The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Is freedom, freedom, ’tis your own!

  “Yes, yes,” he said once more, and moved onto a fourth piece, something very fine and dear to him.

  That it was yet another French work is not our fault, any more than is the fact that once again the prevailing mood was military. It was an intermezzo, a vocal solo, a “prayer” from Gounod’s opera about Faust. Someone stepped forward, someone for whom he felt great sympathy, whose name was Valentin, but whom Hans Castorp called by another, more familiar name that carried great sadness with it and was identified in his mind with the person beginning to sing from the cabinet there, though the recorded voice was much more beautiful. It was a strong, warm baritone, and its song was in three parts, consisting of a frame of two closely related stanzas, quite religious in nature, almost in the style of a Protestant chorale, and a middle stanza that had a gallant, chivalresque spirit, warlike, lighthearted, but equally devout—which was what gave it such a French military feel. The invisible person sang:

  And now since I must leave

  My homeland far behind—

  and, given these circumstances, turned to the Lord of heaven, begging him to protect the life of his dearest sister in the meantime. He was off to war, the rhythms bounced about, grew bold and daring—to hell with worry and care, he, the invisible singer, wanted to go where the battle was the fiercest, the danger the greatest, to meet the foe gallantly and devoutly, like a true Frenchman. But if God should call him to heaven, he sang, then he would be looking down from there to protect “you.” And by “you” he meant his dear sister; but all the same it touched Hans Castorp to the depths of his soul, and those emotions lasted to the very end, when the brave fellow inside there sang above the massive chords of a chorale:

  O Lord of heaven, hear my prayer,

  Take Marguerite into Thy tender care.

  There was nothing else of importance about the record. We thought we should mention it briefly because Hans Castorp liked it so very much, and also because it will play a certain role later, on a rather strange occasion. But now, we have arrived at the fifth and final work in the group of real favorites—which, to be sure, was not another French piece, but something particularly, indeed exemplarily German, and not from an opera, either, but a song, one of those special lieder—simultaneously a masterpiece and a folk song, and that simultaneity was what stamped it with its particular intellectual and spiritual view of the world. But why all the fuss? It was Schubert’s “Lindenbaum,” none other than the old familiar “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore.”

  Accompanied by a piano, it was sung by a tenor, a fellow with tact and taste, who knew how to treat its simultaneously simple and sublime material with a great deal of good sense, musical feeling, and narrative restraint. We all know that there is a great difference between how this splendid song sounds as an art song and as a tune in the mouths of children and everyday folks. In the latter case, it is sung to the basic melody, usually in simplified form, one stanza after the other; whereas here the original melody is already varied in a minor key by the second of the three eight-line stanzas, reemerges very beautifully in the major by the time the third stanza begins, is then dramatically abandoned in the “cold winds” that blow your hat from your head, and only finds its way back again in the last four lines of the stanza, where it is then repeated so that the song can be sung to an end. The most overpowering phrase of the melody occurs three times, always in its modulating second half—the third time, then, being in the reprise of the last half-stanza that begins “And many now the hours.” This magical phrase, which we do not want to abuse with words, is found in the lines: “So many words of love,” “As if they called to me,” and “Since I have been away.” And the warm, bright tenor voice, with its fine breath control and the hint of a restrained sob, sang it each time with such intelligent sensitivity for its beauty that it would grip the listener’s heart unexpectedly, particularly since the artist knew how to heighten the effect with an extraordinarily intense head voice on the lines “It always drew me back” and “And here you’ll find your rest.” In the repetition of the last verse, however, where the line reads, “You could have found rest here,” he sang “could have” the first time in full, yearning chest voice and only the second time in the gentlest of flute tones.

  But enough of the song and this rendition of it. We would like to flatter ourselves that in our previous examples we succeeded in awakening in our listeners a general understanding of the intimate sympathy with which Hans Castorp approached his evening concerts. But it is, we must admit, a very tricky task to explain what this last work, this song, this old “linden tree,” meant to him, and the greatest care must be given to nuance, if we are not to do more harm than good.

  Let us put it this way: an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is “significant” in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object—by which the degree of its significance is then measured. Moreover, love for such an object is itself equally “significant.” It says something about the person who feels it, it defines his relationship to the universe, to the world represented by the created object and, whether consciously or unconsciously, loved along with it.

  Does anyone believe that our ordinary hero, after a certain number of years of hermetic and pedagogic enhancement, had penetrated deeply enough into the life of the intellect and the spirit for him to be conscious of the “significance” of this object and his love for it? We assert, we recount, that he had. The song meant a great deal to him, a whole world—a world that he evidently must have loved, or otherwise he would not have been so infatuated with the image that represented it. We know what we are saying when we add—perhaps somewhat darkly—that his fate might have been different if his disposition had not been so highly susceptible to the charms of the emotional sphere, to the universal state of mind that this song epitomized so intensely, so mysteriously. But that same fate had brought with it enhancements, adventures, and insights, had stirred up inside him the problems that came with “playing king,” all of which had matured him into an intuitive critic of this world, of this absolutely admirable image of it, of his love for it—had made him capable, that is, of observing all three with the scruples of conscience.

