Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
My Favorite German Novel: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
By Kaiser Haq
My title was deliberately chosen to remind readers of their schooldays, when they might have been set composition exercises according to the thematic formula “My Favourite x”, where “x” could be anything on which the teacher wanted the student to descant, an uncle, a cricketer, a film or film star, or indeed a book. The usual practice among students would be to prepare a set of such essays and adapt one or the other to the requirements of the examination. After a lifetime of teaching and writing, and on the brink of turning seventy-five, the formulaic title provokes varied reflection on its constituent parts. What does it mean to say that something is “My favorite”? Just try emphasizing in turn and with tonal variations each of the words in the first part of the title and you will be amused if not amazed at the range of semantic nuances that emerge. This is “MY favorite”, implying perhaps that I don’t care if you don’t approve of my taste. This is “my FAVORITE”, that is, I am deeply attached to it. This is “my favorite GERMAN novel”, indicating that there is something distinctive about German literary culture or national identity. And if I emphasize “NOVEL”, obviously I have in mind some noteworthy trait of this genre. I am sure you can tease out further shades of meaning.
For me, Mann’s novel is embedded in a muddled autobiographical context that has its inception at my naming or “akika”, as the ceremony, which involves animal sacrifice, is called in Arabic. I learnt that my first name had been given me by a granduncle who out of nationalist and hence anti-British sentiment harbored some sort of admiration for Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor who led his country into the catastrophe of the Great War. Of course, in our social milieu there was greater awareness of the Second World War, which everybody of my parents’ generation had lived through. Everybody was aware of Hitler as the consummate demonic figure and the holocaust as the ultimate abomination in modern history, an example of technological and organizational skill in the service of evil. The more cultured and better educated among us were disturbed at the irony that Germany also boasted brilliance in pure science, philosophy and literature and the arts. But by now we are all alive to the presence of irony as the dominant figure of speech in human affairs.
As we were growing up, our connection with Germany, compared to that with several other foreign nationalities, was purely in the abstract. My school, St. Gregory’s, was run by American missionaries; Faujdarhat Cadet College, where I spent a couple of years, had a New Zealander as principal and several British VSOs (young volunteers who came to teach for a year each in a scheme run by an organization called Voluntary Service Overseas). Most of us had family members or relatives who had been to Britain or America or settled there; few had a similar connection with any other western country. But our curiosity was unbounded, and we seized every opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the noteworthy cultural achievements of different countries; not only Anglophone ones, but also France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, the Scandinavian and Latin American countries. If we lacked opportunities to have direct acquaintance, we tried to know whatever we could about them; even knowing the correct spelling of a celebrated name was a significant cultural accomplishment. Nirad Chaudhuri, in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, narrates that on his wedding night—it was an arranged marriage of course—he determined whether he had found a worthy helpmeet by asking the bride to spell “Beethoven”. To his delight she passed the test with flying colors, and he knew he could look forward to a happy conjugal life. In a similar vein, we as schoolboys could rattle off a list of German cultural icons (or rather German speaking icons, for the German cultural realm rather than nationality alone mattered): Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche in philosophy; Freud, Adler, Jung in psychoanalysis; Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner in music; Goethe, Schiller, Mann, Kafka, Rilke, Brecht in literature. I have to admit, though, that we then knew virtually nothing of German art. It would be a while before I came to know and to appreciate its distinctive achievements, particularly the works of German Expressionism, a movement which is evident not only in painting and sculpture but also in film and literature, and in fact is a pervasive influence in every sphere of German cultural production.
