Few novels capture the disorientation and contradictions of the first quarter of the twentieth century as fully as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Published in 1924 – though written between 1912 and 1924, with a long interruption during the First World War – the novel bears the marks of a historical moment characterized by technological acceleration, political radicalism, and mounting militarism. The resonance with our present is difficult to ignore. As we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century, this sense of historical parallelism invites reflection. Is The Magic Mountain still pertinent today? And if so, in what sense? Does its relevance lie merely in the analogy between Mann’s time and our own, or is there more to be said about its philosophical significance for the present?

These are the questions I address in The Scandal of Distance: A Reading of The Magic Mountain for the Twenty-First Century.[i] The book departs from the following hypothesis: if The Magic Mountain is a philosophical novel – as most readers and scholars readily agree – this is not primarily because of its explicit philosophical themes such as love, death, or time. Rather, its philosophical core lies in a question that permeates the entire work: the question of the advantages and disadvantages of distance for thought.

Ascending the Mountain

As is well known, The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, a young German who, after completing his university studies in naval engineering in 1907, travels to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin. He intends to stay for just three weeks but, succumbing to a mysterious fever and captivated by the atmosphere of the Alpine retreat, ends up remaining for no fewer than seven years.

During this prolonged stay, Castorp undergoes a series of formative experiences: he falls in love with a fellow patient; wrestles with an intense obsession with death; reflects on the nature of time; and immerses himself in a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from anatomy to astronomy, history, and metaphysics. His intellectual education is influenced by two charismatic figures, with opposing worldviews: Settembrini, an Italian humanist and pedagogue who champions reason, enlightenment and progress; and Naphta, a converted Jew turned Jesuit turned Marxist, whose thoughts exhibits unmistakable totalitarian tendencies. These figures compete for Castorp’s intellectual allegiance, but he ultimately appears to free himself from their direct influence. When the First World War breaks out in 1914, Castorp is called to serve and disappears into the chaos of the battlefield.

The Magic Mountain has often been described not only as a Bildungsroman – a “novel of formation”, in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) –, but also as a profoundly philosophical work. This reputation, shaped by readers as diverse as Hermann Weigand, Susan Sontag, and Harold Blom, has even acquired a kind of visual emblem in the recurrent use of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog on book covers, conference posters and scholarly studies devoted to the novel. The myth of an intellectually fruitful retreat in the mountains clearly resonates with both academic and popular imaginations.

Yet The Magic Mountain is anything but a celebration of serene detachment or contemplative withdrawal. From the outset, the mountain reveals its problematic nature. Inaction, superficiality and indifference dominate the life of the sanatorium, prompting the narrator’s ironic remarks about its “horizontal mode of life” [ii].  This irony is also directed at Castorp himself, who seems neither capable nor willing to resist the mountain’s spell. In the opening lines of the novel’s final section, the narrator observes, with a blend of sarcasm and disappointment, that Castorp has become “a dependable man, here for good and all, who had long since lost track of where else he might go, who was no longer even capable of forming the thought of a return to the flatlands”[iii].

The question thus becomes unavoidable: what is the value of Castorp’s alpine sojourn? Does the sanatorium sharpen thought, liberating it from the pressures, constraints, and distractions of the flatlands, or does it corrupt it with the vice of indifference? Is the mountain a site of existential growth, or rather a source of alienation, an alibi for inaction and abdication? Refusing to resolve these questions, the novel remains ambivalent to the very end. Yet it is precisely this hesitation – one that pervades the text because it haunted Mann throughout the twelve years of its composition – that constitutes the novel’s philosophical core. Put more bluntly: how should the intellectual – the thinker, the writer, the artist – position themselves in relation to their time? Should they intervene, or not? And if so, in what form? These were tumultuous years, and understanding how Mann grappled with them is essential to understanding the novel itself.

The Case of Mann

In a 1925 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin described his astonishment upon reading The Magic Mountain. Remembering Mann as the nationalist author of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Benjamin confessed that a writer he had “hated like no other” had suddenly become “very close” to him. “ I can only imagine”, he concluded, “that an internal change must have taken place in the author while he was writing. Indeed, I am certain this was the case.”[iv]

Between 1912 and 1924, Thomas Mann did indeed undergo a profound personal and intellectual metamorphosis, repeatedly reassessing the role of the writer and the artist in times of historical and political upheaval. In this sense, it is not far-fetched to suggest that The Magic Mountain had not one but three authors: the disenchanted bourgeois of the prewar years; the artist galvanized by war, and the democratic humanist of the early Weimar period.

