It is a time-novel in two different meanings: first in the historical sense as it attempts to compose the internal picture of an epoch, namely the European prewar-time second because the pure time itself is its very content, which the novel not only treats as the experience of its protagonist, but also in and through itself. Thus, The Magic Mountain constitutes a “time novel” in a double sense: Without doubt this very historic constellation lends the novel its “incomparable intellectual vibrancy” and makes it “a chief exhibit in any investigation of German mentalité in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” īesides inscribing itself into the text in terms of historical background, the time that passes during the novel’s creation process also turns into its very subject in the end, the text is a narration about the passage of time itself. It is the crucial period of World War I that interrupts his work process repeatedly and that leaves traces––not only in the author’s changing political point of view but also in the text itself. The Magic Mountain ( Der Zauberberg) was first published in 1924, yet Thomas Mann (1875–1955) already began his work on the novel in 1913.
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