Castorp’s friend Joachim Ziemssen is taking the cure, and a three-week visit seems a perfect break before work begins. The year is 1912, and an oblivious world is on the brink of war. Hans Castorp is, on the face of it, an ordinary man in his early 20s, on course to start a career in ship engineering in his home town of Hamburg, when he decides to travel to the Berghof Santatorium in Davos. Then, it was instantly recognised as a masterpiece and led to Mann’s Nobel Prize in 1929. Its unusual story - it opens with a young man visiting a friend in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - was originally started by Mann in 1912 but was not completed until 1924. It was The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) that confirmed Thomas Mann as a Nobel prizewinner for literature and rightly so, for it is undoubtedly one of the great novels of the 20th century.
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