This year’s Davos is reminiscent of the sanatorium in Davos from Thomas Mann’s famous novel. An Alpine health resort where, since the nineteenth century, an elite that still has power but no longer has its health has been gathering. It is a place where illness is neither denied nor treated; where symptoms are meticulously described, while therapy is postponed indefinitely. The only difference is that what is measured is no longer body temperature, but market volatility, geopolitical risk and climate stress.
Today, too, we are witnessing that something on that mountain is not quite right. Globalization is no longer working, markets are no longer autonomous, the state has returned to the game, and war has ceased to be a “black swan.”
All of this is already known to everyone, but the way it is being discussed reveals more about the patient’s state of mind than about diagnosis, let alone vision. Mark Carney’s speech is already being proclaimed historic, even though the man who, with the same moral dignity, today represents liberal Canada as he until recently represented the Bank of England, said only what even the birds on the branches already know: the fragmentation of the world, the return of industrial policy, the end of the illusion of self-regulating markets, imperial arbitrariness, and risk as a permanent condition. If listing the symptoms is being treated as an epoch-making act, then we are indeed witnessing a form of spiritual paralysis.
At the Berghof sanatorium (I have always wondered whether Thomas Mann happened to give it that name by chance), there is a division of roles: Dr. Krokowski is responsible for the patients’ “souls,” while the director, Dr. Behrens, deals with what is physical—the lungs, the cough. Yet both relativize the illness with the aim of keeping the patient there long enough for one of two possible hypotheses to prove correct—life or death, like Schrödinger’s cat. When a patient can no longer be cured, he is consoled by the precision of the findings.
In such an atmosphere, minor gestures acquire symbolic weight. Christine Lagarde walks out of a dinner during the speech of the American Secretary of Commerce—like an institution retreating in the face of political improvisation. Larry Fink, Davos’s new host, naturally remains at the table. He is to have a place on the working group for “peace in Ukraine.” Because there can be no peace without reconstruction, financing, risk, returns, and, above all, promises. And one has to learn to live with illness. Brian Moynihan, the head of Bank of America, was not on the guest list for Trump’s reception. This is another symptom of the disease: transnational financial giants must compete for the favor of states, because there is no longer an order based on rules.
In such an atmosphere, Hans Castorp, the novel’s protagonist, otherwise a sober Protestant man—in our case, we might call him Christoph Heusgen—can only be moved to tears, as he was last year in Munich, because he senses the end of a world that had promised so much.
The problem with Davos is that it sees no solution, while for a long time it itself nurtured the illusion that it was precisely the magician capable of preparing, outside institutions, permanent solutions that would eventually be transformed into an order. The summits of business and politics know too much to believe in simple solutions, yet they have neither the strength nor the will to provide real ones. And so Davos truly resembles The Magic Mountain: time passes, the conversations repeat themselves, the banal is proclaimed historic (as though Nafta and Settembrini were conversing in the novel), the symptoms multiply, and the descent into the “lowlands” is endlessly postponed.
A small point, but I interpreted Christine Lagarde’s walkout as not a retreat but a calculated and contemptuous rejection: a show of strength not weakness.
I really appreciated this. I read Magic Mountain as an assignment in college. I was proud of myself for making it through the entire book but really didn’t have the maturity or historical knowledge to understand it. I suspect I should follow Mann’s advice and read it again.
Mann's sanatorium was class privilege — not everyone could afford to go up. Today's sanatorium is class punishment — not everyone gets to leave. Entering it is no longer a choice, it is how the middle is housed. The top still decides when Castorp gets conscripted.
This was a brilliant read, thanks!!! When I was a teenager I was nigh obsessed with this book and I particularly loved the Naphta/Settembrini dialogues. When, on occasion of an essay, my philosophy teacher tried to convey to me something pejorative about my supposed style of writing (I just loved to pastiche every writer I loved; he, a professed Kundera-fan considered what I tried utterly “tedious” and old-fashioned) my “Thomas-Mannscher-Satzbau”, he inadvertedly gifted me one of the most beautiful compliments of my life 😆✌️. Anyways - wonderful essay; I want to hear more on these topics from you (and, btw, the recent David Runciman- podcast episode on different modes of history writing was interesting). These immersive posts (and the great moments are manifold even without these elaborate deep dives) are my favourite Chartbook- moments 👏
Wow, I've read Adam Tooze for several years and sometimes get to a point where I know generally what his view is and need to skip ahead, just for lack of time, but this dive into Mann, the Magic Mountain, time and space, history and historical fiction, is really stimulating. I recommend it for the likely spins into your own research and reflection it's likely to give.
