The Magic Mountain

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The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), published in 1924 by Thomas Mann, is a towering European Bildungsroman and novel of ideas. It follows young German engineer Hans Castorp, who visits a cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, for a planned three-week stay and ends up remaining for seven years until the outbreak of World War I. Although Mann's 1929 Nobel Prize citation highlighted Buddenbrooks, NobelPrize.org notes The Magic Mountain as one of his defining masterworks. Inspired by Mann's 1912 visit to a Davos sanatorium where his wife Katia was being treated for tuberculosis. First published in Berlin by S. Fischer Verlag in 1924 in two volumes totaling 1,207 pages (578 and 629 pages). Uses the isolated alpine sanatorium as a microcosm of pre-WWI European intellectual, political, and scientific debates—ranging from humanism and mysticism to disease and time.