A consequential encounter: How Susan Sontag's thinking and work were influenced by Thomas Mann. In 1949, the barely seventeen-year-old student Susan Sontag visits the seventy-four-year-old Thomas Mann in his Californian exile. What unfolds here is not only one of the most surprising episodes in recent transatlantic literary history. For Sontag, the visit marks the beginning of a lifelong, in-depth, and extremely vibrant engagement with her ever-critically viewed role model. Just a year before her death, the world-renowned intellectual describes "The Magic Mountain" as the most important book of her life. Kai Sina traces for the first time the partly overt, partly hidden traces and influences of this intellectual constellation: in Sontag's estate, in diaries and conversations, in essays and novels. It becomes evident that important areas...