How Thomas Mann Wrote the Magic Mountain

In case you know german and like audiobooks, I highly recommend the following version of Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)

https://hoerspiele.dra.de/detailansicht/1426911

(No download link there)

It is a great book, certainly made an impression on me.

> an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption

I assume "burgher" is a misspelling of German "Bürger"? There are "Burgher people" but Thomas Mann doesn't seem to be one of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgher_people

    [1a] Einwohner einer Gemeinde
    [1b] Angehöriger eines Staates
    [2] Angehöriger der Mittelschicht, des Bürgertums

  burgher noun
  ...
  1: an inhabitant of a borough or a town
  2: a member of the middle class : a prosperous solid citizen

It is one of the funniest book I ever read.

Thomas Mann has the most subtle humour.

I found this book (idk which English translation) unreadable when I looked at it in college. Maybe I should try again.

Interesting to see a new book on this, but disappointing that it seems to re-tread much of what was already known of the author --- maybe this is going to be a trend/standard for future writing about authors and their works for this window of time where folks still wrote letters? It is now possible to exhaustively analyze such correspondence far more easily than the laborious manual pouring over of photocopies and archives (for Mann, apparently, in addition to Yale, Baylor, Princeton, and the University of Bonn and the Library of Congress hold extensive collections).

Makes one wonder what will happen with recent and contemporary authors --- will their e-mail correspondence survive to be preserved? I know I've lost access to two major sets of my e-mails from previous employers and will lose access to the current one at my retirement (unless I go back as an annuitant? Copy the Outlook .pst archive?) --- at one point in time, Barry Hughart's (typewritten!) notes for his books were available on-line, but they have since vanished....

Interesting, and I'll have to add it to my to-be-read stack --- wondering if Hesse will get the same treatment (or already has and I missed it?) --- his _The Glass Bead Game_ was quite influential on me and probably is why I'm fascinated by software tools such as OpenSCAD Graph Editor.

What makes Morten Høi Jensen’s study so timely is how it highlights Mann’s own transformation. The Magic Mountain isn't just a 'modernist summit'; it’s a record of a man watching his world slide into the abyss of authoritarianism. Seeing the clash between Settembrini’s humanism and Naphta’s radicalism feels less like 1924 and more like a mirror to our current 2026 political climate. It reminds us that intellectual debates aren't just academic they are the symptoms of a society's terminal irrationality

If you haven’t read it, Standsrd Ebooks have a US public domain translation available: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-mann/the-magic-moun...