The Trial of Curiosity in Der Zauberberg

Abstract

Implicated in Der Zauberberg (1924) is a trial of curiosity played out through two competing narratives: the celebration of unbounded curiosity as the hallmark of the modern age and the looming catastrophe of the First World War. Much of the novel's comedy comes from resonances between high and low objects of curiosity and from the hero's ambivalently mixed motives as a curious collector of knowledge produced by others. Like Freud's libido, curiosity appears as a desire intrinsic to human nature and a productive driving force of culture. The trial reaches a climax, however, in the conjuring up during a séance of a ghost in the uniform of the First World War. The episode implies that curiosity be subject to ethical questioning, which in the case of literature concerns the limits of representation.