Creating an Oriental Feindbild

Abstract

One of the first things that Hans Castorp, the protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, learned upon his arrival at Berghof Sanitarium in Davos, was that there was a “good” Russian table and a “bad” Russian table. The bad Russians were characterized as barbarians, more or less uncivilized. Even the good Russians, while more polite, were considered to be an exotic and alien presence, quite different from anything that Castorp, the model of the German bourgeois class, had ever experienced. As Larry Wolff has noted, Russia was a place connected to the rest of Europe by postal routes, but which few Germans ever visited.