The Great Petulance is how Thomas Mann titled the penultimate, climatic chapter of the The Magic Mountain, a work about slowly creeping, enveloping sickness and a masterful allegory of the social psychology of Europe sleepwalking toward the precipice of catastrophe and dissolution.
It was a time of acute inequality, decadent idle ruling classes, declining empires, subtly shifting geopolitics, and rising proto-fascism.
The Great Petulance can be described as a chapter of elevated, pregnant madness. Face slapping fracases of honor, tantrums over cold tea, pistol duels over mere intellectual disagreements, all unattributable to prior causes yet somehow inevitable in the foul air, full of the lust for death and self-destruction.
The main protagonist is a "perfectly ordinary" malleable young man.
We are 80% through a 37.5 hour audiobook version of The Magic Mountain (John E. Woods translation), listening for an uninterrupted hour each day as we make the round trip down canyon to get our mail. Sometimes we re-visit whole sections to better grasp the depths underneath more superficial goings on. In addition to themes outlined in this essay there is a tortured love story wherein Hans Castorp, in pursuit of his unobtainable love object (the enigmatic Clavdia Chauchat), undergoes an ‘identification with the aggressor’ who is in effect her “sugar daddy” - Herr Peeperkorn, a charming and irresistible narcissist who possesses in spades that which Castorp craves but profoundly lacks; a big personality infused with power and confidence. This haunting book is no easy ride yet Mann adroitly transports the reader into the very midst of every situation and conversation. I look forward to part two of your review!
I started a reread when Adam referenced the book in his newsletter two months ago. I loved the figure of peeperkorn, and as at the end of this article I believe he echoes on into contemporary figures hahaha
I have read The Magic Mountain, and I find it less revealing than the tetralogy Mann wrote afterward, Joseph and His Brothers, composed between 1926 and 1943, in exile, watching the Weimar Republic he had championed being destroyed. The Magic Mountain is the work of a man in the wreckage of his world trying to understand how it happened. Joseph is the work of a man who has understood what the sanatorium's specific pathology actually was, and has written the antidote.
The difference is precisely in the relationship to time, place, and the intergenerational covenant. Hans Castorp is the perfectly alienated modern individual: educated enough to appreciate the Settembrini-Naphta debate, wealthy enough to remain on the mountain indefinitely, rootless enough to lose track of time entirely. He has no particular attachments, no fire, no commons, no ancestors whose specific experience of mortality would have grounded him against the sanatorium's manufactured timelessness. The war does not redeem him. It simply consumes him.
Joseph knows exactly who he is in the chain of generations, the son of Jacob, the grandson of Isaac, the great-grandson of Abraham, and that specific genealogical anchoring gives him the resilience and adaptability that Castorp entirely lacks. Joseph goes from the pit to the slave's quarters to the prison to the pharaoh's court without losing himself, because his particular identity is so deeply anchored that no external condition can dissolve it. This is not mysticism. It is the specific psychological formation that comes from being genuinely embedded in a community, a lineage, and a relationship with the natural world that precedes and exceeds the individual self. The coat of many colours is the visible expression of the particular attachments that make Joseph who he is regardless of where he finds himself. The sanatorium has spent seven years extracting exactly those attachments from Castorp, and the chaise longue is what is left.
A figure missing entirely from the Magic Mountain, and from Tooze's reading of it, is that of an educated farmer who reads the Farmer's Almanac, follows new methods of cultivation and animal rearing, and would have made short shrift of the entire sanatorium performance, including the philosophical debates about death. The farmer knows what winter means because he has watched the field die and return. He knows what mortality means because he has held the dying animal and planted the seed in the same ground. He has no need of the sanatorium's medical apparatus to convert dying into a diagnostic process, because mortality is woven into his daily practice in a way that Castorp's merchant-family formation has systematically insulated him from. Castorp encounters death as a medical event. The farmer encounters it as a metabolic one. The difference is not sentiment. It is formation.
Castorp's survival chances in the war relative to the farmer's are very likely much smaller. The farmer knows terrain, weather, exhaustion, the specific practical intelligence of someone who has been working against physical resistance his entire life. Castorp has been lying on a chaise longue reading thermometers. The war's conditions, mud, cold, logistical collapse, the management of physical extremity, are the conditions for which the farmer's formation is specifically adapted and for which the sanatorium has spent seven years making Castorp specifically unfit. Mann sends Castorp into the assault because the novel's logic requires it. The farmer can of course end up in the war side by side with Castorp and hi likely survies it at a higher rate not because he is braver but because he has the embodied knowledge the sanatorium extracted from Castorp.
