(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.The Magic Mountaintakes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alpsa community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. Acclaimed translator John E. Woods has given us the definitive English version of Mann's masterpiece. A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment,The Magic Mountainis an enduring classic.

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.

In 1912 Thomas Mann's wife, Katja, stayed in Dr Friedrich Jessen's 'Waldsanatorium' from March to September, suffering from a lung complaint. Mann himself visited her for four weeks in May and June. During that time, he said, he suffered a troublesome catarrh of the upper air passages, owing to the damp, cold atmosphere on the balcony. The consultant diagnosed a 'moist spot' of tubercular infection, just as Dr Behrens in the novel diagnoses Hans Castorp. Mann, however, did not stay in the magic mountain, but hastened back to Flatland and Munich, where his own doctor advised him to pay no attention. There is an ironic twist to this story which would have amused the novelist Katja, it appears was misdiagnosed, whereas Mann himself, in his post-mortem, was indeed seen to bear the marks of an earlier tubercular illness. This is the biographical germ of the novel. Its intellectual germ is related to Mann's great novella, Death in Venice. Death in Venice was a classically constructed tragedy of the fall of a great artist and intellectual. The Magic Mountain was to be the satyr play that accompanied the tragedy the comic and parodic tale of a jeune homme moyen sensuel, caught up in the dance of death, amongst the macabre crew of the sanatorium. Both tales represented the fate of someone out of context, on a holiday visit, encountering love, sickness and death with a peculiarly German mixture of fascination and resignation. Work on the novella was interrupted by the First World War. Mann spent the war years writing passionately in support of the German cause. His 'Thoughts in War', his praise of Frederick the Great as a man of action, his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, are definitions of the German genius which, he asserts, is concerned with Nature, not Mind, with Culture as opposed to Civilization, with military organization and soldierly virtues. Culture is compatible with all kinds of horrors oracles, magic, pederasty, human sacrifice, orgiastic cults, inquisition, witch-trials etc. by which civilization would be repelled; for civilization is Reason, Enlightenment, moderation, manners, scepticism, disintegration Mind (Geist).* *T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Culture is German. Civilization is predominantly French. Mann opposes Frederick the Great and Voltaire as archetypes of the opposition. Voltaire is a man of thought; Frederick, a greater hero, is a man of action. What Mann was arguing was very much what most German artists and writers were arguing the 'decadent' took strength from a sudden nationalist identification. There was, also, a personal battle furiously pursued through the battle of ideas. Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, was against the war, and in favour of socialism, civilization and reason. In November 1915 Heinrich Mann published an essay on Zola, praising Zola's defence of Dreyfus, praising Zola as a civilized 'intellectual', castigating those in France (and by implication those in Germany) who compromised themselves by supporting unjust rulers and warmongers. There is a sense in which the wartime attitudes of the brothers mirror the conflict between the civilized Settembrini and the spiritual nihilist Naphta, in the novel as we read it. And in Thomas Mann's Unpolitical Reflections (published in October 1918) he makes a direct attack on his brother, in the figure of the Zivilisationsliterat, who claims that he sides with Life, Reason, Progress, and is against death and decay. He quotes the author of 'that lyrical-political poem which has Emile Zola as its hero' as saying he himself has 'the gift of life . . . the deepest sympathy with life'. Man