Hans’s stay is meant to last three weeks Joachim warns his cousin that time at the sanatorium does not conform to anyone’s expectations. Joachim has been staying in the International Sanatorium Berghof, which is in the Swiss Alps near the town of Davos, in a location so far above sea level that the air is thin and birdsong is rare.

Hans Castorp takes a break from his engineering studies in Hamburg to visit his cousin, an officer in training named Joachim Ziemssen, who has tuberculosis. This study guide refers to the 1995 translation from the German by John E. The novel was Mann’s first to reach wide international acclaim and helped secure him a Nobel prize. Rapid technological changes were shrinking the world advancements in medicine and the relentless exploitation and colonization of a global working class created to substantial changes to the health and prosperity of the European and American bourgeoisie.Ī Modernist bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, The Magic Mountain takes place throughout the decade leading up to World War I and explores these global technological and ideological shifts through its main protagonist, Hans Castorp. The telegraph and railway were giving way to the motorcar and radio. World War I was the culmination of many upheavals to the global order that took place within Mann’s lifetime. He relocated to the United States and became a U.S. During World War II, he was exiled from Germany, where Nazis burned copies of The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp-such as the young man’s name-sat alone in his little grey-upholstered compartment, with his alligator-skin handbag, a present from his uncle and guardian.Mann was born in 1875, just four years after the creation of the modern state of Germany and the failed revolutionary Commune of France.

You mount a narrow-gauge train and as the small but very powerful engine gets underway, there begins the thrilling part of the journey, a steep and steady climb that seems never to come to an end.įor the station of Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude, but now the wild and rocky route pushes grimly onward into the Alps themselves. Here, after a long and windy wait in a spot devoid of charm. You take the train again, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station, where you have to change. It crosses all sorts of countries, goes uphill and down dale.ĭescends from the plateau of Southern Germany to the shore of Lake Constance, over its bounding waves and on across marshes once thought to be bottomless.Īt this point, the route, which has been so far over trunk lines, gets up. AN UNASSUMING young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.įrom Hamburg to Davos is a long journey – too long, indeed, for so brief a stay.

The magic mountain novel