Mann began working on The Magic Mountain in 1912, following a few weeks' visit to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Twelve years later the novel that had begun as a short story appeared in two long volumes. The war that had postponed the book's completion had "incalculably enriched its content." Now it was a massive meditation on "the inner significance of an epoch, the pre-war period of European history." It was an immense international success from the time of its publication.
The Magic Mountain is the story of an unassuming, undistinguished young engineer named Hans Castorp who sits on the balcony of a sanatorium, wrapped in his camel's hair blanket, thermometer in his mouth, naively but earnestly pondering the meaning of life, time, and his love for the beautiful Frau Chauchat. Among the other characters on this Germanic ship of fools are the malapropian Frau Stohr; Hofrat Behrens, the head doctor, and his hearty but sick-looking sidekick, Dr. Krokowski; Ludovico Settembrini, the enlightened humanist; Han's noble cousin Joachim Ziemssen; and Hermine Kleefeld, who, with her whistling pneumothorax, is the pride of the Half-Lung Club. In this community organization completely in reference to disease, Hans Castrop achieves a kind of transcendence unimaginable in the world of the "flatlands" below him.

A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.

In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Translated and introduced by John E. Woods, these radio dialogs represent some of the conversations of Arno Schmidt, a major German modernist writer, performed on radio from 1955 to 1971. Included are dialogs on German authors Barthold Heinrich Brockes, Christoph Martin Wieland, Ludwig Tieck, and Karl May; the British Brontes; and the Irish master James Joyce. A second volume of these dialogs is forthcoming in early 2000 from Green Integer.

A unique and gripping document: the recently discovered diaries of a German businessman, John Rabe, who saved so many lives in the infamous siege of Nanking in 1937 that he is now honored as the Oskar Schindler of China.

As the Japanese army closed in on the city and all foreigners were ordered to evacuate, Rabe felt it would shame him before his Chinese workers and dishonor the Fatherland if he abandoned them. Sending his wife to the north, he mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized an "International Safety Zone" within which all unarmed Chinese were to be -- by virtue of Germany's pact with Japan -- guaranteed safety. As hundreds of thousands of Chinese streamed into the city, the Japanese army began torturing, raping, and massacring them in untold numbers. All that stood between the Chinese and certain slaughter was Rabe and his committee, and it is thought that he saved more than 250,000 lives.

When the siege lifted in 1938 and Rabe finally felt able to leave, the Chinese gave him a banner that called him their Living Buddha, or Saint. Back home in Germany, he wrote Adolf Hitler to describe the Japanese atrocities he had witnessed. Two days later, the Gestapo arrested him. He was not sent to the camps. As it turned out, Rabe survived the war and the starvation that followed because the Chinese government learned that he was alive, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had food parcels sent to him.