  Anyone who would claim that such scruples are detrimental to love surely understands absolutely nothing about love. On the contrary, they are its very roots. They are what first add the prick of passion to love, so that one could define passion as scrupulous love. And what were Hans Castorp’s scruples, what questions did he ask himself when “playing king,” about the ultimate legitimacy of his love for this enchanting song and its world? What was this world that stood behind it, which his intuitive scruples told him was a world of forbidden love?

  It was death.

  But that is sheer madness! A beautiful, marvelous song like that? A pure masterpiece, born out of the profoundest, most sacred depths of a whole nation’s emotions—its most precious possession, the archetype of genuine feeling, the very soul of human kindness? What hateful slander!

  Oh my, oh my—that was all very pretty, was what any honest man would have to say. And yet behind this sweet, lovely, fair work of art stood death. It had special ties with death, ties one might indeed love, but not without first “playing king,” not without intuitively taking into account a certain illegitimacy in such love. In its own original form, there may have been no sympathy with death, only something full of life and folk culture. But to feel spiritual and intellectual sympathy with it was to feel sympathy with death. In its beginnings, purest piety, the epitome of judicious concern—there should be no thought of contesting that. But in its train came the workings of darkness.

  What was all this he had himself believing? He would not have let any of you talk him out of it. The workings of darkness. Dark workings. Torturers at work,
misanthropy dressed in Spanish black with a starched ruff and with lust in place of love—the outcome of steadfast, pious devotion.

  Settembrini, that old man of letters, was certainly not someone in whom he placed unqualified trust, but he recalled a certain lecture that his clear-minded mentor had once delivered, long ago, back at the start of his hermetic career—a lecture on “backsliding,” on “intellectual backsliding” in certain spheres. And he found it useful to apply those teachings, with some caution, to the object at hand. Herr Settembrini had characterized the phenomenon of backsliding as a “sickness”—and from his pedagogic viewpoint, even the worldview, the intellectual epoch, toward which one “slid back” might appear “sick” as well. But what’s this? Hans Castorp’s sweet, lovely, fair song of nostalgia, the emotional world to which it belonged, his love for that world—they were supposed to be “sick”? Not at all. There was nothing more healthy, more genial on earth. Except that this was a fruit—a fresh, plump, healthy fruit, that was liable, extraordinarily liable, to begin to rot and decay at that very moment, or perhaps the next; and although it was purest regalement of the spirit when enjoyed at the right moment, only a moment later and it could spread rot and decay among those who partook of it. It was a fruit of life, sired by death and pregnant with death. It was a miracle of the soul—the ultimate miracle, perhaps, in the eyes of unscrupulous beauty, who gave it her blessing; yet it was regarded with mistrust, and for valid reasons, by the responsible eye of someone “playing king,” who affirmed life and loved its organic wholeness. Both a miracle and, in response to the final compelling voice of conscience, the means by which he triumphed over himself.

  Yes, triumph over self, that may well have been the essence of his triumph over this love—over this enchantment of the soul with dark consequences. In the solitude of night, Hans Castorp’s thoughts, or intuitive half-thoughts, soared high as he sat before his truncated musical coffin . . . ah, they soared higher than his understanding, were thoughts enhanced, forced upward by alchemy. Oh, it was mighty, this enchantment of the soul. We were all its sons, and we could all do mighty things on earth by serving it. One need not be a genius, all one needed was a great deal more talent than the author of this little song about a linden tree to become an enchanter of souls, who would then give the song such vast dimensions that it would subjugate the world. One might even found whole empires upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly empires, very coarse, very progressive, and not in the least nostalgic . . . his truncated musical coffin, inside which the song decayed into some electrical gramophone music. But the song’s best son may yet have been the young man who consumed his life in triumphing over himself and died, a new word on his lips, the word of love, which he did not yet know how to speak. It was truly worth dying for, this song of enchantment. But he who died for it was no longer really dying for this song and was a hero only because ultimately he died for something new—for the new word of love and for the future in his heart.

  Those, then, were Hans Castorp’s favorite recordings.

  HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE

  Edhin Krokowski’s lectures had taken an unexpected turn after all these little years. His researches, dedicated to psychic dissection and the dream life of his patients, had always had a subterranean character, the whiff of the catacomb. Of late, however, although the transition had been so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall—the sanatorium’s main attraction, the pride of its brochure—which were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life itself, which, so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health.

