NL.02 The Magic Mountain, part I

I'm Hans Castorp.¹

For it’s not about being a “simple-minded though pleasing young man” from a ship-building family in Hamburg, with a “sleepy, young patrician face.” Or that I’m “a tender product of a sheltered life.” Nor is it about having actually travelled by train and alighted at Davos-Platz, clutching an unread volume entitled Ocean Steamships. And it’s not about making a three-week visit to the International Sanatorium Berghof in the years just before the First World War, to cheer up a cousin Joachim who is ill, only to find oneself slipping into step with his “rest-cure.” As I pass the three-week mark in the world-womb of a research residency in the Netherlands, what it is about is entering into a certain “circle of . . . thoughts” and experiences. It’s about realising I’m becoming a version of him. I'm Hans Castorp.

“Well-come to our midst!,” says Dr Krokowski (the assistant to the sanatorium’s directing physician Hofrat Behrens) to Hans, introduced by a limping concierge as a “new inmate.” Krokowski is somehow both “jovial and robust” and “pale as wax.” His soft collar “lends a stamp of the studio” to his appearance, beneath a sack suit, and with “open-worked sandal-like shoes over grey woollen socks.” He gets up from a chair by a fireplace in an antechamber, “smiling warmly . . . showing his yellow teeth,” speaking in a baritone. “Do you come as a patient, may I ask?” Upon learning that Hans the engineer believes himself to be in good health, Krokowski shares that he has yet to meet a single human being who is “perfectly healthy.”

Hans feels a curious drowsiness.

The built environment I have entered is carefully appointed and clean. Here’s managed artificial universe devoted not to illness and treatment regimes and death but to inquiry and conversation, to knowledges gained through “slow science.” Steep staircases with unaccountably solid railings lead up and up, in the style of centuries-old Dutch homes. The sills of great windows are adorned with flourishing cacti and succulents, looking onto fantastic chimneys and angles and ladders, before patches of fast-moving sky.

Offices open up behind each of our names and numbers, and sport pristine whiteboards and tastefully practical shelving and desks. They knew something of me and my project before the pair of us even appeared, all tired and sweaty from Schipol; we and our kind are always coming, I muse. Back in Switzerland, Hans too —like his creator, Thomas Mann —who visited his Katia for three weeks at just such a place in May of 1912— is led up and up by a limping concierge. Taken along a series of crisp corridors, Hans also contemplates a series of doors. On them are the names of the occupants along with the basics of their case (their illnesses). Finally, he reaches his space, “number thirty-four.”

◇◇◇

We fellows in research residency —we visitors, we guests, we inmates in our monastic-studious “carceral idyll”²— are we “ill”? Are we “patients” of a kind? How can we not be? Who's not in a form of recovery? Recovery from professing and advising, from the relentlessness of professional bumpf, from myriad personal pressures, small and otherwise, and from the buffeting world we inhabit, its injustices and precarities?

Little wonder that subsets of human beings do this —create (or else seek to inhabit) “sanatoria” of various kinds. We do it all the time. The place apart, the garden in which you putter, the forest in which you stroll and bathe. The weekend abroad. This retreat, that institute. Desert islands. Our various “up heres” in contrast to our “down belows.” Ideals which open, ideals in which we shut ourselves away.

We fellows, we visitors, we guests, we inmates of our monastic-studious carceral idyll. We subsets of humans. Wildly divergent, and so much the same. So expert at fooling ourselves, so reliably self-defeating, so requiring of empathy. So damn hilarious.

◇◇◇

Mann's Der Zauberberg is about several things, but it’s perhaps especially — recurringly and variously— about time. About time’s relativity and elasticity. About the enchantment of timelessness and its traps. About “a winding of the path.”

Cousin Joachim is quick to school Hans in how “one’s ideas get changed” in this place, in this living apart from life. When Hans gamely offers that “time must go fast, living up here,” Joachim responds that “You can’t call it time — and you can’t call it living either!” “Three weeks are nothing at all, to us up here,” he adds “. . . you with your ‘going home in three weeks.’ That’s the class of ideas you have down below.” The well-read and ominously playful Herr Settembrini —whose style Mann deliciously describes as a “mingling of shabbiness and grace”— sniffs out that Hans is “not one of us. . . . but a guest here, like Odysseus in the Kingdom of the Shades.” The Italian patient can barely contain himself upon learning that Hans intends a visit to the sanatorium of only three weeks. “Three weeks . . .” he jousts, “We up here are not acquainted with such a unit of time as the week . . . Our smallest unit is the month. We reckon in the grand style — that is a privilege we shadows have . . .”

