Tristan Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain

Several literary and other works make reference to Mann's book The Magic Mountain, including:

• Frederic Tuten's 1993 novel Tintin in the New World features many characters (such as Clavdia Chauchat, Mynheer Peeperkorn and others) from The Magic Mountain interacting with Tintin in Peru.
• Andrew Crumey's novel Mobius Dick (2004) imagines an alternative universe where an author named Behring has written novels resembling Mann's. These include a version of The Magic Mountain with Erwin Schrödinger in place of Castorp.
• Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood (1987), in which the main character is criticized for reading The Magic Mountain while visiting a friend in a sanatorium.
• The song "Magic Mountain" by the band Blonde Redhead.
• The painting Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann) by Christiaan Tonnis (1987). "The Magic Mountain" is also a chapter in Tonnis's 2006 book Krankheit als Symbol ("Illness as a Symbol").[34]
• The 1941 film 49th Parallel, in which the character Philip Armstrong Scott unknowingly praises Mann's work to an escaped World War II Nazi U-boat commander, who later responds by burning Scott's copy of The Magic Mountain.
• In Ken Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), character Indian Jenny purchases a Thomas Mann novel and tries to find out "just where was this mountain full of magic..." (p. 578).
• Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 film The Wind Rises, in which an unnamed German man at a mountain resort invokes the novel as cover for furtively condemning the rapidly arming Hitler and Hirohito regimes. After he flees to escape the Japanese secret police, the protagonist, who fears his own mail is being read, refers to him as the novel's Mr. Castorp. The film is partly based on another Japanese novel, set like The Magic Mountain in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
• Father John Misty's 2017 album Pure Comedy contains a song titled "So I'm Growing Old on Magic Mountain", in which a man, near death, reflects on the passing of time and the disappearance of his Dionysian youth in homage to the themes in Mann's novel.[35]
• Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning relates the "time-experience" of Holocaust prisoners to TB patients in The Magic Mountain: "How paradoxical was our time-experience! In this connection we are reminded of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Mann studies the spiritual development of people who are in an analogous psychological position, i.e., tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existence—without a future and without a goal."
• The movie A Cure For Wellness, directed by Gore Verbinski, was inspired by and is somewhat a modernization, somewhat a parody, of The Magic Mountain.[36] In one scene, an orderly at the asylum can be seen reading Der Zauberberg.
• The album cover for Peter Schickele's recording of P.D.Q. Bach's "Bluegrass Cantata" shows an illustration of the 18th Century German bluegrass ensemble Tommy Mann and his Magic Mountain Boys.

Death in Venice

Many literary and other works make reference to Death in Venice, including:

• Luchino Visconti's 1971 film version of Mann's novella.
• Benjamin Britten's 1973 operatic adaptation in two acts of Mann's novella.
• Woody Allen's film Annie Hall (1977) refers to the novella.
• Joseph Heller's 1994 novel, Closing Time, which makes several references to Thomas Mann and Death in Venice.
• Alexander McCall Smith's novel Portuguese Irregular Verbs (1997) has a final chapter entitled "Death in Venice" and refers to Thomas Mann by name in that chapter.
• Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain (2000).
• Rufus Wainwright's 2001 song "Grey Gardens", which mentions the character Tadzio in the refrain.
• Alan Bennett's 2009 play The Habit of Art, in which Benjamin Britten is imagined paying a visit to W. H. Auden about the possibility of Auden writing the libretto for Britten's opera Death in Venice.
• David Rakoff's essay "Shrimp", which appears in his 2010 collection Half Empty, makes a humorous comparison between Mann's Aschenbach and E. B. White's Stuart Little.
• Two main characters in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl make a spoof film titled Death in Tennis.
• 'A Good Year' 2006 film.
• In the MTV animated series Daria, Daria Morgendorffer receives from Tom Sloane a first-edition English translation as a present ("One J at a Time, Season 5, Episode 8, 2001) and is ridiculed by her sister, Quinn, for having a boyfriend who only gives her "a used book".

Other

• Hayavadana (1972), a play by Girish Karnad, was based on a theme drawn from The Transposed Heads and employed the folk theatre form of Yakshagana. A German version of the play was directed by Vijaya Mehta as part of the repertoire of the Deutsches National Theatre, Weimar.[37] A staged musical version of The Transposed Heads, adapted by Julie Taymor and Sidney Goldfarb, with music by Elliot Goldenthal, was produced at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and the Lincoln Center in New York in 1988.
• Mann's 1896 short story "Disillusionment" is the basis for the Leiber and Stoller song "Is That All There Is?", famously recorded in 1969 by Peggy Lee.[38]
• In a 1994 essay, Umberto Eco suggests that the media discuss "Whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections" as an alternative to "Whether Joyce is boring".[39]
• Mann's life in California during World War II, including his relationships with his older brother Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht is a subject of Christopher Hampton's play Tales from Hollywood.[40]
• Colm Tóibín's 2021 fictionalised biography The Magician is a portrait of Mann in the context of his family and political events.[41]