It was common practice among my friends to draw up lists of writers and books to read, and actually try to read them. Needless to say not all the books listed were available to us, nor did we get through more than a handful. Among modern German writers, or rather writers in German, the one everyone read was Kafka, and “Metamorphosis” in particular. Then came Herman Hesse’s “Siddharta”, and a contemporary star, Gunter Grass, whose “The Tin Drum” enjoyed great popularity, as did the Marxist playwright-poet Brecht. None of my friends showed much interest in Mann. The reason I did has to do with my close relationship with the poet Shaheed Quaderi and his elder brother, Shahed Quaderi, who married a cousin of mine, and after studying English literature at Dhaka University had for some years taken up teaching in a government college. He would later go into Public Relations and contractual diplomatic service before retiring from active service. At the time I am speaking of Dhaka was a city of a million or so inhabitants, I was an HSC student, and Ayub Khan’s autocratic decade-long rule was nearing the point when it would collapse. The Quaderis lived in Gopibagh, on the upper floor of an old-style two-storied house with a wide south-facing verandah. Once or twice a month I would take a rickshaw from my home in Naya Paltan to spend an evening there, chatting over tea and “nashta” and smoking a cigarette, which Shahed Bhai would proffer, in quiet defiance of conventions regulating relations between youngsters and mature men. We would talk literature and politics. The younger Quaderi, the poet, would more often than not be out at some literary “adda”. Both brothers greatly admired Mann, the elder perhaps a tad more, but they no longer had the writer’s works in their collection. They used to keep their substantial collection of books stacked in a sort of lumber room where their houseboy spread out his bedding roll at night to sleep. One day the servant vanished and most of the books were found to be missing. Years later a colleague of mine reported coming across a book of poetry with Shaheed Quaderi’s name on the flyleaf. But no matter; the enthusiasm with which Shahed Bhai descanted on Mann was infectious, and his conversation was the best possible introduction I could have had to the genius of Mann. Shahed Bhai’s classmate at the university, Aslam, then a well-known journalist on the staff of “Holiday”, was another Mann aficionado whose ear for western classical music gave him an enviable understanding of the way “The Magic Mountain” organically weaves music into the novel’s structure. In time I managed to acquire or gain access at the Dhaka University Library to most of Mann’s major works. The appearance of new translations of the major novels by John E. Woods from the mid-1990s onwards gave fresh impetus to my interest in the author. These versions have superseded the earlier ones of Helen Lowe Porter, which at times seemed to justify the snide remark of the British philosopher-politician Brian Magee about Mann’s “lurid” prose. More readable versions of the major novellas and stories have also appeared, like those by David Luke.
Though my primary acquaintance with Germany is as a reader, I should not scant the role played by my couple of visits to that country, and to Switzerland, in adding a touch of intimacy to the reading. Thanks to the munificence of the Goethe-Institut in Dhaka, I spent a little over a couple of delightful months in Germany, attending a basic language course at the Institute’s West Berlin establishment, and following it up with visits to two chosen cities: I chose Munich and Cologne (with a trip to its twin city, Bonn). It was 1990. The Berlin wall was being chipped away, and chunks of it sold in the streets as souvenirs while the process of finalizing the reunification of Germany was under way. I was billeted in a flat along with two other language students, a Japanese and a Turk, both hardly more than half my age, in a flat owned by a Herr Daryush, son of an Iranian father and a German mother. It was within a stone’s throw of the Charlottenburg Schloss, a Baroque royal palace where Napoleon had set up headquarters when he forced Prussia into submission. It has been preserved as a museum and stands on extensive grounds where I went in the evenings for a leisurely walk. Cologne was headquarters to Deutsche Welle, the German state’s radio and television network, which had a Bengali service at which Frau Nazmunnessa, poet Shaheed Quaderi’s first wife, as well as a couple of other Bangladeshis were employed. Piyari, to use Frau Nazmunnessa’s informal moniker, arranged to have me interviewed by the radio station’s English service. The interviewer was Amrita Cheema, a Rhodes scholar and Oxford D. Phil in Modern History, who has had a distinguished career as a journalist with Deutsche Welle radio and, later, DW television. We had a very pleasant chat about the rise of postcolonial writing in English, but I missed it when it was aired, though a recording must be there in the DW archives, waiting for an enterprising researcher to discover it with an “Ah ha, what have we here!” Cheema has recently retired but I recall spotting her not that long ago on DW television, still a handsome woman, with short hair coming down her neck, and a sparkle in her clear eyes. My hotel in Cologne was a modest establishment but it was charmingly located just yards from the Kolner Dom or Cologne Cathedral, at 515 feet the world’s tallest twin-spired church, a Gothic cathedral whose construction began in 1248 and progressed fitfully over the centuries, finally attaining completion in 1880. A spiral staircase winds all the way to the top, from where there is a soothing view of the surrounding countryside. On the broad terrace surrounding the cathedral one could beguile oneself watching an artist creating short-lived paintings in chalk, or jugglers showing off their skills, or listening to busking musicians.
