Arrival (Foreword and Chapter One)

Foreword. The story of Hans Castorp, which we mean to tell — not for his sake, for the reader will come to know him as a simple, if pleasing, young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling — this story, we must remember at the outset, happened long ago; it is, so to speak, already covered with the patina of history, and must certainly be told in the tenses of the deepest past. It took place before the Great War, at the beginning of which so many things began that have scarcely yet left off beginning. And as for its length: we shall not finish it in a moment, nor in a week, nor even in seven months. Better not to ask how much earthly time will pass while it holds us in its toils. It may even be — God forbid! — seven years.

Arrival. An unassuming young man was travelling, in high summer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of the Grisons. He was going for a visit of three weeks.

His name was Hans Castorp. He was twenty-three, a fair, well-bred, rather ordinary young man of good Hamburg family, who had just passed his examinations as a ship-building engineer and was about to join a shipyard; he was a little anaemic, and his doctor had advised a change of air before he began his career. So he had decided to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, a young lieutenant who had been sent up into the mountains with a weak lung, and had been at the International Sanatorium Berghof for five months.

From Hamburg up there is a long journey — too long, really, for so short a stay. It goes through several countries, up and down; from the south German plateau to the shore of the Swabian sea, and by boat over its bounding waves, across gulfs once thought bottomless. From there, the journey becomes difficult; the little narrow-gauge train climbs and climbs, through gorges and past waterfalls, higher and higher, until the air grows thin and cold and the young man, who had looked forward to it, began to feel a little uneasy at having left so far behind him the world he knew. Two days carry a man — and above all a young man, whose roots are not yet deep — away from his everyday world, from his duties and interests, much further than he had dreamed in the cab on his way to the station. Space, rolling and spinning between him and his home, has the powers we usually ascribe to time. It works the same transformation — like time, it is a Lethe.

Joachim met him at the station, tanned, in a civilian suit; he looked well. But the doctors, he said, had given him six months more. They were very free with time up here, he told his cousin; Hans could not imagine; three weeks were nothing to them.

The Berghof stood on a slope above the village, a long building with balconies on every floor, where the patients lay in reclining chairs in the open air, wrapped in blankets, for the "rest cure," several times a day. Hans was given a room on the second floor, number thirty-four, next to Joachim's; it had been fumigated, he was told, with formalin, because an American lady had died in it two days before. Through the wall of the next room he heard, on his first night, a married couple, Russians, whose sounds made him blush. He met, in the evening, the doctors: the Hofrat Behrens, the medical director, a tall, bony man with blue cheeks and goggling eyes, who talked in a strange, jovial, slangy, student manner and himself had a touch of the disease; and his assistant, Dr Krokowski, pale, black-bearded, in a black smock, who practised the new psychoanalysis and gave lectures on love as the hidden cause of illness. "You're not one of us," Krokowski said to Hans, smiling. "Or — are you quite sure you are healthy? I have never yet met a perfectly healthy man."

Hans was surprised by everything: the five huge meals a day; the patients' talk of their temperatures, their "pneumothorax," their lungs; a young woman whistling at him through a hole in her chest; the casual way in which they spoke of those who had "gone." He coughed a little in the thin air, and felt hot in the face, and could not get warm; he thought it was only the altitude. In the evening he found that his cigar, his beloved Maria Mancini, tasted of leather.