“Good Lord, is it still only the first day?,” exclaims Hans on the afternoon of his arrival, “It seems to me I’ve been up here a long time.”

“A path is always longer the first time we traverse it,” our Hans reflects at another point.

My microcosmic magic mountain begs similar contemplations. Outside my studio, church bells mark the quarter hour, as well as the hour and half-hour, insisting through variations, with distinct flourishes along the way. Something like normal days are passing, and are there to be lived.

The Dutch are famous for reclaiming land from the sea. And also for myriad urban and environmental planning decisions that I experience in the labyrinthine re-constructions in central Amsterdam. A young woman takes time, and is surrounded by it. Time to read between classes in an agreeably makeshift uni café, which sits atop seventeenth-century cobbles, and between university edifices that once housed the Dutch East India Company.

Time is kept track of. But measurement spills beyond the temporal, it’s omnipresent in life “up here.” Hans comes secretly to covet the “flat, curving bottle of bluish glass with a metal cap” that Joachim and the other patients carry, that the “sputum” from their respiratory tracts may be examined later, compared with what was produced before. And then there’s the thermometers with which the inhabitants of the sanatorium perched above Davos-Platz take their temperatures, four times each day. And the slow-burning distress this regime promotes. “Down to 99.3,” someone remarks, “last night was almost 100.” It emerges that a guest who knows her way about can acquire what’s known as a “silent sister ,” “. . . a mercury column without degrees” — with no numbers at all — “to be used by those who wanted to cheat.” Quite what the individual might be concealing, or wishing to pretend, could be decided on the given day.

“Measuring can’t hurt anybody,” encourages Behrens, before wishing his interlocutors a good morning and “sail[ing] off down the hall.” It isn’t long before a certain visitor’s interest is piqued, before his concerns flicker. “When do you measure again?” Hans inquires of Joachim. Why am I so flushed in the face? Why the bouts of fatigue in spite of my long sleeps in bed or on the blessed balcony? My eyes seem unaccountably red at their rims; and is that a trace of blood in my handkerchief? All this is nothing like life for the twenty-first-century residential research fellow you might reasonably think. But you’d be wrong. Even beyond the digitised key cards, and the check-ins here and check-outs there, there’s the tracking of progress, of what an enshittifying world trains us to see as “productivity.” One guest is monitoring her words written by Excel spread sheet, another is a proponent of intermittent fasting, another reports on the ebb and flow of what each of us craves: momentum.

◇◇◇

I’m not summoned to lunch by the Berghof’s gong, but I might as well be. "“Oh hallo!” It’s meal-time again. We eat lunches together, share a hot meal all are grateful for. “Early breakfast was taken seriously up here” at the Berghof, and so is a punctual lunch in my magic mundito. We’re greeted by a caterer’s noticeboard, piles of plates, the tell-tale set-up of fire-warmed stainless steel. A phalanx of artificial plants stand, as if on guard behind the steel. A few guests are reminded not to seek leftovers-for-later before their fellows have enjoyed lunch. It’s trivial and reasonable enough. But here it’s fraught. Tales circulate about the great-tupperware-wars of yesteryear, the casualities of semesters past. Surely I must have misheard that there is now a Dutch expression, a compound word —not only for “walking on the beach in the wind” but also— for “flashing one's tupperware too soon.”

