3.0

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Average Course Rating

Taught in English. Stranded for seven years in an Alpine sanatorium, a young engineer is granted a highly unusual education, one that is at turns hilarious and stirring. He gains initiation into the mysteries of life, death, and love, and finds himself caught in the middle of dazzling arguments animated by the ideological conflicts of a continent on the brink of world war. A unique blend of comic portrayal, essayistic reflection, and ironic narration allows Mann to develop an absorbing panorama and an acute diagnosis of cultural crisis, making his novel from 1924 a key work of modernism. We will discuss the novel against the backdrop of the cultural currents and political developments to which it responds.