Zachary Davis: The novel is set in a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients high up in the Swiss Alps. I'm a comparative literature professor at Yale University. It sort of covers everything in the world, and it covers it in a sort of funny, ironic way, but it's a very, very deep novel, and it really merits rereading. Pericles Lewis: Mann was a great novelist because he took fairly modern techniques, sort of slightly experimental techniques, but he applied them to the major issues of his time, to the problem of to what degree can we believe in rationality, to the problem of self-interest and love and lust and desire and how they blind our search for truth to the problem of death. The German author Thomas Mann used this pandemic as the backdrop for his 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain. On average, one in seven people died from tuberculosis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition, a tuberculosis pandemic had a firm grip on Europe and the United States. In the midst of this apparent golden age, darker forces of nationalism and class resentment were brewing beneath the surface. The bourgeois class was flourishing and Germany’s industrialized economy was the strongest in Europe. Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress dominated. Their scientists and artists were the envy of the world. Zachary Davis: In the early 20th century, you could make a strong claim that Germany was the leading country on earth.
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