The Modern World: Ten Great Writers — Season 1, Episode 5: Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

Episode synopsis

A novel of ideas at once serious and comic, The Magic Mountain offers a bird’s-eye view of the political, philosophical, and social landscapes of pre-World War I Europe. This program uses provocative dramatizations of key scenes from Thomas Mann’s grotesque bildungsroman and employs the character of Mann himself, in a re-creation of a 1939 lecture, as a guide to the story’s heights and depths. In addition, Mann’s biographer, Nigel Hamilton, inquires into the story’s manipulation of time and the effects of environment on identity.

About The Modern World: Ten Great Writers

This documentary series uses drama and commentary to shed light on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Luigi Pirandello, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.

More episodes from Season 1

• E1James Joyce: Ulysses
• E2Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent
• E3Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'
• E4Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
• E6Henrik Ibsen: The Master Playwright
• E7Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
• E8Luigi Pirandello: In Search of an Author
• E9T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
• E10Franz Kafka: The Trial
• E11Ten Great Writers: The Seminar