Hans Castorp Dream about the Greatness of Nature

Abstract

In the article two key chapters of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”, namely “Walpurgis Night” and “Snow” are interpreted in the categories of aesthetic experience. In both of them Hans Castorp is lead into a dream, which could be treated as a hermeneutical symbol. Castorp experiences the feeling of the sublime which is a source of the spiritual metamorphosis. Seen from this angle Castorp turns out to be a literary expression of a new anthropological conception of man, and “The Magic Mountain” – a critique of the attempts to realize such a conception by the help of a solely intellectual argumentation.