DURING THE COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020, readers of modernist literature have often been reminded of the flu epidemic of 1918–1920, which killed tens of millions exactly one century ago. Modern fiction is full of dead bodies, more often associated with the First World War than with communicable disease. One of the great authors of the period, Thomas Mann, wrote a pair of works, however, that used disease as a metaphor for the state of European society on the eve of the war. Death in Venice (1912) sets the decline of an aristocratic German writer and his love for a young Polish boy against the backdrop of the last major cholera epidemic to affect Italy, in 1911. Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain, originally intended as a ‘humorous companion-piece’ to the earlier novella, was begun in 1912 but not completed until 1924, and it grew along the way into a 700-page epic spanning seven years of ill health. Intermittently funny and lugubrious, it anatomises pre-war bourgeois society as represented by the inmates of a tuberculosis asylum in Davos, Switzerland. Although the current pandemic has not caused nearly as much disruption to uppermiddle- class life as Mann’s contemporaries experienced in a decade of cholera, tuberculosis, influenza and war, The Magic Mountain has taken on a renewed relevance for those of us experiencing enforced immobility and social distancing amidst widespread political paralysis.

Shortly after Hans Castorp arrives at the Berghof Sanatorium in the opening pages of the novel, his cousin Joachim Ziemssen explains that, at the Schatzalp Sanatorium, even higher in the Alps, ‘They have to transport the bodies down by bobsled in the winter, because the roads are impassable.’ Castorp is shocked at what he calls his cousin’s ‘cynicism’: ‘The bodies? Oh, I see. You don’t say! On bobsleds! And you can sit there and tell me that so calm and cool.’ This discussion of how to dispose of the bodies of tuberculosis patients sets the uneasy tone for Castorp’s first day at the sanatorium. It also typifies a concern in modernist fiction with the proper rites for the burial of the dead.