WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM: The setting for Thomas Mann's novel of disease and decay is, a century on, a place where the health of the global economy is examined

NEW ARRIVALS to the blinding snow landscape of Davos are greeted with a sign promising “well-prepared pistes”. Two metres of snow have fallen so far this year – a new record – but the political and business elite arriving today are braced for exertion that has nothing to do with winter sports.

A century ago, a young German novelist named Thomas Mann arrived here to visit his wife, Katia, at the Waldhotel sanatorium, where she was taking in the crisp mountain air to recover from TB.

Struck by the morbid atmosphere of both the clinic and town, he made Davos the setting of his seminal 1924 novel, Der Zauberberg(The Magic Mountain), about a young man who, while visiting a sick cousin here, falls ill and himself stays on for seven years as a patient.

An allegory on disease and decay, Mann’s sprawling novel explored the decline of the European bourgeoisie before the first World War. Among the lengthy Mann sentences, the novel’s most memorable quote is its shortest: “Everything is politics.”

A century on, everything and nothing has changed in Davos. Today the patient is the world economy, with Europe in particular on the critical list. World political and business leaders know that cash and confidence, not mountain air, are what is needed to fix the patient. But what is the correct dose?

Yesterday, the deserted main promenade through Davos felt like a lock-down before a tornado.

A local, catching sight of a cluster of journalists sighed, “Here they are, the ants”, before trudging off in the snow with provisions.

Most Davos locals try to keep out of the way until the annual storm passes; those who can leave are gone, renting their scarce accommodation at €500 a night.

“A lot of people I know would like to get away from here but have to work,” said Melanie Hämmerle, in the town’s deserted travel agency. “You get used to the barriers and security, though it’s a far more pleasant place the other 51 weeks of the year.”

Today the focus is no longer the Waldhotel sanatorium, still perched on a hill over the town, but the Belvedere hotel and new congress centre.

Aside from business and political leaders, the guest list runs the gamut from celebrity to wannabe, from Huffington Post publisher Arianna Huffington to “JR”, a French artist whose self-penned biography calls himself a “photograffeur . . . whose identity is unconfirmed”.

As traditional as the annual forum is the anti-forum protest. Near the train station, an Occupy World Economic Forum camp of igloos is being built. Down the road, opposite a Barclays Bank, a few protesters carved a message in the snow: “Capitalism Kills.”

In the chilly Davos sun yesterday, metre-long icicles dangling dangerously from chalet roofs appeared a more immediate threat.

As the real VIPs arrive this afternoon and evening by limousine and helicopter to meet, greet, gossip and plot, they all insist that Davos is a place of ideas and ideals. But, as Mann noted in The Magic Mountain, "What good would politics be if it didn't give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?"