The Magic Mountain (eBook)

Thomas Mann (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
250 Seiten
Seven Books (Verlag)
9783689952051 (ISBN)

Infos

The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature. Mann started writing The Magic Mountain in 1912. It began as a much shorter narrative that comically revisited aspects of Death in Venice, a novella that he was preparing for publication. The newer work reflected his experiences and impressions during a period when his wife, who was suffering from respiratory disease, resided at Dr. Friedrich Jessen's [de] Waldsanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, for several months. In May and June 1912, Mann visited her and became acquainted with the team of doctors and patients in this cosmopolitan institution. According to Mann, in the afterword that was later included in the English translation of his novel, this stay inspired his opening chapter ('Arrival').

Paul Thomas Mann (1875 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.Mann was a member of the hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.

Textauszug

CHAPTER II

Of the Christening Basin, and of Grandfather in His Two-­fold Guise

Hans Castorp retained only pale memories of his parental home. His father and mother he had barely known; they had both dropped away in the brief period between his fifth and seventh birthdays; first the mother, quite suddenly, on the eve of a confinement, of an arterial obstruction following neuritis—­an embolus, Dr. Heidekind had called it—­which caused instantaneous cardiac arrest. She had just been laughing, sitting up in bed, and it looked as though she had fallen back with laughter, but really it was because she had died. The father, Hermann Castorp, could not grasp his loss. He had been deeply attached to his wife, and not being of the strongest himself, never quite recovered from her death. His spirit was troubled; he shrank within himself; his benumbed brain made him blunder in his business, so that the firm of Castorp and Son suffered sensible financial losses; and the next spring, while inspecting warehouses on the windy landing-­stage, he got inflammation of the lungs. The fever was too much for his shaken heart, and in five days, notwithstanding all Dr. Heidekind’s care, he died. Attended to his rest by a respectable concourse of citizens, he followed his wife to the Castorp family vault, a charming site in St. Katherine’s churchyard, with a view of the Botanical Gardens.

His father the Senator survived him a short time; then he too passed away, likewise of inflammation of the lungs. His death agony was sore, for unlike his son, Hans Lorenz Castorp had been a man of tough constitution, and firmly rooted in life. Before his death, for the space of a year and a half, the grandfather harboured the orphaned Hans Castorp in his home, a mansion standing in a narrow lot on the Esplanade, built in the early years of the last century, in the northern-­classic style of architecture. It was painted a depressing weather-­colour, and had pilasters on either side the entrance door, which was approached by a flight of five steps. Besides the parterre, which had windows going down to the floor and furnished with cast-­iron grilles, there were two upper storeys.

In the parterre were chiefly reception-­rooms, and a very light and cheerful diningroom, with walls decorated in stucco. Its three windows, draped with wine-­coloured curtains, looked out on the back garden. In this room, daily, at four o’clock, for the space of eighteen months, grandfather and grandson dined together, served by old Fiete, who had ear-­rings in his ears and silver buttons on his livery, also a batiste neckcloth like his master’s, in which he buried his shaven chin just as Hans Lorenz Castorp did in his. Grandfather said thou to him and addressed him in dialect—­not with any humorous intent, for he had no bent that way, but in all seriousness, and because it was his custom so to do in his dealings with the common people—­the warehouse hands, postmen, coachmen, and servants. Hans Castorp liked to hear it, and very much he liked to hear Fiete reply, in dialect too, bending over as he served and speaking into his master’s left ear, for the Senator could hear much better on that side. The old man would listen and nod and go on eating, sitting erect between the table and the high back of his mahogany chair, and scarcely at all bending over his plate. And his grandson, opposite, watched in silence, with deep, unconscious concentration, Grandfather’s beautiful, thin, white old hands, with their pointed nails, and, on the right forefinger, the green seal ring with the crest; watched the small, deft, practised motions with which they arranged a mouthful of meat, vegetable, and potato on the end of his fork, and with a slight inclination of the head conveyed it to his mouth. Then he would look at his own hands, and their still clumsy movements, and see in them the hope foreshadowed of one day holding and using his knife and fork as Grandfather did.

Again, he would wonder whether he should ever bury his chin in such another neck-­band as that which filled the wide space inside Grandfather’s extraordinary collar, with its sharp points brushing the old man’s cheeks. He doubted it. One would have to be as old as Grandfather for that; in these days, save for him and his old Fiete, nobody, far and wide, wore such collars and neckcloths. It was a pity; little Hans Castorp liked the way Grandfather’s chin nestled in the high, snow-­white band. Even after he was grown, he recalled it with pleasure; something in the depth of his being responded to it.

