The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain

By Thomas Mann.

Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Translator’s Note
4. Foreword
5. The Magic Mountain
   1. Chapter I
      1. Arrival
      2. Number 34
      3. In the Restaurant
   2. Chapter II
      1. Of the Christening Basin, and of Grandfather in His Twofold Guise
      2. At Tienappels’, and of Young Hans’s Moral State
   3. Chapter III
      1. Drawing the Veil
      2. Breakfast
      3. Banter. Viaticum. Interrupted Mirth
      4. Satana
      5. Mental Gymnastic
      6. A Word Too Much
      7. Of Course, a Female!
      8. Herr Albin
      9. Satana Makes Proposals That Touch Our Honour
   4. Chapter IV
      1. Necessary Purchases
      2. Excursus on the Sense of Time
      3. He Practises His French
      4. Politically Suspect
      5. Hippe
      6. Analysis
      7. Doubts and Considerations
      8. Table-Talk
      9. Mounting Misgivings. Of the Two Grandfathers, and the Boat-Ride in the Twilight
      10. The Thermometer
   5. Chapter V
      1. Soup-Everlasting
      2. Sudden Enlightenment
      3. Freedom
      4. Whims of Mercurius
      5. Encyclopaedic
      6. Humaniora
      7. Research
      8. The Dance of Death
      9. Walpurgis-Night
   6. Chapter VI
      1. Changes
      2. A Newcomer
      3. Of the City of God, and Deliverance by Evil
      4. Choler. And Worse
      5. An Attack, and a Repulse
      6. Operationes Spirituales
      7. Snow
      8. A Soldier, and Brave
   7. Chapter VII
      1. By the Ocean of Time
      2. Mynheer Peeperkorn
      3. Vingt-Et-Un
      4. Mynheer Peeperkorn (Continued)
      5. Mynheer Peeperkorn (Conclusion)
      6. The Great God Dumps
      7. Fullness of Harmony
      8. Highly Questionable
      9. Hysterica Passio
      10. The Thunderbolt
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Translator’s Note

The translator wishes to thank, in this place, a number of scholars, authorities in the various special fields entered by The Magic Mountain, without whose help the version in all humility here offered to English readers, lame as it is, must have been more lacking still. That they gave so generously is not to be interpreted otherwise than as a tribute to a work of genius. But with all their help, the great difficulty remained: the violet had to be cast into the crucible, the organic work of art to be remoulded in another tongue. Shelley’s figure is perhaps not entirely apt here. Yet, since in the creative act word and thought are indivisible, the task was seen to be one before which artists would shrink and logical minds recoil.

But of the author of The Magic Mountain it can be said in a special sense that he has looked into the seeds of Time. It was indispensable that we should read his book; intolerable that English readers should be barred from a work whose spirit, whatever its vehicle, is universal. It seemed better that an English version should be done ill than not done at all.

H. T. L.-P.

Foreword

The story of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling⁠—though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp’s behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody⁠—this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth or the past.

That should be no drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by. With this story, moreover, it stands as it does today with human beings, not least among them writers of tales: it is far older than its years; its age may not be measured by length of days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned by the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do with the passage of time⁠—in which statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of that riddling element.

But we would not wilfully obscure a plain matter. The exaggerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place⁠—or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place⁠—in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the