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With the outbreak of the World War I Hans Castorp leaves the sanatorium and returns to Germany to fight.

The Magic Mountain is a novel concerned with perspectives of history and philosophy of our time. The magic being exerted on the lives of patients of sanatorium is cutting them off from calendar time. Time flows through their days and years with quiet nothingness and perceptions of reality stretch into eternity. The Magic Mountain is the sick world of Europe, and its people are various aspects of the modern consciousness.

It seems as if Thomas Mann loves the disease, as if his art means devotion to weakness, suffering and death. The Magic Mountain is a collection of the sick people, it is an international meeting place of those who fight with death. This fight goes on in every room of the sanatorium. The theme of agony and death is revealed throughout the book in such a way that it doesn t support the idea of death, but rather steps out as help in exploring the magnificence of life.

Each of the characters Hans meets is a symbol for a strain of thought prevalent in pre-war Germany. Castorp himself is fascinated with ideas of death. Claudia Chauchat is a hedonist. Settembrini is an Italian humanist, secure in his belief that man can be improved through reason. Mann makes all these characters seem spent and sick, their tuberculosis being a sign of social illness. The start of war is symbol that such aesthetic wanderings must come to an end. The novel provides a look at the treatment for tuberculosis at the turn of the century. The disease represents a character itself, coming and going from the lives of the other characters.

The hero of the novel Hans Castorp, is in fact no hero at all. He is just an ordinary, insecure man unable to find solution to the conflicting ideologies of his friends and of his time. Simplicity and commonness is his best quality.

It is my belief that The Magic Mountain in one of the greatest works of 20th century. The story line which is very simple serves as a bracket to hold the immense collections of our opinions and knowledge together. It compiles a huge amount of controversial information and a variety of subjects such as Mathematics, Medicine, Astronomy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, Literature, History and many more. I liked the book very much. It opened up my horizons.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. S. Fischer Verlag, 1924.

2)(www.gsprize.com/theme_8.html)

3)(www.zelda.thomson.com/rootledge/who/germany/mann.html)

4) (www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmann.htm)

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