Germany six years after the First World War: Hitler was in prison following the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and the Reichsbank was issuing a new mark after hyperinflation destroyed the currency. Then, in November, the 49-year-old author Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain. He was pessimistic about the book’s chances, later writing: ‘Would anyone expect that a harassed public, economically oppressed, would take it on itself to pursue through 1,200 pages the dreamlike ramifications of this figment of thought?’

Much to Mann’s delight, readers responded with rapture, first at home and then abroad. The book helped secure him a Nobel Prize, along with his reputation as the greatest German writer since Goethe. This was a surprise, given that The Magic Mountain was originally meant to be a comedy, a short, satiric companion to Death in Venice. Mann had finished that novella in the spring of 1912, before visiting his wife Katia at a sanatorium in Davos. She was staying at the Waldhotel to cure a lung infection; Mann spent three weeks sitting on the balcony beside her, breathing the Alpine air. On acquiring a cold of his own, he consulted a local doctor, who immediately discovered a ‘moist spot’ on his lung. Would he like to remain there for the next three months, taking the cure as a precaution?

Mann refused, returning to Munich with the germ of his comic novel, until the First World War interrupted work. It was impossible to write a parody of privileged European invalids while the continent collapsed, so Mann turned to non-fiction instead, composing a vast political treatise to justify his nationalistic and authoritarian instincts. He only revisited The Magic Mountain when the war was over, yet, as he explained in a subsequent introduction to the book, the conflict ‘incalculably enriched its contents’.

The Magic Mountain was finally published in November 1924, 12 years after that Davos visit. It told the story of an orphaned engineering student from Hamburg, who visits his cousin at a Swiss sanatorium and ends up staying for seven years. At first the experiences of the protagonist, Hans Castorp, echoed Mann’s own visit: the three-week stay, the consultation for a cold, and the suggestion he remain for several months as a precaution. But Hans agrees to take the cure, and rather than return to the ‘flatland’, he lingers at the Berghof Sanatorium, experiencing a moral, sensual and intellectual awakening. At the same time, he loses the industrious contentment of his bourgeois life below. Follow the routines of an invalid and you end up sick.

In the years between conception and publication, Mann’s novel had expanded from a brief comedy to a grand tragedy, recreating the world before the war. Conventional narrative gave way to meditations on time; social and political concerns were subordinated to the texture of individual experience. Simultaneously, the book engaged with many of the leading figures of German-language thought: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Lukács. The result was a Modernist masterpiece: ‘one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature’, according to A.S. Byatt. It was also a popular success, with a fascination – and a fatal warning – that endures to this day.

In a letter to the writer and translator Paul Amann, Mann claimed his novel explored the ‘spiritual oppositions of Humanism and Romanticism, Progress and Reaction, Health and Sickness’. The oppositions were played out in the personalities of different characters, in particular the Enlightenment encyclopedist Lodovico Settembrini and the reactionary revolutionary Leo Naphta. These two intellectuals spend much of the book trying to convince Hans of their respective worldviews, arguing over the value of democracy and the draw of totalitarianism, not to mention medieval Christendom and modern communism, technological progress and Gnostic wisdom. While Settembrini makes the case for a liberal egalitarianism that seemed increasing untenable in the wake of the war, Naphta articulates the totalitarian radicalism that provided such a charismatic alternative during the 1920s and 1930s. The latter wins almost every debate, yet the political solutions he proposes anticipate the nightmare of modern European history.

These debates also echo contemporary concerns. Today, across the Western world, populist political movements are diverging from the values of the educated elite. These elites struggle to make sense of figures such as Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán, or the rise of far-right parties among younger voters in Europe. Economic and political assumptions that promised a steady march towards prosperity cannot account for the magnetism of fringe ideas, regressive ideologies and self-punishing policies. Likewise, the lofty aspirations of the Enlightenment cannot comprehend the unreasoning impulses that haunt humankind into the 21st century. And yet, for their supporters, these extreme alternatives are preferable to the complacent confidence of the current global order.

Nowhere is this more true than modern Davos, the setting of Mann’s novel. At the turn of the century, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Europe and America, but, after the discovery of antibiotics, the Alpine town became a resort for winter tourists. Then, in 1971, Davos began to host the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, its former sanatoria occupied by leading figures from politics, business and charity. Now, over five days and 500 sessions, the delegates discuss the future of society with the same earnest detachment as the invalids at the Berghof Sanatorium. Elevation promises a sense of perspective, but, as The Magic Mountain warns, it leaves you fatally detached from the world below.

Mann called his novel a ‘fairy tale,’ but also a ‘swan song of that form of existence’ – the long sanatorium stays funded by the settled economics of pre-war Europe. Through Hans, the novel reflects the romantic draw towards disease that Mann considered widespread in pre-war Europe, and that Freud termed ‘the death drive’ in his 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. ‘There are two ways to life: one is the regular, direct and good way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius,’ Hans concludes. Such a morbid fascination is only possible for someone protected from suffering, and the First World War was both a consequence of and an antidote to this perspective. The outbreak of fighting also marks the end of The Magic Mountain, as Hans finally leaves the sanatorium to meet his fate on the flatlands of the Western Front.

Rival superpowers, rising inequality, environmental degradation – today’s visitors to Davos have their own subjects to discuss. The naïve fatalism Hans displays is not the sickness of contemporary society, and to a modern reader the tuberculosis cure is more likely to recall the recent confinements of Covid. Similarly, the displaced existence of the sanatorium patients suggests the alternative communities found online, where truth is hidden among the complex webs of conspiracy and falsehood. ‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual’, Mann writes, ‘but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.’

The warning of The Magic Mountain endures. At the Berghof Sanatorium, scholarship is a seduction and argument, a kind of enchantment. While learning offers the illusion of understanding, intelligence cannot protect you from illness, nor does dying guarantee any insight. ‘What we’re here to do is to get healthier, not cleverer,’ Hans is warned, yet he himself must pass through disease in order to be cured, must face the spectre of death to overcome its fascination. Reading Mann’s masterpiece again, 100 years after publication, that lesson becomes a slender source of hope. For it hints that our present upheavals are not signs of sickness, but the first steps towards recovery.