The story of Hans Castorp which we wish to tell – not for his sake (for the reader will meet in him a humble if attractive young man), but for the sake of the story which seems to us highly worthy of being told (with regard to Hans Castorp It should be remembered that it is his story and that not every story happens to everyone): this story was a long time ago, it is, so to speak, completely covered with historical patina and must be presented in the tense of the deepest past.

That would not be a disadvantage for a story, but rather an advantage; for stories must be past, and the more past, one might say, the better for them as stories and for the narrator, the murmuring conjurer of the imperfect. However, it is the same with her as it is with people today, and not least with the storytellers among them: she is much older than her years, her old age is not in days, the age that lies on her is not slowing down calculate solar orbits; in a word: it doesn’t really owe the degree of its past to time – a statement that alludes to and points out in passing the dubiousness and peculiar dual nature of this mysterious element.

But in order not to artificially obscure a clear fact: the high degree of the past in our history stems from the fact that it takes place before a certain turning point and boundary that deeply cleft life and consciousness … It plays, or, in order to studiously avoid any present tense, it plays and played before, in the olden days, in the world before the great war, with the beginning of which so many things began that have hardly stopped beginning. So before that she plays, albeit not long before. But isn’t the past character of a story the deeper, more perfect and fairytale-like the closer “before” it takes place? In addition, it could be that ours has one thing or another to do with the fairy tale, according to its inner nature.

We shall tell them at length, accurately and thoroughly—for when has a story’s shortness or tediousness ever depended on the space and time it occupied? Rather, unafraid of the odium of embarrassment, we incline to the view that only the thorough is truly entertaining.

So the narrator will not be finished with Hansen’s story in the blink of an eye. The seven days of a week will not suffice, nor will seven months. It is best if he does not realize in advance how much earth time will pass while she holds him ensnared. It won’t be exactly seven years, in God’s name!

And so we begin.