The dining room is welcoming but also a warren of choice. Like Hans who enters the equivalent space and scans the array of places among “Joachim’s companions and fellow victims,” the research fellow must decide where to sit. At the long rectangular table, perhaps? Or maybe at one of the smaller round ones? That fast-filling zone over there, or the new beach-head just here? It’s like being back in kindergarten. Or, I muse, perhaps eternal life will be like this, a managed refectory in which you simply must sit, not with your natural friends but between the pious slob and that schoolmistressly type. A tall slim “guest” settles in beside me. She bears what looks to be a heaping tray of cabbage and bell peppers. Originally from one of the Baltic states, she’s on her third successive international fellowship in two years. One can learn from her grant-proposal prowess. As from the members of various other clusters of the cannily productive, on fellowship telling their tales of other fellowships, other centres, other institutes, other logos. I can’t help but think of how the guests in Thomas Mann’s Berghof are ever so aware of the other sanatoriums, all of them with stories attached, not least “the Schatzalp . . . fifty metres higher” (on the very same mountainside) than the Berghof. “They have to bring their bodies down on bob-sleds in the winter,” Hans learns. (One waits for an “oh dear” from the teller, an oh dear that doesn’t come.) And I remember the guests whom Hans learns have scarcely seen the outside of a TB sanatorium in their adult lives.

“I was reading your bio and project,” my tall colleague ventures, having tucked into her cabbage and peppers. Before I can do more than smile in thanks, she adds “something social. Or religious . . .” And then she says “Paul in the new Dune movie is a kind of messiah,” as I’m still fumbling for specifics. I overhear someone pointing out that taking in most beers and wines destroys any healthy diet: “you just wreak havoc with the regime.” Strategic alliances form between individuals only to re-form. Pieties attract and repel. Knowing glances abound. Factions are suggesting themselves, differently fashionable coteries, rebel fringes, real and imagined. My fellow fellows and I are are like so many murmurations of starlings, reconfiguring ourselves in an instant —over a mealtime, after a well-timed drink, following a generous question, or the latest bit of advice.

As at Hans’s sanatorium a century before, unforgettable characters stand out from the pack. Who would be our Herr Ludovico Settembrini? And who would be our incarnation of Mann’s Frau Stöhr, who gossips incessantly through her “rodent-like teeth,” says “diseased” for “deceased,” and boasts that she has mastered “twenty-eight different fish sauces”? How about our Pieter Pepperkorn? Where’s our Herr Albin, who never quite departs this vale of tears as promised? And, of course, who is our Madame Claudia Chauchat. “A charming creature,” she, in part because she’s so beautifully unconcerned, so laggardly, “unmannerly,” so “heedless” of that banging glass door on to the dining room, and also because of her hands. Hans is surprised to find himself dreaming of her. In some dreamish schoolyard, Mme. Chauchat lent boy-Hans a lead pencil and spoke in an agreeably “husky voice.” In another, he’s kissing the palm of one of those hands, “not overly well kept, . . . rather broad, with stumpy fingers, the skin roughened next to the nails.” Where are my updated versions of Mann’s characters, except everywhere?

Tiny things, gestures of kindnesses, fragments of know-how matter immensely, particularly at first. A cool and confident Dutch fellow compliments my Delft pottery-themed lanyard from across the table. “Nice touch!,” she smiles. Me —the “new boy” eager to fit in and grasping after a bit of style to augment the three-and-half grey and blue “outfits” in his suitcase— is ready to declare her friend for life. An eminent linguist, deliciously wry right out of the gate and an old hand about the place, tutors me before the multi-screened coffee machine on our floor. Thanks to him, I’m both laughing out loud and making maximum-strength double-espressos in no time.

Mann’s Hans, though arriving as a visitor, never finds himself short of proffered counsel. Coming upon the directing physician Behrens is to meet a tall “bony man” in a “white surgeon’s coat” whose cheeks are purple. It is also to hear immediate complaints about how poor a case his cousin Joachim is turning out to be. “He’s not good at being ill,” the Hofrat declares, while assuring Hans and anyone else who will listen that he can tell whether a person will make a good patient or not immediately upon meeting them. Behrens is calculating, playing for the cause, and most interested in our Hans, whom he finds “totally anaemic!” “I suggest you do as your cousin does, while you are up here,” he exclaims, “You couldn’t turn a better trick than to behave for the time as though you had a slight tuberculosis pulmonum, and put on a little flesh.”

◇◇◇

I wouldn’t have been surprised to find connected rows of balconies just off our studios, in the airs up above bustling Amsterdam below. Of the kind Hans Castorp soon comes to savour at the Berghof. “The lying down is great,” our Hans says to a guest at one point; “lying-down is very much the thing,” he observes to another. And after breakfast —which soon, necessarily comes to include a Kulmacher beer “. . . when do we lie down again?”

