Hans Castorp’s visit to his ailing cousin in a Davos sanatorium is originally intended to last just three weeks. But he soon comes to appreciate the detachment and peculiar timelessness of the thin mountain air: “The forms of time blur, run into one another, and what reveals itself as the true form of being is an expansive present, in which they bring you your soup for eternity.”
Seven years later, the thunderclap of the First World War tears him from the “enchantment” of this luxurious refuge for a European bourgeoisie that has become untimely, and its pursuit of a heightened life in an “atmosphere of death and amusement.” One moment he is dining with two Armenians, two Finns, an Uzbek Jew, and a Kurd at the “bad Russian table,” the next he is stumbling into Europe’s trenches. The book of these seven prewar years, which—like its protagonist—seems to stand at a great distance from the currents of time in the “flatlands,” is above all a depiction of the “great irritation” that preceded this European and global conflagration.
