Why a Booktrail?
1920s: A sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, is more of a microcosm for Europe
The Magic Mountain
What you need to know before your trail
Hans Castorp is ‘a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man’ when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic – ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.
Locations
Reset- Switzerland - Swiss Alps
- A: Davos - Amselflue
- B: Davos - Alpinum Schatzalp
- C: Davos - Train station
- D: Davos - Jakobshorn
Travel Guide
Davos, Swiss Alps
The whole novel takes place in and around Davos in a fictional yet exclusive sanatorium. The sanatorium represents “a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe”
“An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graubünden. It was the height of summer, and he planned to stay for three weeks.”
The title of the novel derives from Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”:
“Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain had opened before us and revealed its roots to us. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians.”
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Magic Mountain
Destination : The Swiss Alps, Davos Author/Guide: Thomas Mann Departure Time: 1920s
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