In November 1924, a masterwork of 20th-century literature was published: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, a young German from Hamburg who visits his cousin in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.
What begins as a three-week trip becomes a months-long stay in a work that is a reflection on life and death, a classic Bildungsroman, and a critique of pre-World War-1 European society swept away by the conflict.
This documentary revisits Mann’s classic novel one hundred years after its first publication and demonstrates why it continues to be relevant in today’s world.