When they had done, they folded their table-­napkins and put them in their silver rings—­a job at which Hans Castorp never acquitted himself very well, for they were the size of small tablecloths. Then the Senator got up from his chair, which Fiete drew away behind him, and went with shuffling steps into his “office” to get a cigar. Sometimes the grandson followed him in.

This office had come to exist because of a peculiarity in the arrangement of the lower floor—­namely, that the dining-­room had been planned with three windows instead of two, and ran the whole width of the house; which left space for only two drawing-­rooms, instead of the usual three, and gave to one of them, at right angles to the dining-­room, with a single window on the street, a quite disproportionate depth. Of this room, therefore, some quarter of the length had been cut off, and turned into a cabinet. It was a strip of a room, with a skylight; twilighted, and not much furnished—­there was an étagère, on which stood the Senator’s cigar case; a cardtable, the drawer of which held whist cards, counters, little marking-­boards with tiny teeth that clapped open and shut, a slate and slate-­pencil, paper cigar-­holders, and other such attractions; and finally, in the corner, a rococo case in palisander-­wood, with yellow silk stretched behind its glass doors.

“Grandpa,” little Hans Castorp might say, standing on tiptoes to reach the old man’s ear, “please show me the christening basin.”

And the grandfather, who had already pulled back the skirts of his long cashmere frock-­coat and taken the bunch of keys from his trouser pocket, forthwith opened the door of the glass case, whence floated odours odd and pleasant to the boy’s sense. Inside were all manner of disused and fascinating objects: a pair of silver-­branched candlesticks, a broken barometer in a wooden case with allegorical carving, an album of daguerreotypes, a cedar-­wood case for liqueurs, a funny little Turk in flowing silk robes, under which was a hard body with a mechanism inside. Once, when you wound him up, he had been able to leap about all over the table, but he was long since out of repair. Then there was a quaint old model of a ship; and right at the bottom a rat-­trap. But from one of the middle shelves Grandfather took a much-­tarnished, round silver dish, with a tray likewise of silver, and showed them both to the boy, lifting them separately and turning them about in his hands as he told the story he had so often told before.

Plate and basin, one could see, and as the little one heard once again, had not originally belonged together; but, Grandfather said, they had been in use together for a round hundred years, or since the time when the basin was made. The latter was very beautiful, of simple and elegant form, in the severe taste of the early nineteenth century. It rested, plain and solid, on a round base, and had once been gilt within, but the gilding had faded with time to a yellow shimmer. Its single decoration was a chaste garland of roses and serrated leaves about the brim. As for the plate, its far greater antiquity could be read on the inside: the date 1650 was engraved there in ornamental figures, framed in curly engraved lines executed in the “modern manner” of the period, florid and capricious devices and arabesques that were something between star and flower. On the back, engraved in a variety of scripts, were the names of its successive owners, seven in number, each with the date when it had passed into his hands. The old man named each one to his grandson, pointing with beringed index finger. There was Hans Castorp’s father’s name, there was Grandfather’s own, there was Great-­grandfather’s; then the “great” came doubled, tripled, quadrupled, from the old man’s mouth, whilst the little lad listened, his head on one side, the eyes full of thought, yet fixed and dreamy too, the childish lips parted, half with awe, half sleepily. That great-­great-­great-­great—­what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the falling away of time, yet how it seemed the expression of a piously cherished link between the present, his own life, and the depth of the past! All that, as his face showed, made a profound impression. As he listened to the great-­great-­great, he seemed to smell the cool, earthy air of the vault of St. Michael’s or Saint Katherine’s; the breath of regions where one went hat in hand, the head reverently bowed, walking weavingly on the tips of one’s toes; seemed, too, to hear the remote and set-­apart hush of those echoing places. Religious feeling mingled in his mind with thoughts of death and a sense of history, as he listened to the sombre syllable; he received therefrom an ineffable gratification—­indeed, it may have been for the sake of hearing the sound that he so often begged to see the christening basin.

Grandfather set the vessel back on the tray, and let the boy look...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.2.2025
• Verlagsort: Vachendorf
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Schlagworte: classics • Magic Mountain • Spirituality • The Magic Mountain • Thomas Mann
• ISBN-13: 9783689952051 / 9783689952051