“Berghof,” the Universal Disease of Modernity

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Notes

1. T. Mann, Volshebnaia gora (Moscow: Krus; St. Petersburg: Komplekt, 1994), T. 1, p. 407.

2. Semёn Yakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887) published only one book of poems, but it won him enormous popularity in the 1880s.—Trans.

3. This was a well-trodden path at that time; suffice it to recall the sympathies of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, a Hellenophile and humanist, for fascism and Nazism. See, e.g., J.-M. Brohm, Le mythe olympique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981).

4. Pad is a Russian root denoting “fall.”—Trans.

5. Zakat literally means “sunset” in Russian, but also has the meaning of “decline” in a figurative sense. The title of Oswald Spengler’s work The Decline of the West was rendered as Zakat Evropy (The Decline of Europe).—Trans.

6. Gibbon’s instruments of destruction are the barbarians. But they could not shake the edifice of Rome until it went into decline on its own, based on natural causes. Gibbon has the decline precede the destruction.

7. J. Murray (Ed.), The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon (London, 1897), p. 272. Historians doubt the accuracy of the date cited by Gibbon; some contend that the event occurred in 1763 rather than 1764 (see E.P.B. Craddock, “Gibbon and the Ruins of Capitol,” in A. Patterson (Ed.), Roman Images (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 63–82).

8. “Yesterday” for Edward Gibbon in 1764 meant the Middle Ages. Antiquity, meanwhile, was “the day before yesterday.”

9. We repeat: “Decline” was what happened in the past; “decadence” is today, and “disease” is right now.

10. If something is ill, it was once healthy; at first glance, what is ill in The Magic Mountain is the once-healthy world of bourgeois values, that is, the Western world of the time of Edward Gibbon, who looked back to the decline of the Roman Empire and viewed its destruction as something that was already over and marked the beginning of our new time. In other words, modernity in its acquisition/invention of the present perceives its own early stage as the uniquely and naturally healthy condition. This supports our notion of progress as a disease—a notion in contrast, incidentally, to the original meaning of the concept of “decadence” as something opposite to the advancement of progress.

11. All of this will happen, but under special circumstances, on Walpurgis Night, in the chapter of that name.

12. It is for good reason that Settembrini called him “a problem child of life”!

13. “It was just too crazy! She whistled at him, but not with her mouth; her lips weren’t puckered at all, were tightly closed in fact. The whistle came from inside, and the while she stared at him, with her doltish, half-closed eyes. An extraordinarily unpleasant whistle, harsh, intense, and yet somehow hollow and protracted” (1, 72).

14. “Gentlemen, it’s as if you are being tickled in the most infamous, intense, inhuman way” (1, 365).

15. F. Kafka, “Prigovor,” in F. Kafka, Sochineniia: V 3 t. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura; Kharkov: Folio, 1995), T. 1, p. 102.

16. F. Kafka, Dnevniki (Moscow: Agraf, 1998), p. 240.

17. A superb Russian translation by Kseniia Starosel’skaia: P. Khiulle [Huelle], Castorp (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005).

18. Ibid., p. 9.

19. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

20. At that very time, in Eastern Europe itself, the East proper was already becoming Orientalized—recall Vladimir Soloviev with his “pan-Mongolism,” the aggressive racism of writings of the traveler Przheval’skii, and Alexander Blok with his endless “one’s blood is turning yellow” references in his diary entries.

21. The Kipchaks were a nomadic Turkic people that inhabited the Eurasian steppe in the Middle Ages.—Trans.

22. Before the war Mann was writing this work as a satire—and only later radically changed his conceit.

23. He told Castorp that he was a member of the “International League for the Organization of Progress,” an organization very similar to the Masons (Naphta immediately pointed out to Hans and Joachim that the Italian was a Freemason), whose mission was, no more and no less, to combat human suffering. The most important instrument of this struggle was the publication (for some reason in Barcelona) of the multivolume The Sociology of Suffering: “An encyclopedia of some twenty or so volumes […] will list and discuss all conceivable instances of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the large-scale conflicts of groups to suffering that arises out of class hostility and international strife” (1, 290–291). The planetary humanistic, enlightenment-oriented undertaking for some reason strongly resembles Buddha’s doctrine of human life as suffering and of the necessity of enlightenment so as, after gaining an understanding, to put an end to the source of universal suffering. The League for the Organization of Progress will spend twenty volumes on a list of human sufferings, while for Buddha it is enough to cite several varieties of suffering, which, however, is not even suffering but—if one believes some translators—“distress.” Settembrini must write a long survey chapter for The Sociology of Suffering—but never does finish it.

24. We should note that, when referring to “Asia,” “Tatars,” Genghis Khan, and Madame Chauchat’s Eastern cheekbones and slanted eyes, Settembrini means not actual Asia or Tatars but specifically Eastern Europe and Slavs. Chauchat is a “dissolute person,” not a “child of nature” or “natural,” but a “corrupted” one who has abandoned form and discipline, and Slavs are not imaginary “wild Asians” but bad Europeans who have been taught a lesson in Europeanness, but either they did not understand it or they did not want to really learn it, contenting themselves merely with the external characteristics of a civilized person.

25. Born on the border of Galicia and Volhynia, the son of a butcher who was savagely murdered during a Jewish pogrom.

26. Here is a striking model of this line of thinking: “The point of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the political-economic demand for salvation in our time, is not dominion for its own sake and for all eternity, but a temporary abrogation of the polarities of the spirit and power under the sign of the cross. It is a way of overcoming the world by ruling it, a transition; its point is transcendence, the Kingdom of God. The proletariat has taken up the task of Gregory the Great” (2, 72).