Modernism and the Bildungsroman

Abstract

Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, published in 1924 (the translation The Magic Mountain appeared in 1927) describes how a talented if somewhat simple young bourgeois of Hamburg, Hans Castorp, postpones his internship in a shipbuilding firm in order to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, a patient with tuberculosis in the Berghof sanatorium in Davos. Castorp has planned on a comfortable three-week visit; he ends up staying for seven years, and with him the reader of this magnum opus is confined within the institution and the nearby countryside for hundreds of pages. Yet the copious attention that Mann devotes to life among the moribund and the convalescent - including Castorp who, soon after his arrival, is diagnosed with a not inconsequential problem in his lungs - does not produce a novel which one could accurately describe as being 'about' a sanatorium. On the contrary, The Magic Mountain is about Castorp's growth and transformation, his 'heightening' or 'transsubstantiation', to use the novel's own categorical terms, in a context, the sanatorium, populated by an array of characters constituting an allegory of European culture on the eve of the First World War. It is, in other words, about Castorp's education and can therefore be usefully discussed within the tradition of the novel of education, the German Bildungsroman .