Thomas Mann wrote German-language novels and novellas about family decline, artistic identity, illness, politics and the pressures of modern European society. Buddenbrooks traces several generations of a prosperous merchant family as commercial confidence and social position gradually weaken, using domestic life and business decisions to show change over time. The Magic Mountain places Hans Castorp in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, where an intended short visit becomes a long encounter with illness, philosophy, politics and competing ideas about Europe before the First World War. Death in Venice is a shorter work about the writer Gustav von Aschenbach and his obsessive fascination with a boy he sees while staying in a cholera-threatened Venice. Mann’s prose is intellectual, ironic and often slow-moving, with ideas embedded in detailed social observation. His work fits modernist fiction, German classics and philosophical novels. Death in Venice is the most compact entry point; The Magic Mountain is better for readers wanting his full-scale discursive style. Read more Less
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