Der Sieg der „Unform“. Das „Schnee“-Kapitel des "Zauberbergs"

Abstract

During the last twenty years Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain has been dominated by two contradictory lines of interpretation. On the one hand, it is acknowledged that this tale is a development novel, and on the other, it is interpreted as a philosophical novel, deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision of life. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the conflicting specialist views on the subject of the story, and in particular the „Snow“ chapter which is rightly perceived by researchers of the work as the key one. Starting from various and frequently contradictory ways of interpreting Castorp’s vision, the author of the article sets herself the aim of examining the dream from the „Snow“ chapter using Freudian Dream Analysis. If we are to understand dreams as ,fulfilled wishes‘, as Freud intended, then there raises the question of what Castorp’s dream means in this case, what his visions personify and whether Castorp really gets closer to humanist thought through his dream and goes, as Thomas Mann himself put it, through an „education programme“.