The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature. Mann's vast composition is erudite, subtle, ambitious, but, most of all, ambiguous; since its original publication it has been subject to a variety of critical assessments. For example, the book blends a scrupulous realism with deeper symbolic undertones. Given this complexity, each reader is obliged to interpret the significance of the pattern of events in the narrative, a task made more difficult by the author's irony. Mann was well aware of his book's elusiveness, but offered few clues about approaches to the text. He later compared it to a symphonic work orchestrated with a number of themes. In a playful commentary on the problems of interpretation—"The Making of The Magic Mountain", written 25 years after the novel's original publication—he recommended that those who wished to understand it should read it twice. Background Mann started writing The Magic Mountain in 1912. It began as a much shorter narrative that comically revisited the aspects of Death in Venice, a novella that he was preparing for publication. The newer work reflected his experiences and impressions during a period when his wife, who was suffering from a lung complaint, resided at Dr. in Davos, Switzerland, for several months. In May and June 1912, Mann visited her and became acquainted with the team of doctors and patients in this cosmopolitan institution. According to Mann, in the afterword that was later included in the English translation of his novel, this stay inspired his opening chapter ("Arrival"). The outbreak of World War I interrupted his work on the book. Like many other Germans, Mann supported the German Empire, and his own mental state he described as "sympathy with death"; he wrote essays "Gedanken im Kriege", "Gute Feldpost" and "Friedrich und die große Koalition", examples of his "intellectual military service" which he regarded as his duty. However, his position was shaken by the anti-war intellectuals such as his older brother Heinrich Mann, who, unlike Thomas, did not support the German state: on the contrary, he wrote the satirical novel Der Untertan and the essay "Zola", where he defended idea of the inevitable defeat of Germany which would lead to Germany becoming a democracy.