Join Hans Castorp on what begins as a three-week visit to a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps—and becomes a seven-year intellectual journey through illness, ideas, love, and death.

Published in 1924, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a great modern novel of education, tracing the growth of an ordinary young engineer. Hans encounters competing visions of reason and mysticism, progress and pessimism, freedom and authority. Along the way, Mann explores the relativity of time, the impact of psychoanalysis, the power of myth, the appeal of music, and the relationship between medicine and the humanities. Meanwhile, the sanatorium becomes a miniature Europe moving toward the catastrophe of the First World War.

This seminar will explore the novel’s ideas, its distinctive literary form, and its place in German and European history. As we follow Hans’s education on the mountain, we will also ask what education itself is for: vocational preparation, entry into a cultural tradition, or intellectual and personal transformation. What does Hans learn during his long sojourn—and what can his experience teach us about how to live and learn?

Image: Ferdinand Hodler, Eiger, Mönch und Jungfrau in der Morgensonne, 1908

Prof. Berman on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain

This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Thursday, via Zoom, from 7 PM to 9 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $150 Amazon Bookshelf voucher contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.

Faculty

Russell A. Berman

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His scholarship spans German and comparative literature, cultural theory, religion and culture, the Middle East, and international relations.

Russell A. Berman

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His scholarship spans German and comparative literature, cultural theory, religion and culture, the Middle East, and international relations. Berman has served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the journal Telos, senior adviser on the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and a member of the Commission on Unalienable Rights. At Hoover, he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. His books include Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture, Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem, and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad. His honors include the German Studies Association’s best book award, the Federal Service Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Stanford awards for both undergraduate and graduate teaching. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session

Reading:

  • Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, pp. xi–179

Discussion Questions:

  1. Who is young Castorp? How did he grow up? What sort of person is he? Characterize him, paying special attention to the baptismal bowl.
  2. Who is Settembrini? What is his intellectual profile? What does he say about music, and why? Pay special attention to “Politically Suspect.”
  3. What do we learn about Hans’s erotic life in “Hippe” and Dr. Krokowski’s theories in “Analysis”?

Essay Prompts:

  1. What are the intellectual challenges Hans faces as he settles into Berghof?
  2. What childhood experiences and family background shape Hans?
  3. What elements of irony or satire enter into descriptions of life at Berghof?
  4. Is Settembrini a convincing proponent of Enlightenment thinking?

Reading:

  • Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, pp. 180–338

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does Hans adjust to becoming a patient, and what happens to his experience of time?
  2. What perspective does Settembrini bring to disease in “Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity”?
  3. In “Research,” what does the novel suggest about biology, spirituality, body, soul, and life itself?
  4. What makes “Walpurgisnacht” strange, and what attraction develops between Hans and Clavdia?

Essay Prompts:

  1. Is Clavdia’s judgment on Hans as a representative German warranted?
  2. How does Hans experience time as he acclimatizes to Berghof?
  3. What perspective does Settembrini bring to disease?
  4. What is the nature of the relationship between Hans and Clavdia?

Reading:

  • Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, pp. 339–530

Discussion Questions:

  1. Who is Naphta, and what does he say about the Pieta in his residence?
  2. What is attractive or dangerous about his position?
  3. What is Hans’s vision in “Snow,” and how does it relate to the novel’s major themes?
  4. Compare Hans and Joachim: is Joachim’s commitment to duty admirable, foolish, tragic, or some combination?

Essay Prompts:

  1. How does Hans’s vision in “Snow” corroborate his itinerary between his two teachers? Who is more convincing, Naphta or Settembrini?
  2. What does Naphta say about medieval art and culture?
  3. Whom do you find more admirable: Hans or Joachim, and why?

Reading:

  • Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, pp. 531–706.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does “A Stroll by the Shore” bring together the novel’s themes about time?
  2. Who is Mynheer Peeperkorn, and why does Clavdia return with him?
  3. What does his presence reveal about Hans’s earlier erotic idealization?
  4. Why is Hans singing at the end, and what relationship does the novel posit between romantic musical culture and war?

Essay Prompts:

  1. How does the novel judge the First World War?
  2. How does the novel continue to explore the nature of time?
  3. Who is Peeperkorn and how is he characterized?
  4. How is music addressed, especially in the gramophone scene, “Fullness of Harmony”?

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