Barbara Heldt

Nov 27, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Karolina Watroba |Barbara Heldt |Eric Naiman |Piotr Gwiazda

Thomas Mann’s modernist magnum opus The Magic Mountain, a landmark novel of ideas-cum-comedy of manners set in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, was published on November 28, 1924. On the German literary scene that year, its publication dramatically overshadowed an event that had taken place six months earlier in another TB sanatorium: the death of Franz Kafka.

Oct 30, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | European Literature |Barbara Heldt

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Feb 7, 2023 | the-tls.co.uk | European Literature |Ian Ellison |Karolina Watroba |Barbara Heldt

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain can get under your skin. I first read it in intense bursts during a period of ill health shortly after moving to Germany. Its account of dislocation and realignment thrilled and disturbed me. The inhabitants of the Berghof sanatorium seemed hardly to be characters at all, let alone people; they were ideas and intensities, the novel they populated disorienting, stimulating and weirdly funny. When I finished it, I was left in a state of dreamlike intoxication.