Castorp

This story of Hans Castorp's school days in Danzig works pretty well on its own as a shrewd and fluent amusement, and the amusement is doubled and trebled by little references to Schnitzler's Traumnovelle or Grass's Danzig novels, but it's of course the new lens it brings to The Magic Mountain that's the real point of interest. Huelle precapitulates Mann's novel for purposes that are often straight-up satirical, like the conversations in the bathhouse between the English proto-Settembrini (we need a word or suffix for "proto-" but with an implication of already-in-the-context-of-the-thing-being-protoedness, in other words, a situation where proto-x comes before x but is nevertheless framed by it) and the German proto-Naphta, or the way show more the Decline-of-the-West pre-WWI stuff with Clavdia Chauchat about Germans and Slavs in the original gets made explicit here--at the end, rolled out in more or less thesis form by a sudden 21st-century narrator. But the book goes deeper too, and the fact that these things happened, will have happened, had already happened, had always had to happen, before the events of the MM changes Castorp from a sheepish Everyman into someone a bit numinous, a character to whom unexpected journeys to magical kingdoms and the descent of visions suffused with yearning are destined to happen, and whose ultimate destiny (I won't spoil the end of The Magic Mountain here) makes him a kind of dreamy blankish slate forced into the role of representative of and sacrificial lamb for the old bourgeois Europe. When Hans is caught looking out the window in math class and oh-snaps the professor with a heavy nineteenth-century comeback about Fermat's last theorem, the other students don't start to call him Cloudgazer or imbue him a reputation for legendary wit. They call him "Practical Castorp," against all the evidence. He's being forced into the role. This makes his Maria Mancinis and good meals and punctilious habits no longer cloying physical indulgences but humanizing details, and his bicycle rides, like the later walk in the snow, attempts to escape the role. It makes the essence of Castorp not practicality and innocence but enchantment and doom--and looking back, all four things were true of the pre-war world. Thus, the two-part story that Castorp and The Magic Mountain now become are revealed as a walk to the gallows no longer of a decadent and distracted world that doesn't know it's coming, but of an agitated and desperate one that suspects, and isn't yet aware that it suspects, but is looking desperately for a way out that isn't there, not in the highest mountain or the fluffiest Baltic cloud. show less