In German, there’s no proper term for “chill out”. We’ve only got entspannen (relax) and abhängen (hang out), so about 20 years ago, the Duden (Germany’s answer to the Oxford English Dictionary) threw in the towel and adopted “chillen” as a new word.
About time, too. Because idle inactivity had long been immortalised in literature by the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann: his masterpiece Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) was first published a century ago, in 1924 – and it is a highbrow ode to chilling. Mann takes tuberculosis, boredom and the creeping political radicalisation of the 1920s, and spins them into an epic tale.
Hans Castorp, a well-off 22-year-old engineer from Hamburg, pops over to a friend in a Davos lung sanatorium for a three-week visit. Seven years later, he finally leaves – straight into the trenches of the first world war. Mann’s mountain clinic is a microcosm of European society on the brink of war, a place where political ideologies, personal freedoms, and philosophical navel-gazing clash in the rarefied Alpine air. Europe is terminally ill, Mann suggests, yet unable – or unwilling – to leave the comfort of its proverbial deckchair.
The way Mann – who knew Davos from visiting his wife, Katia, there – describes young Hans isn’t quite the standard German work ethic: “I would have to lie if I said that working was so good for me. In fact, I have to say that it takes a lot out of me. I only feel really healthy when I’m doing nothing at all.” Which translates into lounging in the crisp, dry Swiss air – considered a cure-all back then, before penicillin came along and stole its thunder.
To be fair, there is some action: meticulously noting one’s body temperature on a fever chart five times a day. This is done with a pencil, which makes many appearances in Mann’s 1,000-page opus: as a tool as well as a signal for erotic advances.
After Der Zauberberg’s centenary this year, 2025 will bring another reason for celebrating Mann – his 150th birthday. And with Mann comes the melodrama of the Mann family, also to be revisited. Let’s say Mann didn’t set a record in good parenting (“Quiet, Father is writing!” one of the six children would routinely shush the others), but being both a stellar family man and a literary giant may be asking too much.
Mann remains the quintessential German writer: erudite, complex, prone to existential broodiness and deeply contradictory. A steadfast bourgeois, clinging to dignity, reputation and respectability, he initially supported the Kaiser’s war policies – putting him at odds with his progressive brother, Heinrich. He came to regret it.
It’s no wonder that Hans Castorp is told by a fellow patient: “You are hardly up to the problem of tolerance, engineer. But at least memorise that tolerance becomes a crime when it applies to evil.”
Mann would go on to become one of the most articulate Nazi critics. His books may have escaped the burnings of May 10, 1933 (unlike those of Heinrich and his own son Klaus), but an arrest warrant kept him from returning to his Munich home, his citizenship and honorary doctorate were soon revoked, and his house and assets were confiscated.
His son Golo managed, at substantial risk, to smuggle the completed parts of the Joseph and His Brothers novel manuscript into Switzerland, as well as his father’s sensitive diaries. Not just politically sensitive – Mann’s homoerotic leanings figure, ogling tennis players and boys from behind his curtains. Death in Venice was autobiographical, after all.
Exiled to Los Angeles, Mann began monthly eight-minute recordings of Deutsche Hörer! (German Listeners!), a series of speeches to his countrymen that were sent to London and broadcast by the BBC as part of the allies’ demoralisation tactics.
After the RAF bombed Lübeck, his hometown, Mann was aghast, yet responded: “But I think of Coventry and have no objection to the doctrine that everything must be paid for. Did Germany believe it would never have to pay for the atrocities that its lead in barbarism allowed it to commit?”
So here we are, a century on, still grappling with Mann’s themes of time, illness and human frailty. The sanatorium may have been a symbol of pre-war Europe, but it also feels eerily prescient in a post-pandemic world where isolation and polarisation have become part of the collective psyche.
All the more reason for some Mann merch: look out for the limited edition Playmobil figure (white suit and hat, Venice-style) and do try his marzipan portrait, courtesy of the sweet-maker Niederegger, from Lübeck.
