BY ALL ACCOUNTS, time is enshrined in Thomas Mann's 1924 novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) and in his 1939 discussion of it at Princeton University, Mann himself even famously stated that it is “ein Zeitroman in doppeltem Sinn” (a time novel in a double sense). The first sense of time for Mann is historical and involves the novel's portrayal of the intellectual enmity and fatalism of European civilization prior to the First World War. The second sense refers to the novel's treatment of time as a conceptual category, both in philosophical discourse and in the temporal unfolding of the narrative. These two senses are not disconnected from one another. References to the First World War appear prominently in the novel's foreword and epilogue, and thus history frames the fictional story, which principally traces the main character's sojourn at a mountaintop sanatorium removed from the “normal” flow of time on the European continent. While the topic of time in Der Zauberberg has been the subject of substantial scholarship, the dynamic interaction of the external world's historicism with the individual's perception of time has been largely unexamined. These two temporal forces are not simply discrete notions—they are antitheses that define one another, and the resolution of their tension informs the reading of Mann's novel. The concept of the “performative” from recent literary theory offers a new discursive matrix for plotting the interface of these two temporal models. The performative articulates the movement by which some literary works attempt to achieve efficaciousness in the world outside of the text. In Der Zauberberg, the performative is empowered by the novel's narrative, which foregrounds its own being in time: “Die Zeit ist das Element der Erzählung” (Time is the element of the narrative). The performative bridges the chasm between “objective” historical time and subjective perceived time, between the perpetual unfolding of events in the external world and the apparent timelessness in the isolated consciousness of the individual. The resistance of these two temporal modes to one another in Mann's novel engenders a crisis which the performative seeks to overcome in a dialectical process.

This examination of Der Zauberberg appropriates and recontextualizes the theory of Homi Bhabha's regarding the performative. Bhabha's notion of performative foregrounds the aesthetic act of narrative and contends that its design possesses real-world efficacy to resist the linear, progressive temporality of historicism.