5/10/2023 0 Comments The magic mountain mannThe magic mountain is no longer a retreat or social height it is our everyday. That is a search we have all embarked upon. He is on a quest: to pass through illness to rediscover the ethics of normal life. But if Hans is part Romantic hero, he is also part arch-malinger, a young man who does everything he can to join the institutionally coddled life at the mountaintop. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes to a sanatorium for a three-week visit with his sick cousin but ends up staying for seven years, adopting the role of the TB patient with a sense of exaltation and even elation. In the nineteenth century, and not just in Germany, tuberculosis was the Romantic’s illness that is, those afflicted with TB were considered sensitive, brooding, creative, and interesting. But it is also, in a broader sense, an epic of illness-an ambitious attempt to show how being ill was experienced at a particular time in a particular culture. Weigand called it “the epic of disease.” It is more accurate to say that the novel is the epic of a particular disease, tuberculosis, one which has accompanied humans at least since they started building and settling in cities. I n his influential commentary on Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, the scholar Hermann J.
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