With the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, inaugurated yesterday, driven by a curiosity that has now become morbid and struck by the fact that in Italy radio and TV continued to incorrectly pronounce the name of the famous town in the Canton of Grisons (in the French style, with the accent on o instead of a, as foreseen in the German language), with the afternoon episode of Focus Economia still in the ears (the popular radio broadcast of Radio 24 conducted by the well-prepared Sebastiano Barisoni in dialogue with the deputy director of Sole 24 ore, Alessandro Plateroti ) yesterday evening I happened to reopen Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924).
While the Great Ones of the Earth, today, are confronted on the measures to be taken in the fight against the pandemic caused by Sars Covid, a century ago Thomas Mann chose an alpine sanatorium as the setting for his masterpiece in which the protagonists (the famous cousins Castorp, the fatal Madame Chauchat, the Illuminist Settembrini and the Jesuit Naphta) had closed themselves in the (often) vain attempt to fight the endemic disease of the time, tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis and Covid represent, a century later, the specter of decadence, uncertainty and, in the design of the great German writer, the end of an era, in his case that of the Belle Epoque. If anyone should decide, one day, to draw up a repertoire of the real places that most influenced and transformed the artistic life and the imagination of the last century, the sanatoriums built along the Alps between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century would certainly occupy a place of honor, and the Berghof Hotel in Mann would be the spearhead.
Just think of all those – famous and less famous – who have passed (yesterday as today and with varying fortunes) through the experience of illness and hospitalization.
In no particular order and limited to the period examined: the French director Jean Vigo who died of TB at the age of only twenty-nine in 1934 during the shooting of his masterpiece, L’Atalante; the writers George Orwell (1950), Franz Kafka (1924), Anton Chekhov (1904), William Somerset Maugham (1965), Thomas Wolfe (1938), Kathleen Mansfield (1923); the poets Guido Gozzano (1916) and Sergio Corazzini (1907); the playwright Edmond Rostand (1918, to whom we owe the character of Cyrano di Bergerac), the musician Chopin (1849), the painter Amedeo Modigliani (1920). But also the Austrian mathematician Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel Prize in Physics) who died in 1961, the actress Vivian Leigh (1967, Rossella O’Hara of Gone with the Wind), the French thinker and activist Simone Weil (1943), the inventor French Louis Braille (1852), the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1850).
The disease of the last century, like that of today, was perhaps the most democratic disease in history, since it did not spare even royalty, saints and powerful: King Alfonso XII of Bourbon died of tuberculosis in 1885, the French mystic Thérèse Françoise Marie Martin (better known as St. Therese of Lisieux) in 1897, while former American first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the father of the New Deal) in 1962.
Also in this field there is no shortage of relatives of: this is the case of Matilde, the favorite daughter of Manzoni, who died of consumption in 1856 or of Johanne Sophie, sister of the Norwegian painter Edward Munch (that of the Scream), who died in 1877.
Before them, when the disease had not yet been well defined and canonized, the list of those who died of suspected tuberculosis boasts excellent names such as those of the poets Novalis, Keats and Alfred Louis Charles de Musset, of the playwrights Moliere and Schiller, of the writers Laurence Sterne (his the famous Tristram Shandy) and Emily Brontë; the list includes prominent scientists and thinkers such as Pascal, Spinoza, Thoreau and Celsius; musicians like Pergolesi; scholars like Francesco Algarotti and politicians like James Monroe (the one of the famous Doctrine); but also a revolutionary like Simone Bolivar and, first of all, the painter Antonello da Messina. They miraculously escaped the subtle ache, but were nevertheless influenced by it for the rest of their lives, characters such as Goethe, Albert Camus, David Herbert Lawrence; later also Charles Bukowsky, Dashiell Hammett and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
As for the artistic contaminations generated by the sickness-sanatorium combination, the list would be endless but it is at least worth remembering the main moments. For literature, the Lady of the Camellias (1848) by Dumas son, The Brothers Karamazov (1879) by Dostoevsky (which ends with the harrowing scene of the burial of the very young Iliuscia, who died of tuberculosis), The Enchanted Mountain (1924) by Thomas are essential. Mann and the famous A Silvia by Leopardi; some stories by Maupassant set on the French Riviera, but also some passages taken from works by Verga, Zola and Tolstoj; more recently in Italy, Gesualdo Bufalino’s Diceria dell’untore (1981) updated the theme, placing the story told in a Sicilian sanatorium.
In music, the characters of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata (1853) and Puccini’s sublime Mimì have remained famous (La Bohème is from 1896, the aria «Che gelida manina» among the best known in the world).
The cinema, for its part, has recently produced on the theme the splendid musical Moulin Rouge by director Baz Luhrmann (2001), which partly refers to the original subject by Henri Murger (Scènes de la vie de bohème, 1851) from which they took Puccini’s librettists for La Bohème (Illica and Giacosa, a sort of Mogol-Battisti duo of melodrama) are also inspired. But also one of the few (and underestimated) directorial tests of Nino Manfredi: For grace received (1971), Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Beyond the readings and the fascination for the fate of numerous artists of the past century – all somehow touched by subtle aches and therefore forced to frequent the Alpine sanatoriums, the place that inspired the Berghof Hotel imagined by Mann is today almost invisible in the eyes of the tourist who happens to be there by mistake or by choice, as opposed to the huge (and anonymous) reception structure (a Congress Center on the outskirts of the town) which every year hosts the famous political-social event.
Reachable through the Swiss territory along the A2 and A13, the impact with Davos is immediately unsettling: a common, ordinary, very normal Swiss tourist town of medium size at 1500 meters above sea level; equipped with hotels, spas, ski lifts and equipment for sports lovers, a kind of Saint Moritz in a minor tone that really does not have anything special for those who are not fond of winter sports.
Elements able to connect me with literary suggestions? Only the two railway stations of Davos-Dorf and Davos-Platz, the same ones that Hans Castorp passes through before reaching the sanatorium.
To reach the sanatorium, today, it is necessary to go to Davos Platz: a side lane leads to the funicular that allows you to reach the Shatzalp through twenty minutes of vertiginous ascent aboard a blue four-compartment carriage.
At 1861 meters high to welcome the unsuspecting visitor, today there is a romantic place called Shatzalp Restaurant; a wooden structure, the roof with the characteristic slate tiles, outdoor red tables and chairs complete with lighted lamps.
The silhouette of the former sanatorium that inspired Mann and more recently the director Paolo Sorrentino in the 2015 film Youth (now renamed Berghotel Schatzalp, the equivalent of an Italian four-star) rises in front. A long white-enamelled wooden porch and a veranda introduce the actual Hotel, where the Belle Époque atmosphere is still alive and the metal plaques show some famous passages from the novel.
The building – an imposing white facade embellished with red profiles – is simple, and is spread over four levels: the rooms on the upper floors take advantage of the large terraces of the former sanatorium. On the ground floor an Art Nouveau dining room, a large foyer, the area reserved for the piano bar, the restaurant. In front of it a large park with a breathtaking view that overlooks the snow-capped peaks of Pischahorn, Jakobshorn and Rinerhorn Hoch Ducan: woods and meadows, pine and evergreen forests, with the offshoots of Davos in the background.
Next to the hotel there is an important botanical garden, along the west side the Chalet and the villa, a little higher up the park (from which the second section of the funicular that leads up to the Strelapass, at 2352 meters above sea level), the Thomas Mann Platz and the Thomas Mann Weg, the one in which Madame Chauchat and Hans Castorp walked and discussed while observing the other patients.