The Magic Mountain Study Guide

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, German Empire (present-day Germany) to a bourgeois family. After Mann’s father, a senator and grain merchant, died in 1891, the family moved to Munich, where Mann studied at the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich. Mann lived in Munich from 1891 to 1933 and began his writing career there, working as an editor for the satirical magazine Simplicissimus and publishing his first short story, “Little Mr Friedemann,” in 1898. He married Katia Pringsheim in 1905; the couple had six children together. In 1912, Mann’s wife moved to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland for several months to receive treatment for a respiratory illness. Mann visited her in Davos several times, and his experiences there would serve as inspiration for his novel The Magic Mountain, which he began writing that year. The onset of World War I in 1914, however, would bring this project to a halt. Though Mann initially supported the German Empire’s nationalist cause, he gradually came to embrace democratic ideals following the German Republic’s establishment in 1919. The themes Mann examines in The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, demonstrate the gradual political conversion Mann underwent during this time. Mann, warned that it would not be safe to return to Munich following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, lived in Switzerland for a time before emigrating to the United States in 1938. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944. Though he visited both East and West Germany in the years following World War II, he never returned to Germany to live. His later notable works include novels Lottie in Weimar: The Beloved Returns and Doctor Faustus, as well as several essays about the moral obligations of writers. In general, his works, particularly early ones, are characterized by a deep philosophical bent and the creative individual’s struggle between the world of imagination and real, ordinary life. He died in August 1955 at the age of 80 in Zürich.

Thomas Mann began work on The Magic Mountain in 1912, but the project was interrupted when World War I broke out in 1914. Though not an overtly political work, given the allegorical implications of the story’s setting (an international sanatorium in the years leading up to the war), it is impossible not to read the novel without reflecting on the sociopolitical tensions that laid the foundation for the conflict. Historians identify numerous factors as long-term and immediate causes of World War I. While the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the intended heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) by a Serbian nationalist was the event that triggered Austria-Hungary to declare war, broader issues such as European imperial expansion, a rise in nationalism across the continent (but in Serbia, in particular), and tension among alliances involving European powers, Russia, and the Ottoman empire all laid the foundation for the conflict. Prior to the onset of World War I, countries across the continent had formed alliances, with powers vowing to support one another should war break out between an allied country and an outside country. One alliance formed in 1907 between France, Britain, and Russia and was known as the Triple Entente. The alliance was a particularly significant source of tension, with the German Empire—located geographically and ideologically at the center of these Western and Eastern powers—seeing its creation as a political and existential threat. As tensions between alliances grew, nations declared war against other nations on a smaller scale, eventually resulting in the formation of two sides of the war: the Allied Powers (Russia, France, and Great Britain) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire).

Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), follows the generational decline of a wealthy German family. While the origins of The Magic Mountain’s Hans Castorp borrow certain elements from Mann’s upbringing, Buddenbrooks draws more heavily from Mann’s own family history. Mann originally intended for The Magic Mountain to be a novella-length satirical accompaniment to his 1912 Death in Venice, a novella about an older writer who abandons his disciplined, honorable character for pleasure and self-indulgence when he travels to Venice and becomes obsessed with a young boy, a transformation that ultimately leads to his titular demise. Mann has influenced a number of later authors, including Yukio Mishima, whose notable works include Confessions of a Mask, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and The Sound of Waves. Finally, The Magic Mountain is a Bildungsroman, a literary genre that follows a protagonist’s psychological and moral development as they come of age. Other notable coming-of-age stories include Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, What Maisie Knew by Henry James, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.