"Der Zauberberg" is the German film adaptation of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"
Australian schoolkids grew up with Norman Lindsay's 171-page-long "The Magic Pudding" whose message "The more you eats the more you get" is institutionalised in today's Centrelink.
German schoolkids grew up with Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" with its 729 pages about death which ends seven years later - which is about as long as it takes you to read it - on the battlefields of Flanders.
whose German title is "Der Zauberberg"
Read it online here (if you have seven years to spare)
Even the preview is 78 pages long
Published in Germany in 1924, the book tells the story of Hans Castorp, fresh from university and about to become a civil engineer, who comes to the Sanatorium Berghof in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim, an army officer, who is recovering there from tuberculosis. Intending to remain at the Berghof for three weeks, Hans is gradually contaminated by the morbid atmosphere pervading the place. Wishing very much to be considered a patient like the others, he achieves his ends and stays in the sanatorium for ... seven years. During this time, he has enough time to take part in the furious philosophical debates pitting against each other Settembrini, a secular humanist, and Naphta, a totalitarian Jesuit. And to fall in love with the beautiful but enigmatic Clawdia Chauchat. When he is finally discharged in 1914 - along with all the other patients - it is only to plunge into the horrors of World War I.
Reading all of the 260,000 words in "The Magic Mountain" is not for the faint-hearted, so you may prefer the following radio dramatisation:
Consider yourself lucky if you only had to read "The Magic Pudding"!
