The Magic Mountain — Foreword

Chapter 1 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

The story of Hans Castorp, which we propose to tell, not for his sake (for the reader will come to know in him a simple, though engaging, young man), but for the story's sake, which seems to us in a high degree worth telling (whereby, to Hans Castorp's advantage, it should yet be remembered that it is _his_ story, and that not every story happens to everybody): this story is very long ago; it is, so to speak, already altogether overlaid with the noble rust of history, and must be presented in the tense of the most remote past.

That would be no disadvantage for a story, but rather an advantage; for stories must be past, and the more past they are, one might say, the better for them in their quality as stories and for the storyteller, the murmuring conjurer of the imperfect. Yet with this one the case is as it is today with human beings too, and among them not least with storytellers: it is far older than its years, its venerableness is not to be reckoned by days, the age that lies upon it not by the revolutions of the sun; in a word, it owes the degree of its bygone character not properly to _time_ - a statement by which, in passing, an allusion is made and attention drawn to the questionable nature and peculiar dual character of that mysterious element.

But not to cloud an evident fact artificially: the high degree to which our story has flowed away into the past comes from its taking place _before_ a certain turning-point and boundary that deeply rived life and consciousness ... It takes place, or, to avoid every present tense with due care, it took place and did take place formerly, once upon a time, in the old days, in the world before the great war, with whose beginning so much began that has scarcely yet ceased to begin. It takes place before that, then, though not long before. But is not the past character of a story the deeper, the more perfect, the more fabulous, the more closely before it takes place? Besides, ours may perhaps have one thing or another else in common with the fairy tale, by virtue of its inward nature.

We shall tell it at length, exactly and thoroughly; for when was the brevity or tediousness of a story ever dependent on the space and time it claimed? Far from fearing the odium of pedantry, we are rather inclined to the view that only the thorough can be truly entertaining.

So the storyteller will not be done with Hans's story in the twinkling of an eye. The seven days of a week will not suffice for it, nor seven months either. Best that he should not make clear to himself in advance how much earthly time will pass over him while it keeps him enmeshed. In God's name, it will not, outright, be seven years!

And so we begin.