I don't watch every episode, but I like Strange Lucidity YouTube channel. I don't know her name. She's a European literature student, Austrian, and goes to France at some point. She speaks in English, and read a little of the German just for a small taste to hear it for her English speaking audience. She has a sweet demeanor. She worked with people with disabilities, if I remember correctly. Anyway, she gave an introduction, and gives her email address. So I'm going to try and read this book.
Kickoff video on YouTube.
She prefers the John E. Woods translation to the other.
The Magic Mountain was published in 1924, and I missed the centennial last year.
Thomas Mann lived 1875-1955. He lived a life of a repressed homosexual married to a woman.
First he studied sciences, then history, economics, art history and literature for journalism. Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933 except he lived in Palestrina Italy for a year with his novelist brother. In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. She converted to Lutheranism. They had 6 children. They had a country house until they fled Germany. He left Germany in 1933 because of Hitler, moved to Switzerland, then to the USA 1939 and moved to Switzerland in 1952.
When Hitler took power, "He was doubtful at first, because, with a certain naïveté, he could not imagine the violence of the overthrow and the persecution of opponents of the regime, but the children insisted, and their advice later turned out to be accurate when it emerged that even their driver-caretaker had become an informant and that Mann's immediate arrest would have been very likely."
He received Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936, even though he had never lived there.
Reddit wisdom: "The book is best known for representing the "Befindlichkeit" - roughly translates to state of mind - between the nations in Europe before the first world war. A practical tip: longer reading sessions are more rewarding than lots of short ones, that way you'll get into the lull of the mountain... Edit: as a sidenote, the buddenbrooks - decline of a family, is his other masterpiece, it is more accessible and more of a page turner, it is the easier way if you first try to get into Thomas Mann. I still prefer magic mountain though!" (Befindlichkeit)
Links:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Notes:
3/23/25:
In Greek mythology, Lethe was one of the rivers of the underworld of Hades. Also known as the Amelēs potamos (river of unmindfulness), the Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. The river was often associated with Lethe, the personification of forgetfulness and oblivion, who was the daughter of Eris (Strife). In Classical Greek, the word lethe (λήθη) literally means "forgetting", "forgetfulness".
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