  We say this, because we consider it our duty to shame irresponsible sorts who asserted that Dr. Krokowski had turned to arcane subjects in the hope of rescuing his lectures from what he feared was unmitigated monotony. His purposes, then, were purely emotional—or so said slanderous tongues, of which there is never a lack. It is true that during those Monday sessions, the gentlemen flicked their ears more vigorously to hear better and that Fräulein Levi looked even more than ever like a mechanically driven wax figure, if that was possible. But such effects were as legitimate as the changes that came with the evolution of the learned doctor’s thought—an evolution he saw as not only consistent, but also inevitable. His field of study had always been concerned with those dark, vast regions of the human soul that are called the subconscious, although one would perhaps do better to speak of the superconscious, since there are occasions when the knowledge that rises up from those regions far exceeds an individual’s conscious knowledge, suggesting that there may be connections and associations between the bottommost unlighted tracts of the individual soul and an omniscient universal soul. The realm of the subconscious, the “occult” realm in the etymological sense of the word, very quickly turns out to be occult in the narrower sense as well and forms one of the sources for phenomena that emerge from it and to which we apply that same makeshift term. That is not all. Any man who recognizes an organic symptom of illness to be the product of forbidden emotions that assume hysterical form in conscious psychic life also recognizes the creative power of the psyche in the material world—a power he is then forced to declare to be the second source of magical phenomena. As an idealist of the pathological, if not to say a pathological idealist, such a man will see himself at the starting point of a sequence of thought that very quickly flows into the problem of being-in-general—that is to say, into the problem of the relationship between mind and matter. The materialist, as the son of a philosophy of pure robust health, can never be argued out of his belief that the mind is a phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, who proceeds from the principle of creative hysteria, will tend to answer, indeed will very soon definitively answer the question of primacy in exactly opposite terms. All in all, this is nothing less than the old argument over which came first, the chicken or the egg, an argument that is so extraordinarily perplexing because of two facts: first, we cannot imagine an egg that has not been laid by a hen; and second, no hen exists that has not crept out of a postulated egg.

  These were the issues, then, that Dr. Krokowski had been discussing in his recent lectures. He had come to them by organic, legitimate, logical means—we cannot emphasize that enough; and to go one step farther, we shall add that he had begun to discuss them long before Ellen Brand appeared on the scene and brought these matters to the stage of empirical experiment.

  Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our audience does not know her, whereas the name is quite familiar to us. Who was she? Almost nobody at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen—everyone called her Elly—with flax-blond hair, a Danish girl, not even from Copenhagen, but from Odense on the island of Fyn, where her father owned a butter factory. She knew something about real life, had in fact spent a couple of years as a clerk in a provincial branch office of a national bank, sitting on a swivel stool, a sleeve-protector on her right arm, and staring at massive tomes—and had ended up with a fever. Her case was negligible, really more suspicion than fact, even though Elly was delicate, and obviously anemic, too—but definitely a likable girl, the sort you would have loved to pat on her flax-blond head, as the director did regularly whenever he spoke to her in the dining hall. There was an aura of Nordic coolness about her, a glasslike chasteness, a virgi
nal, childish quality that was quite attractive, as were both the full, pure look in her blue, childlike eyes and her pointed, refined way of speaking, in a slightly broken German with the typical mispronunciations of Danes—like “fleck” for “flesh.” There was nothing remarkable about her facial features. The chin was too small. She sat at the same table as Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered her.

  This, then, was Fräulein Brand, Elly, the friendly little Danish girl, who rode a bike and used to sit on an office swivel stool—and there were things about her that no one would have even dreamed possible on first or second glance at that shining face, but that began to emerge within only a few weeks after her arrival up here and that Dr. Krokowski saw as his task to uncover in all their strangeness.

  Some parlor games during an evening social were what first pulled the learned doctor up short. There had been all sorts of guessing games; then came the search for hidden objects, done with piano accompaniment, which would be played louder if the searcher got closer to the hiding-place, and softer if he or she wandered off track. This was followed by a game in which someone was sent out of the room, and when he came back had to guess the complicated task the others had decided he was to perform—exchanging the rings worn by two people, for example; or bowing three times in order to ask someone to dance; or fetching a particular book from the library and giving it to some particular person; and so on. It should be noted that games of this sort had not normally been played in Berghof society. Who had been the actual instigator could not be determined afterward. It had definitely not been Elly. But it was in her presence that they first took a fancy to such amusements.

  The participants—almost all of them old acquaintances of ours, including Hans Castorp—showed some skill, to a greater or lesser degree, although a few of them were totally inept. Elly Brand’s abilities turned out to be quite extraordinary, sensational, unseemly. Her resourcefulness in searching out hidden objects was greeted with much applause and admiring laughter, and that might have been the end of it; but when she began guessing her complicated task, people slowly fell silent. She accomplished everything they had secretly assigned her to do, carried it out the moment she entered the room, with a gentle smile, without hesitation, and without musical accompaniment, either. She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining hall and sprinkled it on Prosecutor Paravant’s head, then took him by the hand, led him to the piano, and held his forefinger to plunk out the beginning of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Then she brought him back to his seat, curtsied, pulled over a footstool, and sat down at his feet—exactly as they had racked their brains to devise.