EUGENE GOODHEART
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the dominant institution of modern life. I imagine Mann, who regarded
himself as Goethe's successor as Germany's greatest Man of Letters was
aware of the prophesy. In any case,
The Magic Mountain
is in a sense a real–
ization of the prophesy in a way that anticipates future realizations. The
Berghof sanatorium is both a hospital and a theatrical spectacle, a scene of
entertainment both for its residents and its readers. (In our time, Goethe's
prophesy has been realized at the level of popular culture in TV dramas.
"General Hospital," "ER," and "Chicago Hope" provide a kind of anes–
thetizing experience of bodily harm, not unlike the pleasures of violence in
detective dramas.) The asthmatic attack of the hunchbacked Mexican is a
hilarious performance: "he suddenly could not get his breath and would
then grab his neighbor, man or woman, in the iron grip of one of his long
hands, hold on tight as a vise, and drag his struggling, panicky victim, now
shouting for help, down into the pool of dread with him." Or consider the
director, Dr. Behrens's relishing the decomposing body:
First of all, your guts burst...there you are lying on your wood shav–
ings and sawdust, and the gases, you see, swell you up, blow you up until
you're immense, the way frogs look when naughty boys blow air into
them, until you're a regular balloon, and then your abdomen can no
longer take the pressure and bursts. Bang! You relieve yourself notice–
ably...your bowels gush out. Yes, and after that you're actually socially
acceptable again. If granted a holiday, you could visit your heirs with–
out causing much offense. You stink yourself out, so to speak.
Symptoms of the mind, the ideas exuberantly celebrate its energy.
The scene of war that concludes the novel might have provided a gen–
uine test of the seriousness of its ideas. But it does not. The terrible
devastations of the Great War so graphically presented in Paul Fussell's
The
Great l-t&r and Modern Memory
and Pat Barker's novels are given to us by Mann
in a nostalgically heroic evocation.
There are three thousand of them, so that they can be two thousand
when they reach the hills and the valleys-that is the meaning of their
numbers. They are a single body, so constructed that even after great
losses it can act and triumph, even great its victory with a thousand–
voiced hurrah-despite those who are severed from it and fall away.
Youngsters with their backpacks and bayoneted rifles, with their
filthy coats and boots-and in watching, one might also see with a
humanistic, beatific eye, might dream of other scenes. One might imag–
ine such a lad spurring a horse on or swimming in a bay, strolling the
