Projections on Blank Space: Landscape, Nationality, and Identity in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg

Abstract

Blank space on a map represents a region of the globe that has remained unreached, untouched, unclaimed. As such, it becomes something to be conquered and possessed, and something to be feared. Terra incognita is not merely a placeholder, words to fill the empty space on a map, but also the articulation of a challenge to fill that space with words, with narratives, with names. More specifically, it is a challenge to fill that empty space with proper names that claim it. As an aporia to be assigned meaning, the blank space functions as a site for the inscription of identity. In this manner, the history of cartography is always already a history of exploration and colonialization.1 The landscape of the uncharted region becomes a mirror image of desires and needs, modeled on the known, yet defamiliarized and distanced as the unknown. In the early twentieth century, only the polar regions of the Arctic and the Antarctic remained as uncharted territory on the world map. In the nineteenth century, it was Africa, the dark continent, whose mystery spurred the European colonial race and whose landscape functioned as a distorted mirror of individual and national aspirations. And, in a similar manner, beginning with their discovery in the eighteenth century, the Alps provided a site of desire within the European continent. It is thus no accident that Hans Castorp's synthetic vision in the subchapter entitled Schnee of Thomas Mann's epic novel, Der Zauberberg, is projected upon a blank space in the Alps, a white wall of snow. The snow storm that blinds him becomes an empty wall in the mountain region that provides a screen upon which the conflict of his identity is played out and resolved-ifonly temporarily.