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Science in Mann's Zauberberg: The Concept of Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Rudi Prusok
Rudi Prusok*
Affiliation:
Northern Michigan University, Marquette
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Abstract

Der Zauberberg contains a great deal of esoteric scientific information that is woven into its symbolic structure, making the novel only partially comprehensible without some knowledge of twentieth-century science. Old concepts are no longer relevant by themselves, but must be fitted into a new Weltanschauung with its new scientific terminology. Mann used the new scientific information as symbol and leitmotif, updated old myths, and created new ones out of the continually accumulating data of the sciences. His novel has characteristics of a scientific experiment, allowing an Everyman Castorp to develop in the controlled parameters of the Berghof microcosm. This development entails a reconsideration of the nature of man in the light of Einstein's Relativity Theory and modern medicine. The former brings about a new perspective by shrugging off the old absolutes of Euclidian space and linear time and thereby adopting a “higher dimensionality” of perception from that of the “flatland” dweller. The latter, medicine and psychology, redefine man in medical terms and reexamine the Romantic myth of genius springing from disease.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 52 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 I have found no previous research that deals directly with this subject; rather only scattered side comments in research that deals with other facets of Mann's works, mentioning that he drew heavily on the sciences for his material. Thomas Mann's use of science is in need of much more attention.

2 Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Frankfurt : Fischer, 1963), pp. vi–ix.

3 Der Zauberberg, pp. 5–6. This passage also introduces Castorp's investigations into the underworld realm of death with yet another different relationship between space and time. See Helmut Koopmann, “Die Kategorie des Hermetischen in Thomas Manns Zauberberg,” Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie, 80 (1961), 404–22.

4 In Vol. x of Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), p. 139. The essay was written in 1923 when he was finishing the Zauberberg. Later, at Princeton, he knew Einstein intimately.

5 Joseph Brennan, Three Philosophical Novelists (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 143–51 ; Erich Heller, Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (New York: World, 1958), pp. 173–74; Fritz Kaufmann, “Thomas Manns Weg durch die Ewigkeit in die Zeit,” Neue Rundschau, 67 (1957), 564–81; Richard Thieberger, Der Begriff der Zeit bei Thomas Mann (Baden-Baden: Verlag fur Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1952).

6 This is a point stressed in Gustav Geley's Clairvoyance and Materialization (London: Fischer-Unwin, 1927), p. 213, a work with which Mann was familiar in an earlier German edition.

7 That birth-life-death is a process with no precise boundary definitions has led in recent times to some philosophical and legal problems as technology increasingly intervenes in the natural order of things. See Robert S. Morrison, “Death: Process or Event,” Science, 20 Aug. 1971, pp. 694–98.

8 Caroline Newton, “Thomas Mann und Freud,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 24 (1963), 135–39.

9 Hermann Weigand, Thomas Mann's Novel Der Zauberberg (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1933), p. 57.