Hans Castorp, an "ordinary" young German orphan from Hamburg about to begin a dull shipbuilding apprenticeship, visits his tubercular cousin Joachim Ziemssen at the International Sanatorium Berghof in the Swiss Alps in the years before World War I. Hans comes for a stay of three weeks - but ends up staying seven years, after he himself is diagnosed with TB (or is it really love?). With an international clientele, the Berghof is a microcosm of a frivolous, distracted Europe on the eve of cataclysm. The sanatorium's "enchanted" patients amuse themselves with love affairs, fads, and distractions as they await a cure (or death) in a world where time means something very different from time in the "flatlands." Hans Castorp falls hopelessly in love with a fellow patient, and is inspired to plunge into new worlds of.....
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