Thoughts on the ideas in Mann's Magic Mountain

Nearing the halfway point in Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain (1927), which is rightly known as one of the great “Modern” novels (20^th century) and one of the greatest novels “of ideas,” which do in fact become a major part of the plot. The plot itself is deceptively simple: 24-year-old Hans Castorp takes a 3-week vacation (before starting a new job, unpaid, as an apprentice in ship design), travels up to the TB Sanatorium, the Berghof, in Davos to spend the weeks w/ his cousin, Joachim; while on the visit, he decides to take part in the cure, which involves a lot of outdoor rest breathing the cold and fresh air and extensive eating. As he nears the end of his stay, he visits the presiding doctor, Behrens, who detects a slight abnormality in Castorp’s lung, and he in fact becomes a patient. This diagnosis of course plays into his laziness, his desultory pursuit of a career, his lack of close ties to the world below, the “flatland,” and his sexual yearning for the 30-ish Russian woman whom he worships from afar, with out ever – yet – getting up the courage to say a word to her. So why is this novel so special? First of all, the ideas that drive the narrative are complex and arresting: the associate doctor, trained in psycho-analysis (new at the time of course, esp. in the prewar setting, ca. 1910), delivers lectures suggesting that the illness all in the hospital suffer from occurs because of repressed desires, which psychotherapy, the “real” cure, can abate; and in fact, the Berghof is rife with sexual tension and expression, though Hans holds himself at a distance from that. His repressed desires are unclear even to himself, but to the reader it’s clear that his attachment to the Russian woman, Frau (yes, she’s married) Chauchat, occurs because she reminds him of a young man he’d had a crush on during his school days. That said, the whole novel feels in some ways closer to Poe and Kafka than to the other great “modernist” novelists (e.g., Proust, Joyce); Hans and his fellow “inmates” are as if imprisoned in the hospital – once you get in, it seems, there’s almost no chance of getting out alive – that Hans faces this fate w/ bizarre equanimity, as if he’s been drugged and deluded by all the excess of food and the enforced rest. Throughout all of this, Hans engages in many conversations w/ a self-described “humanist,” Settembrini, kwho recognizes that Hans – not nearly so ill as he thinks he is – is in danger of turning his back on life when he should be committed and engaged – but Hans is getting pulled deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of life at the Berghof, as if this strange place w/ its multinational clientele is representative of the world at large, which it is not. Rather, it's a perversion of the world at large, and Hans will die unless he can release himself from its seductive spell.