Sickness, Knowledge and the Formation of Self: The Magic Mountain

Abstract

The experience of death is central to all of Mann’s early fiction, from Buddenbrooks (1901) to Death in Venice (1912). Tonio Kröger is the only major work of this period in which that experience is absent; in all of Mann’s other works, death appears either as a brute reality, the inevitable culmination of physical decline, or, more metaphysically, as the object of longing, a solution to the crisis of alienated sensibility that besets many of Mann’s early ‘heroes’, from little Herr Friedemann (in the short story of the same name) through to Hanno Buddenbrook. To a large extent, this preoccupation with death arises quite logically out of the themes that Mann addressed in this early body of work: the relationship between knowledge and sickness, between attenuated sensibility and decadence and the plight of the artist torn between bourgeois happiness and artistic vocation. These are themes that belonged to the artistic generation of fin de siècle Europe who seemed to live permanently in repudiation of the comfortable securities of life, and in admiration of all forms of transcendence, including the ultimate one. Indeed, Mann himself, as a young man, had not been impervious to the idealism of longing that characterized the otherworldly temperaments of his generation; nor had he been a stranger to the experience of death as a fact of family life, as is evident in his sensitive treatment of the subject in Buddenbrooks.