Thomas Mann at the Sick Bed

Abstract

“Disease has nothing refined about it, nothing dignified!” Mr. Settembrini vented his anger on young Hans Castorp as they met in Davos during their regular walk. In those times, in the first years of the twentieth century, Davos was the centre of hoping tuberculosis patients. Settembrini is there due to his illness, whereas Castorp comes to visit his ill nephew, he himself being thought to be healthy. That changes when Hofrat Behrens, the head physician of the sanatorium, detects his tuberculosis infection, earlier in a latent state but flaring up in Davos. The Magic Mountain, a great novel by Thomas Mann, covers the seven years Hans Castorp spent at the sanatorium thereafter. Obviously, this is only the frame of the novel and so is the setting of the patients’ indolent and idling society. All these serve the author’s aim of expressing and depicting his own world view, mental development, philosophy, social ideas and emotions. Castorp, a very mediocre young man, sometimes called “Life’s delicate child” understands but little out of all that, although the novel seems to represent his evolution, his Bildung.