THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

About the show

Hans Castorp's visit to his cousin, who was suffering from tuberculosis, at a sanatorium in Davos was initially planned for only three weeks. Very soon, however, he came to appreciate the sense of detachment and the peculiar timelessness of the thin air: "The forms of time blur, flow into one another, and what reveals itself as the true form of being is a present without extension, in which they bring you soup eternally." Seven years later, the thunderclap of the First World War tore him from the "enchantment" of this luxurious refuge for an anachronistic European bourgeoisie and its search for a better life in an "atmosphere of death and amusement." Just moments before, he had been dining with two Armenians, two Finns, an Uzbek Jew, and a Kurd at a "bad Russian table"; now he was staggering into the trenches of Europe. The book about these seven pre-war years, which, like its protagonist, seems to remain far removed from the times in the "lowlands", is not least a description of the "great irritation" that precedes this European and global conflagration.