Death in Venice
According to the author, he originally planned "The Magic Mountain" as a novella, a humorous, ironic, satirical (and satyric) follow-up to "Death in Venice," which he had completed in 1912. The atmosphere was to derive from the "mixture of death and amusement" that Mann had encountered whilst visiting his wife in a Swiss sanatorium. He intended to transfer to a comedic plane the fascination with death and triumph of ecstatic disorder over a life devoted to order, which he had explored in "Death in Venice".