Departure is Liberation: All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach @seagullbooks #germanlitmonth

On a journey the face of reality changes with the mountains and rivers, with the architecture of the buildings, the layout of the gardens, with the language, the skin colour. And yesterday’s reality burns on in the pain of parting; the day before yesterday’s is a finished episode, never to return; what happened a month ago is a dream, a past life. (“The Steppe”) Swiss writer, photographer and…

German Literature Month is almost over and we’re closing this year with a GDR week. I chose a book by one of the most famous authors from the former German Democratic Republic. Christa Wolf is the author of Cassandra, Medea, Divided Heaven, No Place on Earth, The Quest for Christa T. and many others. Apart from Medea, I’ve read the ones just mentioned. Cassandra is considered her best, but my…

Time – Boredom – Madness Thomas Mann said that The Magic Mountain was first and foremost a “Zeitroman”, a novel about time. Time in a double sense. First about historical time and then about the perception of time. There are many passages about time, most of which are written from the point of view of Hans Castorp. The longer he stays at the sanatorium, the more his perception and experience of…

Illness – Therapy – Death Set in a lung sanatorium, The Magic Mountain is not only a novel about time (which I will discuss in part 4) but also a novel about illness. Not just any illness, but tuberculosis, an illness that was almost incurable at the time. Hans Castorp arrives in 1907 and will only leave because the war breaks out in 1914. The first antibiotic to work against TB was only…

One of the books I had lined up as a possibility for our #1925Club was a big hitter from that year – “The Trial” by Franz Kafka. It’s a book which I don’t think I’ve read since my early twenties, and although the concept remains clear in my mind, the detail has definitely gone! However, although I ran out of time for the Club, it was still on my radar, and when I was up in London in October I was…

The story – The characters Hans Castorp, a young engineer, travels from Hamburg to the sanatorium Berghof located above Davos, in Switzerland. His cousin, Joachim Ziemssen has been staying at the sanatorium for several months because, like the majority of the patients or guests at the Berghof, he suffers from tuberculosis. Hans Castorp is an orphan, has even lost his grandfather with whom he grew…

It is Thomas Mann week and I thought it was time to finally read one of his masterpieces, The Magic Mountain. Published in 1924, but set during the period before WWI, it tells the story of Hans Castorp who went to visit his cousin in a sanatorium above Davos, in Switzerland, for three weeks and stayed almost a decade. Oh my goodness, what a crazy ride this was. I’ve read a lot of Thomas Mann, Dr.…

This week, for German Literature Month, the focus is on the great writer Thomas Mann with a week set aside to celebrate his 150th birthday. Now to date, my only experience with his work is “The Magic Mountain“, which I read back in 2015 (lordy, ten years ago!) I absolutely loved it, but have somehow never got to anything else by him. However, some years back I did pick up a volume of his stories…