Introduction: Thomas Mann’s “Oriental Carpet”

THOMAS MANN’S DER ZAUBERBERG opens in 1907 with its protagonist’s arrival at the Berghof, a sanatorium in the mountains above the alpine village of Davos. Hans Castorp, a young ship’s engineer-in-training from Hamburg, has traveled to Switzerland to spend three weeks with his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is being treated there for tuberculosis. The three weeks eventually turn into seven years, and Castorp remains on the mountain long after his cousin has left for the “Flatlands.” Under the tutelage of various mentors, Hans becomes a student of both life and of death, far removed from the practicalities and responsibilities of existence in the valley below. What initially inspires him to extend his stay is the desire to comprehend and reconcile the multiple and dissonant discourses that surround him, but in the end it is his all-consuming love for the enigmatic Russian woman, Clawdia Chauchat, that holds him enthralled until she finally departs, and, in the novel’s final pages, the First World War erupts across Europe.

Over the span of his extended stay at the Berghof, Hans Castorp vacillates between admiration for his Northern German cousin Joachim’s military precision and an obsession with Clawdia’s relaxed sensuality; he listens attentively both to the enlightened rationalism of his Italian mentor, Ludovico Settembrini, and to the passionate, reactionary fanaticism of Settembrini’s intellectual nemesis, the Galician Leo Naphta; and he is as committed to life as he is drawn to the mysteries of illness and death. According to Settembrini, one of the protagonist’s most outspoken and influential educators, all the novel’s main characters and many of the key ideas that are represented at the Berghof (and with which Hans Castorp engages) are aligned in some way either with Europe or with Asia. Settembrini’s worldview juxtaposes Western Enlightenment against the seductive but ruinous values and lifestyles of the Orient; and his insistent warnings to Hans of what awaits him on the other (Eastern) side of the divide offer the novel’s clearest articulation of the two distinct “principals” that permeate the Berghof scene: