Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure, and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins.
The year is 1912, and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. Then, it was instantly recognised as a masterpiece and led to Mann’s Nobel Prize in 1929.
Its unusual story - it opens with a young man visiting a friend in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - was originally started by Mann in 1912 but was not completed until 1924. Hans Castorp-such as the young man’s name-sat alone in his little grey-upholstered compartment, with his alligator-skin handbag, a present from his uncle and guardian.It was The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) that confirmed Thomas Mann as a Nobel prizewinner for literature and rightly so, for it is undoubtedly one of the great novels of the 20th century. You mount a narrow-gauge train and as the small but very powerful engine gets underway, there begins the thrilling part of the journey, a steep and steady climb that seems never to come to an end.įor the station of Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude, but now the wild and rocky route pushes grimly onward into the Alps themselves. Here, after a long and windy wait in a spot devoid of charm.
You take the train again, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station, where you have to change.
It crosses all sorts of countries, goes uphill and down dale.ĭescends from the plateau of Southern Germany to the shore of Lake Constance, over its bounding waves and on across marshes once thought to be bottomless.Īt this point, the route, which has been so far over trunk lines, gets up. AN UNASSUMING young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.įrom Hamburg to Davos is a long journey – too long, indeed, for so brief a stay.
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