Ensconced in our miniature “loggia” —our “small separate compartments” separated by “opaque glass partitions”— my fellows and I would do as as Hans and the patients at the Berghof did: take regular intervals of rest. The open air would be just the thing. Wrapped up in our “camel’s-hair rugs,” our cosy plaid blankets tucked beneath our chins, the chill and odd gust of wind would become our awaited companions. Drinking in “gleams of sunshine,” drifting off to threads of music floating up from the world below, we’d lie there, slipping again and again into our dreams. Dreams again? Oh yes, and to them, like Mann, I’ll only return.

Occasionally one of us would visit the dozing other. Or, summoned by the gong, we’d pick up our fellow guest to go eat or take a walk. We’d of course first take the opportunity to observe their rooms and ways, each other’s very positioning. Remember that the world and what matters have shrunk. “I envy you for two reasons,” says a lively companion to me one afternoon, “near the coffee machine and the photocopier!” I in turn envy and seek his corner spot and (surely the answer to) writerly momentum. “How well you do that!,” Hans says to Joachim, back in the Berghof, early in his stay, admiring just how his cousin “wraps himself in his camel’s-hair rug.” Hans has already vowed to acquire just such a reclining chair for back home in Hamburg, and Joachim is certain his cousin can get a matching rug too!

Alas I have no balcony or perfect reclining chair. But outside the windows of my studio in Amsterdam, is much life. Perching and hopping and swooping across the rooftops and amidst the scaffoldings are a great many birds.

I’ve been birding, urban style. Each of these individuals, highly territorial in their ways, favour certain junctures in the day. I find myself longing to get back to them, just as Hans longs to lie down again in his balcony chair.

An insistent Great Tit prefers mornings for song on a ledge just above me. The Blue Tit is more fleeting. A Dunnock, for his part, may be my most aspirant avian visitor, as if using his uncommonly strong voice to make up for looking so much like a sparrow. Heidi researched the squawking contingent of rose-ringed parakeets who have made central Amsterdam home since the 1970s, escapees from city homes who are thought originally to have hailed from Pakistan and other tropical regions.

Rather more taken for granted are the plentiful and various Sea Gulls, not to mention the Common Wood-Pigeons.

Like clockwork each day, the latter resume their clumsy jostles for parochial supremacy, looking to command choice bits of rooftop and chimney.

The stars of the show, easily for me, are two Eurasian blackbirds I’ve named Dirk and Bente.

They are ever-present actors in my present, outside my little window-on-to-the-world,

honorary researchers of a kind, who consistently amuse, and who serenade my dawn and dusk to boot.

A fellow guest confirms that this pair of blackbirds have a nest on a ladder in the garden, below my line of sight.

I swear I’ve seen squabbles between the pair, as there is clearly much to do and Dirk’s performative side can seem excessive.

Bente is the one who nips blueberries from the surface of my metal fire escape (where my loggia should be!); and she was the one most often to be seen with a beak-full of sticks for the nest.

Dirk keeps hopping about, strutting, perching, calling and preening, doing his territorial thing. His upturned orange beak gives him an air of gentility. And of being a bit pleased with himself.

But he’s at the same time more comical than he seems to realise.

Stay tuned for dreams, outings, and more in “The Magic Mountain, part II,” coming very soon.

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*photographs and watercolours by Kenneth Mills.

** there are a number of “newcomers” to Dispatches —journeys near and far . . .

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1. Hans Castorp is the main character, and perspective taken, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924, S. Fischer Verlag as Der Zauberberg). In what follows, unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter’s translation from the German (which I strongly prefer to the present alternatives), published in 1927 by Alfred Knopf, pp. 3-118.

2. I’m indebted to, and am exhilarated by the work of Hanneke Stuit on this concept, mobilised in other contexts. See H. Stuit, “The Carceral Idyll: Rural Retreats and Dreams of Order in the Colonies of Benevolence,” Collateral 23 (2020) https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/4f20fb67-e12d-4a16-a759-541b00eeb728. See also Stuit’s “The Prison as Playground: Global Scripts and Heterotopic Vertigo in Prison Escape,” in Heterotopia and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch, and Daan Wesselman (London: Routledge, 2020), Ch. 11.