When we think of Davos, the city atop the regal Swiss Alps, we think of glamor, money, and of a center where the world's richest gather together to decide the economic fates of the multitude.
From the Davos economic forums emerge new labor laws and new ways to make productivity the center of our lives.
But if we think of Davos in the context of the setting of Thomas Mann's 1924 epic novel, The Magic Mountain Der Zauberberg), we would get a different picture of Davos.
In Mann's novel, Davos is home to The Schatzalp, a "luxurious" sanatorium to which Hans Castorp, the hero, travels to visit his sick cousin. Instead of three weeks, Castorp ends up spending seven years in The Schatzalp.
No sooner than Castorp arrives, he falls ill and can't leave. The doctors collude with the hospital administration to prolong Castorp's stay. In fact whoever comes to the sanitorium, sickened by the pressures and drudgeries of modern, workaday, bourgeoisie life, doesn't want to leave, because the ethos of The Schatzalp is anti-bourgeois.
The doctors of The Schatzalp believe that the interest of culture and life at large will not be served if modern man devoted all his time and energy to mindless office work. Castorp is plunged into a culture of botany, extravagant meals, love affairs, walks in the woods, philosophical discussions, the arts, opera, and the goal is to render him unfit for the world of office work.
I wonder if the pilgrims of today's Davos, who epitomize both 21st century ethos of capitalism and bourgeois values, are aware of this piece of Davos' literary history.
A bit of the fictional Davos can be found here.
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