This was the most challenging book I’ve ever read. I’m fortunate to have read it as part of a Catherine Project reading group. The prose is always beautiful, but sometimes it is tiresome. There is a certain resentment I feel towards a writer who is so guarded and ambiguous that there is little hope of discerning his true meaning. Works from the beginning of civilization manage to be comprehensible by regular people, yet Mann writes with a modern tongue and still can’t communicate clearly. He apparently said it should be read twice, which seems inexcusably indulgent and pretentious. I am a far cry from a literary snob. Still, I enjoyed it and found in each of the characters something remarkable. While I didn’t fully understand it and will not be revisiting it a second time (damned be Mann and his narcissism), there are certain themes that I found profound, which I will touch briefly on below.
The Magic of Retreat
Hans, while visiting his consumptive cousin Joachim, becomes entranced by the Berghof sanitorium. While the extent of his actual illness is ambiguous, desire to be sick is not: he wants to and likes seeing his feverish temperatures on the thermometer. Settembrini urges Hans to return to the “flatlands” before it is too late, but it gets to be too late. Hans finds a certain “magic” in being removed from stultifying German society. Hans has been somnambulating around a cold, conformist pre-WWI German society. He’s on track to be a shipbuilding engineer despite no real proclivity for or interest in the work. He lacks any real connection to the world he finds himself in and he focuses merely on fitting in and behaving as a proper aristocrat. Its suggested that he is relieved to be on some arbitrary path as an engineer, rather than having to deal with the pressures of finding his way. When he arrives at the Berghof, he is released from the burdens of respectability. He eases into this at first, as he is initially shocked by the strangeness of the sanitorium and its residents’ behavior. Once he learns he too has tuberculosis, he simply does what he wants, whether that is intellectual dilettantism, lustful forays with Clavdia, skiing adventures, or bacchanals.
The Irrelevance of Intellectualism
I’m not sure if Mann was intending this theme or its merely my projection, but this mostly comes across through Hans mentorship by the Italian quasi-scholar Settembrini and the quasi-Benedictine monk Naphta . There are the perhaps 100 pages of pedantry from Naphta and Settembrini that go on and on. They argue back and forth, contradicting both each other and themselves. Hans refers to them as “windbags” and that is quite apt. Ultimately these individuals are very ineffectual. For one, they are hypocritical and contradict themselves; the world of ideas they inhabit is both incoherent and devoid of action. At the end, Naphta kills himself after a duel with Settembrini, and Settembrini devolves into a bellicose jingoism, which is a far cry from his earlier self. Of utmost importance is that they never exert influence on anyone, including their captive Hans. This lack of influence comes across through their interactions with Mynheer Peeperkorn, who obviously outshines them in the eyes of others despite never saying anything of substance. The trump card for ideas turns out to be the most important thing in our superficial world: personality. Peeperkorn was probably the most fascinating character to me and he, too, commits suicide in the face of his mortality. He too is flawed because he can’t stand playing second fiddle in life, which his illness starts to necessitate.
Nonlinear Time
There is a lot of discussion of time and the inadequacy of any putative “measure” like seconds, minutes, weeks, etc. to capture how long one spends at the Berghof. Hans spends 7 years there in all. Sometimes a week is 100 pages, sometimes a year is a half page. The book suggests this is unique to the world of the sanatorium but it seems true more broadly. Still, the reader in this industrial world is left with a frustration that Hans won’t just get off his ass and get back to reality, to his important work of … designing ships? Settembrini articulates the reader’s frustration that Hans is not devoted to contributing to the progress of world, but instead in a solipsistic world of half-baked self-improvement. It is revealed at the end that he wasn’t wasting his time; whether he had returned the flatland or not, he would presumably die on the battlefields of a meaningless war. Does it really matter if one dies a fledgling engineer or a fledgling epicurean? War and illness both seemingly render our mortal efforts meaningless as death is always in the offing.
In the same vein, it has to matter, or we ought to convince ourselves that it matters what we do, even if our efforts are cut tragically short. Joachim, Hans’ cousin and OG sanatorium guest / patient, is Hans’ foil in this sense. Joachim resists the magic of the Berghof and obsesses over returning to his soldierly duties. He leaves the sanatorium out of frustration, gets very sick, and ultimately dies back on the mountain. Joachim seems to demonstrate the power of a firm identity and belonging, even if its something as dubious as a professional soldier preparing to engage in perhaps the most pointless war of all time. Towards the end of his life, there appear to be some cracks in his devotion to duty. He engages in the very non-German flirtation prevalent at the sanatorium. It’s as if on his death bed he regrets his rigidity and indulges for once in the non-proper. As is the case with many ideas in the novel, virtue seems to lie somewhere in between the vices, between duty and profligacy, between ideas and action, between life and death.
Conclusion
One of the members of the reading group, who had been an academic and dabbled in modernism, remarked how modernist much of this was. I don’t know much about modernism and the definitions confound me, but from my basic understanding that’s kind of the point. To be modernist is to be confused and ambiguous. It’s to waffle over things and be a nervous nelly. It’s Freud and Mann and writing novels meant to waste people’s time be read twice. I don’t mean to come across as overly negative. The book was clearly thought provoking for me and mostly enjoyable. At least enough to squeeze out a few ideas onto this page.