When Mann conceived the novel in 1912, following a visit to his wife Katia at a sanatorium in Davos, he was in the midst of an existential and creative crisis. In a letter to his brother dated 8 November 1913, he spoke of feeling disoriented “on intellectual and political levels”, expressed a “growing sympathy for death” and questioned the relevance of his own work, dismissing Buddenbrooks as “a bourgeois book” that “no longer matters for the twentieth century.”[v]

The outbreak of war in 1914 represented an existential awakening. His initial enthusiasm – difficult to comprehend today, though far from uncommon at the time – was accompanied by a sense of fascination and fatalistic sympathy for Germany’s destiny. These sentiments found public expression in “Thoughts in Wartime,” where Mann framed the war as a catastrophe that had long been anticipated, even desired, as a response to a world that seemed exhausted and untenable.[vi] This position brought him into open conflict with his brother Heinrich, whose essay “Zola” denounced German militarism and ridiculed its apologists. Feeling personally attacked, Thomas Mann broke with his brother and set out to clarify his position in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a polemical defence of national “culture” against cosmopolitan “civilization”.[vii]

The postwar years marked another turning point. As Germany descended into political extremism and social collapse, Mann found himself increasingly troubled by the realization that his nationalist writings were being praised by figures he profoundly despised. In 1922, following the assassination of Walther Rathenau, the Jewish Foreign Minister, he delivered the speech “On the German Republic”, publicly affirming his support for the Weimar regime. Drawing analogies between Novalis and Whitman, Mann now advocated a form of humanism that was at once romantic and democratic.[viii]

It goes without saying that the point of revisiting these transformations is not to accuse Mann of inconsistency, still less to diminish the significance of his later anti-authoritarian and pro-democratic stance. Mann’s metamorphosis between 1912 and 1924 matters here because The Magic Mountain bears the traces of his hesitation – that of a restless spirit confronting the transformations of its time. These hesitations were historical and political; at the same time, they also concerned technological change, whose impact perception, culture and experience constitutes a less familiar but nonetheless crucial dimension of the novel, one that calls for close attention.

Discs and X-rays

In the essay “For a Portrait of Thomas Mann,” Theodor W. Adorno – who shared with Mann the experience of exile in California – writes that “his work will truly begin to unfold only when people start paying attention to the things that are not in the guidebooks”. Referring ironically to “the interminable string of dissertations on the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the role of music, or on what is discussed in seminars under the rubric of the problem of death,” [ix] Adorno seeks something deceptively simple: rescuing Mann from the empty rhetoric of canonization.

This gesture remains pertinent today. Yet Adorno’s observation is of interest here for another reason. It suggests that Mann’s work will only reveal itself fully when attention shifts to what tends to be overlooked in academic eulogies. Applied to The Magic Mountain, this perspective brings into focus a theme that pervades the novel but has often remained marginal in scholarly accounts: technology.

Indeed, The Magic Mountain is not merely a novel of philosophical speculations on time, love, and death; of ideological battles between humanism and radicalism; or of perilous walks through snowy landscapes. It is also a novel in which new technologies – X-rays, the gramophone, photography, and cinema – play a decisive role. Their presence cannot be dismissed as incidental even from a traditional interpretative standpoint.

Consider how Hans Castorp first confronts the question of death. Is it through philosophical musings? Through peripatetic debates with Settembrini, or Naphta, or Peeperkorn? No. It is through the experience of seeing his own skeleton in an X-ray image.

In response to much begging, he [Dr. Behrens] was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope. And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. […] [F]or the first time in his life he understood that he would die.[x]

Death was not unfamiliar to Castorp, who had lost his parents and grandfather as a child. Yet something qualitatively different occurs here. The emphasis is not on the abstract awareness of mortality, but on the intensely personal realization of one’s own death – an experience mediated by technology.

Later, after the snowstorm episode – during which Castorp seems temporarily  to overcome his now-recognized “sympathy with death” – the seduction of death reasserts itself, this time through music. Once again, the experience is technologically mediated. Night after night, Castorp returns to his favorite records, especially one containing Schubert’s Lied “Der Lindenbaum,” which meant “a great deal to him, a whole world,” a world of “forbidden love” that had a name – death.[xi]

The point is this: Castorp’s encounters with the X-ray and the gramophone cannot be treated as mere narrative digressions. They are not peripheral to his “fundamental” experiences; on the contrary, they function as catalysts and triggers. To borrow a term from Heidegger – ironically, in the context of such technological encounters – their significance is not merely ontic; it is ontological.

In recent decades, a line of interpretation more attuned to the technological dimension of The Magic Mountain has emerged. Sara Danius argues that the novel engages with Weimar debates concerning the relationship between Kultur and technology[xii]. Erik Downing explores the role of photography, characterizing the novel as both a Bildungsroman and an Entwicklungsroman, a “novel of development,” in which the photographic process becomes a metaphor for Castorp formation.[xiii] Going even further, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young rejects the category of Bildunsroman altogether, proposing instead that the novel be read as a Umbildungsroman, a “novel of re-formation” of the human sensorium.[xiv]

These contributions are insightful and stimulating. Yet the debate over whether the concept of Bildungsroman – which Winthrop-Young has playfully described as “an obstinate figment of scholarly imagination”[xv] – should be expanded, reformulated, or abandoned seems less crucial than showing not only that The Magic Mountain engages with technology, but how it does so.

