Der Zauberberg

Universitätsring 2

1010 Wien

 

Hans Castorp's visit to his lung-sick cousin in a Davos sanatorium is initially only scheduled to last three weeks. Very soon, however, he learns to appreciate the detachment and the peculiar timelessness in the thin air: “The tenses blur, flow into one another, and what reveals itself as the true form of being is an expansive present in which the soup is brought to you forever. “

Seven years later, the thunderclap of the First World War tears him from the “enchantment” of this luxurious refuge for a European bourgeoisie that has become outdated and his search for improving life in an “atmosphere of death and amusement”. He had just dined at the “bad Russian table” with two Armenians, two Finns, an Uzbek Jew and a Kurd, and now he is stumbling into the trenches of Europe. The book of these seven pre-war years, which, like its protagonist, appears to be far removed from the times in the “flatlands”, is not least the description of the “great irritation” that precedes this European and global conflagration.

 

(Source: burgtheater.at)