The Magic Mountain

Set at the very beginning of the 20th century and first published in 1924, "The Magic Mountain" recounts the singular experience of Hans Castorp, a young engineer from a Hamburg industrial family who, in 1907, travels to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is undergoing a cure at the Berghof sanatorium in the alpine resort of Davos. The young Hamburg engineer, fascinated by the microcosm of the "people up there", is lulled by their strange rhythm of life; he soon discovers that he has a very peculiar pathology that affected both body and mind.

His stay in the establishment run by the consultant, Dr Behrens, gives him the opportunity to discover a gallery of main characters, each embodying a facet of the era: the Italian Lodovico Settembrini, a Freemason and advocate of Reason and Progress; the mystic and Jesuit novice Léon Naphta, an implacable contemptor of capitalist bourgeois society. There is also the hedonistic and truculent Mynheer Peeperkorn and his bewitching companion Clawdia Chauchat, or Dr Krokovski, Behrens's assistant, a fledgling psychoanalyst and prolific lecturer. The novel illustrates several leitmotifs dear to Thomas Mann: the seduction of death, the links between ethics and aesthetics, the independence of spirit of the artist and the extreme sensitivity of certain "misguided" bourgeois.

Shaken and transformed by these contradictory influences, Hans Castorp, whose stay lasts only three weeks, will not return from the "Magic Mountain", from the "world above", until seven years later; he will have seen the deaths of several of his close friends, including Joachim, and lived through a singular experience that transformed his vision of the world. Without transition, he plunges into the violence of the First World War.