That the novel incorporates technology is evident. More than that, it stages it – in what is exciting, frustrating or threatening about it. It explores how technology disorients and reorients desire, memory, emotion, and the ways we imagine life and death, matter and spirit, the past and the future. Moreover, the novel experiments: it conducts a literary experiment with technology, confronting its promises and dangers, its achievements and crimes.

Mann is far from being a champion of technology. Unlike Marinetti or Jünger, who exalted the fusion of culture and technology under the signs of the speed and power, Mann viewed the military applications of technological progress with growing unease. In the novel’s closing lines, the artillery shell is described as a product “of science gone berserk”[xvi]. At the same time, his attitude toward technological innovation was marked by curiosity, particularly with regard to its artistic and cultural possibilities.

In other words, the novel avoids both blind glorification and dogmatic denunciation of technology. This dual refusal is part of what makes The Magic Mountain so relevant today. And it is here that the notion of distance, which I have proposed as the philosophical core of the novel, re-enters the discussion.

In Search of the Good Distance

Let us unpack the metaphor. The descent from the mountain expresses nothing less – and nothing more – than the demand that the artist and intellectual confront their own time. Now, to descend from the mountain, in the sense of exchanging a contemplative stance for an engaged one, is precisely what Thomas Mann did as early as in 1914. One may deplore how he initially did so, but one cannot deny that from that moment on a willingness to confront historical and political reality accompanied him for the rest of his life.

Yet leaving the mountain of contemplation for the flatlands of activism and partisanship is not sufficient. It is equally necessary to seek the “good distance” – not from our time but within it. Certainly, taking a stance becomes imperative under certain circumstances. And today seems to be one of those moments. Still, the abstract readiness to pick a side is, at best, insufficient. In situations dominated by haste, when all available positions ring hollow, such readiness may even become an obstacle – if not a trap.

The good distance has something of what Nietzsche called the “untimely”. The challenge, once one commits to one’s historical and political moment, is also to think against it. But to think against one’s time is, first and foremost, to think against the way that time understands itself: its certainties, its priorities, its alternatives. One need not look very far – it suffices to consider the U.S. intervention in Venezuela in the first weeks of 2026 – to encounter a situation in which refusing false alternatives is key. Without evading one’s time, one must resist being absorbed by it; one must find the angle from which the most incisive questions can be posed.

What, then, of The Magic Mountain? Does the novel offer a glimpse of the good distance? Or must we conclude that Thomas Mann failed to imagine it – a failure mirrored, on the fictional level, in Castorp’s disappearance on the battlefields of the First World War, and, on the historical level, in Mann’s own ideological vacillations? Not at all. The good distance does exist in The Magic Mountain. But to discern it, one must abandon the narrative opposition between mountain and flatlands and read instead through the interstices of the text.

Implicitly, in its engagement with technology, the novel rejects both the certainties of the sceptic and those of the enthusiast; in matters of history, those of the reactionary and the progressive; in politics, the dogmas of the aesthete and the militant. This attitude does not point to compromise but to something more radical: a permanent willingness to revise one’s ideas, to acknowledge error, and to think anew. Neither the detachment of the aesthete – who remains perpetually aloof – nor the haste of the militant – who always already knows which side to take – provides am adequate response to the urgency of the time.

A glimpse of the good distance is what we must seek in these convoluted times. In an era dominated by disorientation, extremism, and the sense of imminent catastrophe, it is precisely because The Magic Mountain contains the traces of this search that it remains not only profoundly contemporary but also, in the strongest sense, untimely.

Notes:

[i] Published in Portuguese as *O Escândalo da Distância: uma leitura d’*A Montanha Mágica para o século XXI (Lisboa: Tinta-da-China, 2024).

[ii] Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 199.

[iii] Ibid., 697.

[iv] Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, trans. Manfred R. Jakobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 265.

[v] Mann, Briefe I: 1889-1913, GKFA, vol. 21, ed. Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget and Cornelia Bernini (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2002), 815.

[vi] Mann, “Thoughts in Wartime” [1914], trans. Cosima Mattner and Mark Lilla, in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man [and other writings] (New York: New York Review Books, 2021), 474.

[vii] Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: New York Review Books, 2021).

[viii] Mann, “On the German Republic” [1922], trans. Lawrence Rainey, in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man [and other writings], 504.

[ix] Theodor W. Adorno, “Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann”, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 13.

[x] Mann, The Magic Mountain, 215-6.

[xi] Ibid., 641-2.

[xii] Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (New York: Cornell University Press, 2002).

[xiii] Erik Downing, “Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain,” in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain*: A Casebook*, ed. Hans Rudolf Vaget (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 45-70.

[xiv] Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Magic Media Mountain: Technology and the Umbildungsroman,” in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, eds. Joseph Tabbl e Michael Wutz (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 29-52.

[xv] Ibid. 49.

[xvi] Mann, The Magic Mountain, 705.

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