The Magic Mountain

Hans Castorp, a young naval engineer from Hamburg, goes to the sanatorium to visit his cousin Joachim, who is being treated in a mountain village in Davos. In the sanatorium, Castrop sees that time is very different from the time in the city. The way of life between life and death fascinates him. As he is about to return to his normal life, he is diagnosed with a disease. Deprived of time, detached from the world, he remains in the sanatorium where the disease is at the centre of life. During this time, Castrop is trying to discover the world of doctors and patients. He is in a platonic love in the background of his attachment to this diseased environment. In the sanatorium, Castrop, who understands the philosophy of life beyond experiences such as illness and death, undergoes a radical change. Hans succumbs to the power of love and death. The cultural and moral collapse of European society before the war is also mentioned. Rather than the individuals who lived in this period, a period in which all of European society becomes ill and withdrawn is also mentioned. The collapse in this materialist society that lacks equality and justice is described as the disease itself. Castrop will eventually find the way of enlightenment “above” in the sanatorium dominated by the disease, recovering and regaining her health and returning to her former life “below” in the city where society will find itself in war and disease.

“The Magic Mountain” was written by German author Thomas Mann. The novel is among the contemporary classics of world literature. In this novel, bearing traces of his biography and memories, Thomas Mann also wrote essays on “time” and “personality analysis”. Mann was born in 1875 in Lübeck, Germany, and is the child of a wellestablished and wealthy family. Mann has deep religious views. After Hitler dominated Germany, he defected to Switzerland and later immigrated to the United States. Unable to feel comfortable in the USA, Mann moved back to Switzerland at the age of 78 and died in Zurich in 1955.

Keywords: Alps, Architecture, Art, Bildungsroman, Death, Earth surface, Epidemic, Irony, Life, Thomas Mann, Love, Magic mountain, Modernism, Novel, Sanatorium, Space, Speed, Time, Tuberculosis, War.