ABSTRACT
Introduction: the Magic Mountain in context The Magic Mountain, together with Ulysses and Castle, its exact contemporaries, is one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century novel, having a status comparable to Faust or Demons. The three novels with their contrasts and similarities map the space on which the contemporary novel can be situated. Ulysses is never at home, always on the road, wandering (though in Joyce’s novel only in Dublin), while the protagonists of the Magic Mountain are all fixed to one place, into a great alchemic incubator, which however is also not their home. The Castle combines both situations, as its hero K. is away from home, in a village having a closed, incubator-like atmosphere, where everybody else is formally ‘at home’, though nobody really is. The title locations of Mann’s and Kafka’s novels are the same, a ‘mountain’; yet, while the action of Magic Mountain takes place in and near the sanatorium, in the Castle the ‘castle’ is never shown from the inside. The hypermodern novel is thus mapped in between the agoraphobic experience of an infinite space of eternal wondering and the claustrophobic experience of being enclosed in a single, tight spot, the two being united by the experience of never being at home, or unlimited homelessness, an experience stamped through hypermodernity on the entire planet.
