Thomas Mann

“Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family rise, prosper and slowly fall apart.”

“A famous, disciplined German writer, worn out by work, travels to Venice for a rest — and there, in a city secretly stricken by cholera, the iron self-control of a lifetime gives way, and he goes to his destruction.”

“A young engineer from Hamburg goes up to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin for three weeks — and stays seven years, among the sick and the dying, the talkers and the lovers, until the First World War calls him down.”