The Magic Mountain Background

The Magic Mountain Background

"The Magic Mountain" is a philosophical novel of the German writer Thomas Mann, published by Fischer in 1924.

"The Magic Mountain" for its many motifs has a lot in common with the earlier story of Mann's "Tristan" (1903), in which the protagonist carries his beloved TB patient in a mountain resort.

The reason for writing the novel was the visit of Thomas Mann to his wife Katia, who at the time was in one of the resorts of Davos. During his three-week stay in a sanatorium, Thomas Mann personally got acquainted with the daily life of "up there", about which he already knew of some detail of the many letters of his wife. At first, he intended to write about people who revel in their own disease and "groom" it in order to avoid real-life tests.

Work on the "The Magic Mountain" Thomas Mann started in 1912 having interrupted the writing of the novel "Confessions of Felix Krull." The First World War forced him to stop work. He took up the novel again only in 1920. The pre-planned short story has grown to a two-volume novel. In 1924 the book was published.

In 1929, five years after the writing of the novel, Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize.

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