Experimenting with time: therapeutic spaces in the German interwar novel

摘要

In the German novels of the beginning of the twentieth century, therapeutic spaces such as sanatoria, psychiatric hospitals or therapist's offices were used prominently as the setting of the novel or of crucial scenes. Reflecting the ambivalence of modernity, these therapeutic settings were on the one hand spaces where one could escape from the hectic pace of modern life and on the other hand spaces in which the most modern innovations (new theories about the psyche, new technologies, new architectural principles...) were deployed. In this article the function of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg and the psychiatric hospital in Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften will be studied in the light of a crisis in the experience of time. Both these novels begin with staging a crisis in the experience of continuous linear time, which is in both cases staged in architectural terms. The fact that the protagonists of both novels are unable to take up their intended social position, following their fathers, is presented as the crisis of a specific conception of temporality and interiority. The therapeutic settings function as literary devices which allow for the exploration of different responses to this crisis. Neither a flight from modernity nor a picture of a society gone mad, these settings contain elements from different temporal regimes, existing side by side. The therapeutic spaces are experimental spaces characterized by multitemporality where the impact of modernity on the tradition can be assessed and different responses to the crisis of time explored.