Joseph and His Brothers is the Bildungsroman that the Magic Mountain gestures toward but cannot complete, because Mann needed another twenty years and the specific experience of exile and catastrophe to understand what a person looks like who cannot be dissolved by manufactured timelessness. He looks like someone who knows whose son he is. That is also, I would suggest, the answer to the question Tooze leaves open at the end of Part I: which contemporary figure does Mann bring to mind? Not the Davos attendee. Not the floating intellectual. Someone with a coat of many colours and a very long memory of whose child they are.
Look at what happens in Comments when Adam Tooze comes directly to us, puts it on the page and lets us know that he's returning with more of Mann's Zauberberg/Magic Mountain, more of Mann, more about what we may make of ourselves at this time and about time itself - 'a moment of historical transition'.
Thanks for this essay. I read Magic Mountain when I was in my twenties and my memory of it was struggle and boredom. I do not have a desire to read it again.
My parents met and married while working in a TB sanitorium, and my father was very impressed by The Magic Mountain -- I am not so sure about my mother, who was more reticent. He worked there as a contientious objector to the Korean war, and she was an immigrant nurse who had caught TB whilst working in Bradford. Your chart on death rates was telling; if my mother had caught the disease three months earlier she would have died from it, but she was 'lucky' enough to be working in a world leading hospital, so she lived through a spell in an iron lung and was given streptomycin, and survived. Without that modern medicine I would not have been born, or if I had been I would have probably died young, so I have always felt that my life was contingent on chance -- an arbitrary and lucky thing -- and I suspect that has been a profound influence on my attitudes towards politics, cultural life and economics. The result, whatever the cause, is that mixture of profound conservatism, radical left positions and extreme liberalism which puts me (with some unease) into the modern European Green movement. To sum it up, that is anarchist logic and pragmatic politics, and my own prefered book by Mann is Doctor Faust.
Great essay, looking forward to part 2. Since you mention J. G. Ballard, I’ve always found his short story ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ to echo ‘The Magic Mountain’ - though Ballard’s tone is much more comic and, in some ways, straight forward.
This year’s Davos is reminiscent of the sanatorium in Davos from Thomas Mann’s famous novel. An Alpine health resort where, since the nineteenth century, an elite that still has power but no longer has its health has been gathering. It is a place where illness is neither denied nor treated; where symptoms are meticulously described, while therapy is postponed indefinitely. The only difference is that what is measured is no longer body temperature, but market volatility, geopolitical risk and climate stress.
Today, too, we are witnessing that something on that mountain is not quite right. Globalization is no longer working, markets are no longer autonomous, the state has returned to the game, and war has ceased to be a “black swan.”
All of this is already known to everyone, but the way it is being discussed reveals more about the patient’s state of mind than about diagnosis, let alone vision. Mark Carney’s speech is already being proclaimed historic, even though the man who, with the same moral dignity, today represents liberal Canada as he until recently represented the Bank of England, said only what even the birds on the branches already know: the fragmentation of the world, the return of industrial policy, the end of the illusion of self-regulating markets, imperial arbitrariness, and risk as a permanent condition. If listing the symptoms is being treated as an epoch-making act, then we are indeed witnessing a form of spiritual paralysis.
At the Berghof sanatorium (I have always wondered whether Thomas Mann happened to give it that name by chance), there is a division of roles: Dr. Krokowski is responsible for the patients’ “souls,” while the director, Dr. Behrens, deals with what is physical—the lungs, the cough. Yet both relativize the illness with the aim of keeping the patient there long enough for one of two possible hypotheses to prove correct—life or death, like Schrödinger’s cat. When a patient can no longer be cured, he is consoled by the precision of the findings.
In such an atmosphere, minor gestures acquire symbolic weight. Christine Lagarde walks out of a dinner during the speech of the American Secretary of Commerce—like an institution retreating in the face of political improvisation. Larry Fink, Davos’s new host, naturally remains at the table. He is to have a place on the working group for “peace in Ukraine.” Because there can be no peace without reconstruction, financing, risk, returns, and, above all, promises. And one has to learn to live with illness. Brian Moynihan, the head of Bank of America, was not on the guest list for Trump’s reception. This is another symptom of the disease: transnational financial giants must compete for the favor of states, because there is no longer an order based on rules.
In such an atmosphere, Hans Castorp, the novel’s protagonist, otherwise a sober Protestant man—in our case, we might call him Christoph Heusgen—can only be moved to tears, as he was last year in Munich, because he senses the end of a world that had promised so much.