Munich has rich associations with Thomas Mann, who although he was born up north, in Lubeck, spent forty years of his life here, writing many of his great works: “Buddenbrooks” (1901), “Tonio Kruger” (1901), “Death in Venice” (1912), “The Magic Mountain” (1924), the first couple of volumes of the biblical tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers”. When I visited Munich I was not as deeply into Mann as I was later, or else I would have made a point of visiting all the Mann-related sites that have been preserved as tourist attractions. On a later sojourn in Europe, during a three-month residency in 2010 at Les Recollets in Paris, I visited Zurich with my family, and fully relished the city’s literary associations, with James Joyce and the Dadaists, and then with Mann, who lived in three different places on Lake Zurich, first for several years after Hitler drove him into exile, and later after he had lived for more than a decade in America, in the final years of his life. As we sailed around the lake in a tourist boat I let my imagination take me back to the era of sanatoriums for the tubercular, when antibiotics for treating the affliction had not yet been discovered. In 1912 Mann’s wife was prescribed a stay of several months in a sanatorium in Davos for suspected tuberculosis. Mercifully X-rays later showed that the scare was unjustified, but her experience of life in a sanatorium left a lasting impression on the writer. By then Mann had gained an enviable reputation as a writer who could handle both short and long prose narratives with consummate skill. “Buddenbrooks”, based on the decline in the fortunes of his own family, inspired economists to talk of the Buddenbrooks effect, which refers to the tendency of big family businesses to decline over three generations due to creeping decadence, as in the novel. It is a masterpiece of realism; its admirers include one of the most fastidious stylists of our time, V. S. Naipaul. Paul Theroux describes in “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” how Naipaul advised him to study Mann carefully, noting how detail was added to detail to present a clear picture of the world. Naipaul was particularly impressed by Mann’s handling of the death from typhoid of the ill-fated artistic dilettante Hanno; interested readers will find Naipaul’s comments on this scene online. Students of literature will be interested to see how Mann’s “Tonio Kruger” anticipates by years the notion of aesthetic impersonality made famous in the Anglophone world by T. S. Eliot. Both “Tonio Kruger” and its companion piece “Death in Venice” are steeped in the discreet and quietly tormented homoeroticism that is Mann’s hallmark.
After his wife’s stay in the sanatorium, Mann conceived a work that would be a light-hearted follow-up to the tragic tale of the death of the distinguished writer Von Aschenbach in Venice. It had to be put aside as the Great War burst upon Europe, and was taken up again after the catastrophic conflict had ended. Titled “The Magic Mountain”, it was finally finished and published in 1924. In other words, it is time to celebrate the centenary of this modernist classic. While war raged Mann wrote polemical works, like the massive “Reflections of a Non-Political Man”, expounding his conservative attitude which contrasted with his brother Hermann’s more “progressive” outlook. Mann’s politics would evolve significantly as he became a prolific anti-Nazi polemicist in exile. Later, put off by the McCarthyism that gripped Cold War America, he became a Social Democrat. As for his philosophy of life and aesthetics, he distilled it from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on both of whom he has written substantial essays.
The Great War is the pivotal event around which “The Magic Mountain” takes shape. As Mann explains in a pithy and resonant Foreword, the action in the novel ends with the outbreak of the war, which makes a fissure in history, irreconcilably separating what has happened before from what follows after. The protagonist Hans Castorp, a very ordinary young fellow, by profession an engineer, goes up to a sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin Joachim, a freshly commissioned military officer who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Castorp starts feeling feverish himself and stays on for seven years during which the life of the sanatorium completely replaces the life he has left behind. Life on the magic mountain now appears more real than life in the “flatlands”, and is regulated by the scientific discipline enforced by the director Dr Behrens and the psychoanalyst Dr Krokowski. Small wonder that Michel Foucault, a meticulous analyst of the power network that enmeshes the modern clinic, is one of the novel’s admiring readers. Castorp is caught up in an intellectual tug of war between the continually debating Settembrini, a “progressive” democratic Humanist and Naphtha, the Jesuit socialist of Jewish heritage, and an ideological absolutist; absurdly, the two end up fighting a duel in which Settembrini fires in the air while Naphtha in an inexplicably tragic manner shoots himself in the temple. Perhaps the most outstanding modern novel of ideas, “The Magic Mountain” was enthusiastically read by Martin Heidegger and his star student, Hannah Arendt.
But the emotional center of Castorp’s life is the attraction he feels for the mysterious and seductive Madame Chauchat, the lady with “Kirghiz eyes” from across the Caucasus. One bewitching Walpurgis Night, he declares himself in a passionate exchange in second-language French, makes her give him a tiny x-ray image of her diseased lungs as a memento, which he keeps close to his heart and possesses her for a magical hour. There’s a lot more until war breaks out, notably the death of Castorp’s cousin Joachim, and the return of Madame Chauchat as the companion of an eccentric Dutch colonial, Mynheer Peeperkorn, who commits suicide in a bizarre fashion. Castorp now shakes off his illness (if indeed it was illness) and volunteers to fight. The magic mountain after all seems to be symbolic of escapism from life, but life eventually reasserts itself in all the goriness of history, making the book a modernist “fairy-tale” (Mann’s choice of word). I shall stop here, for my intention is not to write literary criticism but merely to sketch the story of my engagement with Mann’s work. If I were to go on about this magnificent novel I would perhaps do so like Borges’s Pierre Menard, who copied “Don Quixote” verbatim to recreate it as something quite new.
