Holiday Potluck: "The Magic Mountain," Part 1

Apparently, you guys can't get enough of Thomas Mann this year! "The Magic Mountain" carried the vote for our December/January book.

At our December meeting, per tradition, we'll discuss the first half of the book and enjoy a holiday potluck together.

Please bring a dish to share. In the interests of variety, consider mentioning what kind of food you plan to bring in the comments below. (But if you show up at the last minute with a bag of chips, that's fine. Your presence is what matters most!)

The recommended stopping point for December's discussion is the end of Chapter 5. (The last section of that chapter is called "Walpurgis-Night.") That will leave you just shy of the halfway point in terms of pages. (There are only two more chapters, 6 and 7, but they're whoppers.)

And now, a word about Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain ("Der Zauberberg", written in German, published in 1924). Here's a brief summary from Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Magic-Mountain):

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The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, a young German engineer, who goes to visit a cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland. Though Castorp intends to stay for only a few weeks, he discovers that he has symptoms of the disease and remains at the sanatorium for seven years, until the outbreak of World War I. During this time, he abandons his normal life to submit to the rich seductions of disease, introspection, and death. Through talking with other patients, he gradually becomes aware of and absorbs the predominant political, cultural, and scientific ideas of 20th-century Europe. The sanatorium comes to be the spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual world away from the magic mountain.
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And here's a bit more from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheMagicMountain):

[QUOTE]
The novel was inspired by the conditions at a sanatorium in Davos, which the author had visited in 1912 while caring for his wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Mann began developing his first ideas for The Magic Mountain in 1912. He initially conceived it as a novella that would revisit aspects of his earlier work Death in Venice in a more humorous manner(!!!). [Exclamation points Dan's.]

The outbreak of World War I disrupted Mann's work on the book. Like many other Germans of the time, Mann initially supported the German Empire and the war effort. In response to anti-war intellectuals, Mann wrote a book-length essay, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, which was published in 1918. His position, however, was challenged by other intellectuals, such as his older brother, Heinrich Mann. The end of the war led Thomas Mann to rethink his position. In 1919, Mann changed the tone of the novel that would become The Magic Mountain to reflect the realities of war rather than its romanticized depiction. He introduced conflicts between the characters, which drew on his relationship with Heinrich.

The novel explores themes such as the experience of time, music, nationalism, sociology, and changes in the natural world. Through Castorp's stay in the rarefied atmosphere of "The Magic Mountain", the narrative provides a view of pre-World War I European civilization and the underlying tensions of the era. Mann explored the sources of much of civilized humanity's destructive nature and speculated about personal attitudes toward life, health, illness, sexuality, and mortality.
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