The problem with Davos is that it sees no solution, while for a long time it itself nurtured the illusion that it was precisely the magician capable of preparing, outside institutions, permanent solutions that would eventually be transformed into an order. The summits of business and politics know too much to believe in simple solutions, yet they have neither the strength nor the will to provide real ones. And so Davos truly resembles The Magic Mountain: time passes, the conversations repeat themselves, the banal is proclaimed historic (as though Nafta and Settembrini were conversing in the novel), the symptoms multiply, and the descent into the “lowlands” is endlessly postponed.
A small point, but I interpreted Christine Lagarde’s walkout as not a retreat but a calculated and contemptuous rejection: a show of strength not weakness.
I really appreciated this. I read Magic Mountain as an assignment in college. I was proud of myself for making it through the entire book but really didn’t have the maturity or historical knowledge to understand it. I suspect I should follow Mann’s advice and read it again.
Mann's sanatorium was class privilege — not everyone could afford to go up. Today's sanatorium is class punishment — not everyone gets to leave. Entering it is no longer a choice, it is how the middle is housed. The top still decides when Castorp gets conscripted.
Looking forward to Part II.
This was a brilliant read, thanks!!! When I was a teenager I was nigh obsessed with this book and I particularly loved the Naphta/Settembrini dialogues. When, on occasion of an essay, my philosophy teacher tried to convey to me something pejorative about my supposed style of writing (I just loved to pastiche every writer I loved; he, a professed Kundera-fan considered what I tried utterly “tedious” and old-fashioned) my “Thomas-Mannscher-Satzbau”, he inadvertedly gifted me one of the most beautiful compliments of my life 😆✌️. Anyways - wonderful essay; I want to hear more on these topics from you (and, btw, the recent David Runciman- podcast episode on different modes of history writing was interesting). These immersive posts (and the great moments are manifold even without these elaborate deep dives) are my favourite Chartbook- moments 👏
Wow, I've read Adam Tooze for several years and sometimes get to a point where I know generally what his view is and need to skip ahead, just for lack of time, but this dive into Mann, the Magic Mountain, time and space, history and historical fiction, is really stimulating. I recommend it for the likely spins into your own research and reflection it's likely to give.
The Great Petulance is how Thomas Mann titled the penultimate, climatic chapter of the The Magic Mountain, a work about slowly creeping, enveloping sickness and a masterful allegory of the social psychology of Europe sleepwalking toward the precipice of catastrophe and dissolution.
It was a time of acute inequality, decadent idle ruling classes, declining empires, subtly shifting geopolitics, and rising proto-fascism.
The Great Petulance can be described as a chapter of elevated, pregnant madness. Face slapping fracases of honor, tantrums over cold tea, pistol duels over mere intellectual disagreements, all unattributable to prior causes yet somehow inevitable in the foul air, full of the lust for death and self-destruction.
The main protagonist is a "perfectly ordinary" malleable young man.
We are 80% through a 37.5 hour audiobook version of The Magic Mountain (John E. Woods translation), listening for an uninterrupted hour each day as we make the round trip down canyon to get our mail. Sometimes we re-visit whole sections to better grasp the depths underneath more superficial goings on. In addition to themes outlined in this essay there is a tortured love story wherein Hans Castorp, in pursuit of his unobtainable love object (the enigmatic Clavdia Chauchat), undergoes an ‘identification with the aggressor’ who is in effect her “sugar daddy” - Herr Peeperkorn, a charming and irresistible narcissist who possesses in spades that which Castorp craves but profoundly lacks; a big personality infused with power and confidence. This haunting book is no easy ride yet Mann adroitly transports the reader into the very midst of every situation and conversation. I look forward to part two of your review!
I started a reread when Adam referenced the book in his newsletter two months ago. I loved the figure of peeperkorn, and as at the end of this article I believe he echoes on into contemporary figures hahaha
As my Gen-Z students say: TLTR
I have read The Magic Mountain, and I find it less revealing than the tetralogy Mann wrote afterward, Joseph and His Brothers, composed between 1926 and 1943, in exile, watching the Weimar Republic he had championed being destroyed. The Magic Mountain is the work of a man in the wreckage of his world trying to understand how it happened. Joseph is the work of a man who has understood what the sanatorium's specific pathology actually was, and has written the antidote.
The difference is precisely in the relationship to time, place, and the intergenerational covenant. Hans Castorp is the perfectly alienated modern individual: educated enough to appreciate the Settembrini-Naphta debate, wealthy enough to remain on the mountain indefinitely, rootless enough to lose track of time entirely. He has no particular attachments, no fire, no commons, no ancestors whose specific experience of mortality would have grounded him against the sanatorium's manufactured timelessness. The war does not redeem him. It simply consumes him.
