A supernatural Alpine moment

By Misha Glenny
Historian, Davos, Switzerland

There's been a distinctly upbeat mood at this year's World Economic Forum. The global economy is bouncing back.

But historian Misha Glenny associates this mountain resort with much more than discussions about economic matters.

Davos is a health resort and home to several literary gems

I used to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos on a regular basis.

The organisers of this grand meeting would invite me to talk about the drama unfolding in the Balkans as Yugoslavia fell apart.

This was, of course, at a time when the agglomerated power of the global movers and shakers attending the forum could do nothing about restoring equilibrium to the battered Balkans.

Now, when these people really could contribute to the redevelopment of the region, the organisers no longer deem the subject sexy enough to warrant issuing me with an invitation.

No sour grapes, I can assure you. Perhaps the mildest whiff of nostalgia though, as I read through their press releases about all the exciting things under discussion there this year, amid the briskly chilled temperatures and powdery slopes of this peculiar Alpine retreat.

I'm especially fascinated by one issue: the ageing of the European population. This is one of the greatest political and economic disasters-in-waiting, about which we are doing very little.

And if we continue to remain indifferent to this problem, an ever-increasing percentage of Europe's population will be old, economically unproductive, an immense drain on resources - particularly in the sphere of public health - and dying; but only very slowly.

Natural remedy

Indeed, large parts of Europe will begin to resemble the great sanatorium of gently putrefying flesh which was the very soul and identity of Davos itself for almost 100 years before tuberculosis, the greatest of all killers in the 19th century, was marginalised as a disease.

After a young doctor discovered in the 1860s that Davos's air and the absence of dust mites slowed the progress of the illness, TB victims from all over Europe and beyond - especially the rich ones - flocked to Davos in the desperate search for a cure.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Kidnapped there while Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired to map out the final struggle between Holmes and Moriaty at the Reichenbach Falls, 80 miles away when accompanying his infirm wife to a Davos sanatorium.

In Davos, one's own mortality echoes around the mountains

They were followed by Thomas Mann, whose monumental work, The Magic Mountain, was conceived and set here.

Taking place on the eve of the greatest carnage of all, the World War I, Mann's novel is an astonishing reflection on life, but above all on the grindingly inevitable approach of death.

All those in Davos were obsessed with failing constitution and their inevitable demise, even those who, like Mann's hero Hans Castorp, arrived perfectly healthy.

In Davos, one's own mortality echoes around the mountains.

Generations before me

I never realised when I first travelled there that the village would compel me to explore its eerie relationship with life and death.

As my father was convalescing from a heart attack in 1990, he confessed that his father, whom he had only seen twice in his life, lay buried somewhere in Davos. He had died there of TB in 1947 and my father suffered a deep sense of guilt for never having visited the grave.

My brother, Paddy, and I took up this vicarious challenge, driving across Europe through huge snowdrifts and over forbidding mountain passes before we finally reached Davos in search of that grave.

Thomas Mann was inspired by Davos to write "The Magic Mountain"

By now, we were also trying to grapple with the bizarre coincidences that our mother had shared with us.

It seems that our maternal great-grandfather, a director of the Lister Institute in the 1920s, played a key role in the development of a TB vaccine and had frequently convalesced from lung conditions himself in Davos. Our maternal grandparents had also met there and it was possible my mother was conceived in the place.

When we reached the chaos of white darkness, in Mann's memorable metaphoric description of the place, our need to find the grave of our grandfather, Air Commodore AWF Glenny, had assumed almost supernatural dimensions. It was as though the family's existence depended upon it.

Discovery

We then stumbled upon one of those experiences so absurd and unlikely...

Paddy and I arrived at the cemetery on a bleak winter afternoon. Our spirits dissolved. The paths and other landmarks were indistinguishable from the headstones.

Everything was sunk deep at the bottom of the crystallised ocean of snow where we had come to fish for a single dead soul.

We waded waste-deep towards the western end where the grave must lie.

We then stumbled upon one of those experiences so absurd and unlikely that one is almost embarrassed in the retelling.

From among the hundreds of graves, the tip of a single headstone poked through as if its resident corpse still had something urgent to say to the living before finally agreeing to join its submerged compatriots.

We thought we might as well start there as anywhere but after just a few handfuls of snow were cleared, the name Arthur Willoughby Falls Glenny became visible.

Before we were able to relate the events of this strange journey to our father, he was dead.

"Moments there are," wrote Thomas Mann, "when out of death and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that love one day shall mount?"

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From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 24 January, 2004 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.