The Magic Mountain

doi:10.1136/bmj.a3032

Published 5 January 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.a3032
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:a3032

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The Magic Mountain

Thomas Rütten

thomas.rutten@newcastle.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, an "ordinaryyoung man." At the beginning of the novel Hans is on his wayfrom Hamburg to Davos to visit his cousin, who is being treatedfor a lung complaint at one of the Swiss resort’s sanatoriums.As the tale unfolds, Hans’s intended three week visitturns into a seven year stint at the sanatorium, which endsonly when Hans is catapulted into the Flanders battlefieldsat the outbreak of the first world war.

To this day The Magic Mountain ranks among the best sellingtitles of its German publisher, Fischer Verlag, which recentlyreissued the novel in a new edition with a separate volume ofdetailed annotations.¹ The swiftly commissioned English translation,published in 1927, as well as Mann’s considerable internationalreputation² (he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in1929), no doubt contributed to the book’s early . . . [Full text of this article]