Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Illness

The patient’s desire to avoid the subject of death and illness while living intimately with those subjects indicates a willful disregard for the complex problems they face. Mann, here, adds meaning to the illness by setting it as a representation of the complex prewar problems Europe was facing and willfully ignoring. The illness like the hyper-militarization and nationalism of the pre-WWI is overwhelming ignored. In the mountain, the illness is set aside in order to pursue frivolous treatments and activities that help keep the patients entertained. “Even before governments issued declarations of war in the summer of 1914, statesmen and diplomats were constructing explanations for the war that was about to break out” (Hilton). Therefore, the patients ignore the illness the same way Europe ignored the hyper-militarization that led to World War I.

Thomas Mann does not identify the illness in The Magic Mountain as tuberculosis, however, he does make vague references about consumption. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, consumption is a “disease that causes wasting of the body, spec. tuberculosis. Now chiefly hist[orical]” (2a). The novel states, “Hans Castorp was not up here to be company for Joachim, he was a patient himself… It was in the first stages of consumption” (Mann 564, 65). At another point, Mann writes, “Up on the Schatzalp there is a man… he has…