Thomas Mann & The Magic Mountain
World Literature & Nobel Prize
Birth of the Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann wrote a large number of novels in his time and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the most important novels in his oeuvre is "The Magic Mountain". A story set in the time of tuberculosis in Davos. Experienced up close.
Hans Castorp, the main character in Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain", is actually in perfect health. He visits his cousin in a Davos sanatorium, who is being kept in Davos by the doctors as a precaution because of signs of tuberculosis. Castorp - fascinated by life in the sanatorium - redefines the image of the sick person for himself. Illness ennobles people, he believes. Healthy people, on the other hand, are just simple-minded. Life in the sanatorium becomes the measure of all things for Castorp...
World literature and Nobel Prize
The novel "The Magic Mountain" became world literature. Thomas Mann got the inspiration for the story from his own stay in Davos. His wife Katia fell ill with tuberculosis and traveled to the Davos forest sanatorium for a treatment. This gave Thomas Mann well-founded, first-hand accounts of life in the sanatorium. Five years after the novel was published, the writer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Sweden, which made his entire work immortal. Just as Thomas Mann probably imagined in his speech on his 50th birthday: "If I have one wish for the posthumous fame of my work, it is that it should be said that it is friendly to life, even though it knows about death."
Speaking of Thomas Mann in Davos
Today, guests can still follow in the footsteps of Thomas Mann and his literary classic “The Magic Mountain.” For example, during a visit to the Hotel Schatzalp, on the Thomas Mann Trail or in the Waldhotel Davos.
Hotel Schatzalp & Thomas Mann Trail
On the Schatzalp, where readers of the Thomas Mann bestseller The Magic Mountain are set, the ambience and the attitude to life in the midst of pure Art Nouveau architecture are almost as they were 100 years ago. The architecture of the sanatorium has been preserved. The terraces where the sanatorium patients once recovered from tuberculosis are now used by hotel guests to sunbathe. In memory of Thomas Mann, a path named after him has been created that leads from the Waldhotel Davos to the Schatzalp.
Waldhotel Davos
The Waldhotel Davos was run as a forest sanatorium until 1957. Katia Mann was one of the first patients in the forest sanatorium, which opened in 1911. She was cured of her pulmonary catarrh here. When her husband Thomas Mann visited her in the spring of 1912, he was inspired to write his famous novel "The Magic Mountain". His impressions and letters that his wife wrote to him from the sanatorium led to his novel, which he worked on between 1913 and 1915 and which he completed in 1924 after a break of several years.
