him against sick Madame Chauchat, and trying to show a positive outlook on life.
The antagonist Naphta described him as "Zivilisationsliterat". Mann originally built Settembrini as a caricature of a liberal-democratic novelist, represented for example by his own brother Heinrich Mann. However, when the novel was written, Mann himself became a supporter of the vocals of the Weimar Republic, which might explain why Settembrini, especially in subsequent chapters, became the author's voice.
Settembrini's physical characteristics are reminiscent of Italian composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo.
Naphta: Radicalism
The antagonist Settembrini Naphta was born a Jew but joined the Jesuits and became a Marxist Hegel. His character is a parody of the philosopher George LukÃÆ'¡cs, who "clearly does not recognize him in Naphta", wrote Mann in a 1949 letter.
Chauchat: Love and temptation
Clavdia Chauchat represents erotic temptations, passions, and love, all in an irregular, morbid, "Asiatic-flabby" form. He is one of the main reasons for Castorp's extended stay in the mountain of magic. The promise of women to sensual pleasures as a barrier to the spirit of men to act imitate the themes of Circe's myth and the nymphs at Mount Venus in Wagner. The character of the Chauchat cat is often noted, his last name is French chaud chat (Eng., hot cat ), and his first name includes English claw (His name may also refer to the Chauchat machine gun, a French weapon that saw significant use by French and American troops during World War I.)
Clavdia Chauchat left Berghof for some time, but he returned with an impressive friend, Mynheer Peeperkorn, who suffered from a tropical illness.
Peeperkorn: Dionysian Principles
Mynheer Peeperkorn, Clavdia Chauchat's new lover, enters the Berghof scene a bit late; but he is certainly one of the most dominant people of the novel. His behavior and personality, with a sense of importance, is combined with the obvious clumsiness and strange inability to settle statements, reminiscent of certain figures in the novellas of the former author (eg, Herr KlÃÆ'¶terjahn in Tristan) - the numbers, which, on the one hand, are admired because of their vital energy, and, on the other, are cursed because naÃÆ'¯vetÃÆ'Â © they. In total, this person represents the grotesqueness of the Dionysian character. The Greek god Dionysus is also important in Nietzschean's philosophy, The Birth of Tragedy is the source of the title of The Magic Mountain .
Peeperkorn ends with suicide, also done in a weird way.
By Mynheer Peeperkorn, the author of this novel simultaneously personalizes his rival, influential German poet, Gerhart Hauptmann, and even some Goethe properties (with whom Hauptmann is often compared).
Ziemssen: Duty
Joachim Ziemssen, Hans Castorp's cousin, is described as a young man representing the ideal of loyalty and loyalty as an officer. As already mentioned, Dr. Behrens alludes to this couple as "Castor (p) and Pollux", the twin brother of Greek mythology. And actually, there are some similarities between two cousins, both in their love to Russian women (Clavdia Chauchat in the case of Hans Castorp, fellow female "Marusja" in the case of Joachim Ziemssen), and also in the ideals. However, unlike Hans Castorp, who is a firm person in the Berghof scene, Joachim Ziemssen is somewhat shy, who is known to stand somehow outside the community. He tries to escape from what he, unspoken, feels as an unhealthy atmosphere. After a long discussion with his cousin, and despite being warned by Dr. Behrens, he returned to "flat land", where he fulfilled his military duties for some time. But after a while, being forced by the damage of his lungs, he returned to Berghof. However, it was too late for a successful treatment of his illness, and he died in a sanitarium. His death is depicted in a moving chapter of the novel, entitled "As a soldier, and a good man", "again a famous quote from Goethe's Faust.
See also
- Novel Portal
Note
References
Further reading
Translation into English
- Mount of Magic , translated into English by H T Lowe-Porter with cover by author, 1927, Secker and Warburg, SBN 436-27237-2
- Mount of Magic , a new translation into English by John E. Woods, 1996, ISBN 0-679-77287-1. It won the Helen Prize and Kurt Wolff Translator in 1996.
Literary critic
- Dowden, Stephen (2002) A Companion to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain , Camden House, ISBNÃ, 1-57113-248-1
- Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986) The Magic Mountain: Modern Critical Interpretation , Chelsea House, ISBN 0-87754-902-8
- Heller, Erich (1958) German German: Thomas Mann Study , Boston and Toronto, Little, Brown and Co.
- Jesi, Furio (1979), "Venusberg - Hexenberg - Zauberberg", in Materiali mitologici. Mito e antropologia nella cultura mitteleuropea , Einaudi, Torino 2001 (pp.Ã, 224-52)
- LukÃÆ'¡cs, Georg (1965) Essay on Thomas Mann , translated by Stanley Mitchell, New York, Grosset, and Dunlap
- Reed, T. J. (1974) Thomas Mann: Tradition Use , Oxford University Press
- Robertson, Ritchie (2001) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature Series, Cambridge University University Press
- Sontag, Susan (1978) Diseases as Metaphors , Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
- Travers, Martin (1992) Thomas Mann , Novelist Modern Series, Macmillan
- Weigand, Hermann J. (1971) Novel Thomas Mann Der Zauberberg: A Study , New York, AMS Press
External links
- A novel review from a medical perspective (Obtained via Internet Archive.)
- A study guide for novels (Obtained via Internet Archive.)
- 'Zauberberg' in Davos still exists (sanatorium converted into hotel in 1954.)
- Magical Mountain Map
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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