Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain“ (1987)

A novel of ideas at once serious and comic, The Magic Mountain offers a bird’s-eye view of the political, philosophical, and social landscapes of pre-World War I Europe. This program uses provocative dramatizations of key scenes from Thomas Mann’s grotesque bildungsroman and employs the character of Mann himself, in a re-creation of a 1939 lecture, as a guide to the story’s heights and depths. In addition, Mann’s biographer, Nigel Hamilton, inquires into the story’s manipulation of time and the effects of environment on identity. This is part of the Ten Great Writers of the Modern World series: Ten Great Writers Seminar: Franz Kafka: Fyodor Dostoevksy: Henrik Ibsen: James Joyce: Luigi Pirandello: T.S. Eliot: Joseph Conrad: Virginia Woolf: https://y