The Magic Mountain

"The Magic Mountain" is a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Its inhabitants are forced to stay here for years, communicating with the outside world only through rare letters and telegrams. Time flows unnoticed here, life and death lose their meaning, while the slightest nuances of human relationships, on the contrary, acquire a painful sharpness and significance. Love, joy, friendship, enmity, jealousy for the inhabitants of the sanatorium seem to be marked by the shadow of non-being…
This story has many possible interpretations - a powerful philosophical exploration of the fundamentals of life, a subtle psychological analysis of different types of human character and relationships, a dive into the history of culture, religion, and history in general - Mann depicted society on the eve of World War I.