Joseph knows exactly who he is in the chain of generations, the son of Jacob, the grandson of Isaac, the great-grandson of Abraham, and that specific genealogical anchoring gives him the resilience and adaptability that Castorp entirely lacks. Joseph goes from the pit to the slave's quarters to the prison to the pharaoh's court without losing himself, because his particular identity is so deeply anchored that no external condition can dissolve it. This is not mysticism. It is the specific psychological formation that comes from being genuinely embedded in a community, a lineage, and a relationship with the natural world that precedes and exceeds the individual self. The coat of many colours is the visible expression of the particular attachments that make Joseph who he is regardless of where he finds himself. The sanatorium has spent seven years extracting exactly those attachments from Castorp, and the chaise longue is what is left.
A figure missing entirely from the Magic Mountain, and from Tooze's reading of it, is that of an educated farmer who reads the Farmer's Almanac, follows new methods of cultivation and animal rearing, and would have made short shrift of the entire sanatorium performance, including the philosophical debates about death. The farmer knows what winter means because he has watched the field die and return. He knows what mortality means because he has held the dying animal and planted the seed in the same ground. He has no need of the sanatorium's medical apparatus to convert dying into a diagnostic process, because mortality is woven into his daily practice in a way that Castorp's merchant-family formation has systematically insulated him from. Castorp encounters death as a medical event. The farmer encounters it as a metabolic one. The difference is not sentiment. It is formation.
Castorp's survival chances in the war relative to the farmer's are very likely much smaller. The farmer knows terrain, weather, exhaustion, the specific practical intelligence of someone who has been working against physical resistance his entire life. Castorp has been lying on a chaise longue reading thermometers. The war's conditions, mud, cold, logistical collapse, the management of physical extremity, are the conditions for which the farmer's formation is specifically adapted and for which the sanatorium has spent seven years making Castorp specifically unfit. Mann sends Castorp into the assault because the novel's logic requires it. The farmer can of course end up in the war side by side with Castorp and hi likely survies it at a higher rate not because he is braver but because he has the embodied knowledge the sanatorium extracted from Castorp.
Joseph and His Brothers is the Bildungsroman that the Magic Mountain gestures toward but cannot complete, because Mann needed another twenty years and the specific experience of exile and catastrophe to understand what a person looks like who cannot be dissolved by manufactured timelessness. He looks like someone who knows whose son he is. That is also, I would suggest, the answer to the question Tooze leaves open at the end of Part I: which contemporary figure does Mann bring to mind? Not the Davos attendee. Not the floating intellectual. Someone with a coat of many colours and a very long memory of whose child they are.
squirrelbrain77.substack.com
Look at what happens in Comments when Adam Tooze comes directly to us, puts it on the page and lets us know that he's returning with more of Mann's Zauberberg/Magic Mountain, more of Mann, more about what we may make of ourselves at this time and about time itself - 'a moment of historical transition'.
Thanks for this essay. I read Magic Mountain when I was in my twenties and my memory of it was struggle and boredom. I do not have a desire to read it again.
English version of the Naphta chart: https://i.imgur.com/3oGqxHa.png
My parents met and married while working in a TB sanitorium, and my father was very impressed by The Magic Mountain -- I am not so sure about my mother, who was more reticent. He worked there as a contientious objector to the Korean war, and she was an immigrant nurse who had caught TB whilst working in Bradford. Your chart on death rates was telling; if my mother had caught the disease three months earlier she would have died from it, but she was 'lucky' enough to be working in a world leading hospital, so she lived through a spell in an iron lung and was given streptomycin, and survived. Without that modern medicine I would not have been born, or if I had been I would have probably died young, so I have always felt that my life was contingent on chance -- an arbitrary and lucky thing -- and I suspect that has been a profound influence on my attitudes towards politics, cultural life and economics. The result, whatever the cause, is that mixture of profound conservatism, radical left positions and extreme liberalism which puts me (with some unease) into the modern European Green movement. To sum it up, that is anarchist logic and pragmatic politics, and my own prefered book by Mann is Doctor Faust.
Great essay, looking forward to part 2. Since you mention J. G. Ballard, I’ve always found his short story ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ to echo ‘The Magic Mountain’ - though Ballard’s tone is much more comic and, in some ways, straight forward.
Thank you for sharing; it has given me a better understanding of the city of Davos.
possibly a spoiler:naphta is widely considered to evoke good ol' carl schmitt