Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Suspense
  3. Political novels

Read and listen for free for 14 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
0.0(0)

The Magic Mountain : [Complete & Annotated]

The Magic Mountain (German: Der Zauberberg) 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 started writing what was to become The Magic Mountain in 1912. It began as a much shorter narrative which revisited in a comic manner 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. Friedrich Jessen's Waldsanatorium 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. The savage conflict and its aftermath led the author to undertake a major re-examination of European bourgeois society. He explored the sources of the destructiveness displayed by much of civilised humanity. He was also drawn to speculate about more general questions related to personal attitudes to life, health, illness, sexuality and mortality. Given this, Mann felt compelled to radically revise and expand the pre-war text before completing it in 1924. Der Zauberberg was eventually published in two volumes by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin.

The narrative opens in the decade before World War I. It introduces the protagonist, Hans Castorp, the only child of a Hamburg merchant family. Following the early death of his parents, Castorp has been brought up by his grandfather and later, by a maternal uncle named James Tienappel. Castorp is in his early 20s, about to take up a shipbuilding career in Hamburg, his home town. Before beginning work, he undertakes a journey to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. In the opening chapter, Castorp leaves his familiar life and obligations, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to visit the rarefied mountain air and introspective small world of the sanatorium.


Author:

  • Thomas Mann

Format:

  • E-book

Duration:

  • 753 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Suspense
  • Political novels
  • Suspense
  • Alternative thrillers

More by Thomas Mann

Skip the list
  1. Trolddomsbjerget : Bind 1-2

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook
  2. Doctor Faustus

    Thomas Mann

    audiobook
  3. Herre og hund

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook
  4. 50 Timeless Masterpieces (Volume 1) : Essential Classics for a Rich Literary Journey

    Homer, Sun Tzu, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, L. M. Montgomery, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, George Orwell

    book
  5. Den Udvalgte

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook
  6. Buddenbrooks

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook
  7. Doktor Faustus : Forord ved Ursula Andkjær Olsen

    Thomas Mann

    book
  8. Tidlige fortællinger : 1893-1912

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook
  9. Døden i Venedig

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook
  10. Joseph and His Brothers: Book 2 : Young Joseph

    Thomas Mann

    audiobook
  11. Joseph and His Brothers: Book 1 : The Tales of Jacob

    Thomas Mann

    audiobook
  12. Taikavuori

    Thomas Mann

    audiobookbook

  • 38 books

    Thomas Mann

    German essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Among his most famous works are Buddenbrooks, published when he was just twenty-six, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus.

    Read more

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5