The Magic Mountain

“I can tell right off whether someone will make a competent patient or not, because that takes talent, everything takes talent, and this Myrmidon here hasn’t the least talent for it.”

The idea of illness as a skill requiring diligence is a folly of the abstracted thinking typical of Director Behrens who compares the duty-bound Joachim to a Myrmidon, a member of the Thessians who followed Achilles to try. From that derivation, the word has come to mean a follower of a powerful person who carries out orders without question or independent, critical thinking. For Director Behrens, Joachim cannot compare to the best of his “students.”

“‘No,’ Hans Castorp insisted with a ferocity not at all appropriate to the mild objection Joachim had offered. ‘I’ll not let you talk me out of it. A dying man has something nobler about him than your average rascal strolling about, laughing and making money and stuffing his belly. It won’t do.’ And his voice began to waver strangely. ‘It just won’t do to walk up so calm and cool and …’ But not his words were swallowed in a fit of laughter that suddenly overwhelmed him, the same laughter as yesterday, welling up from deep inside—convulsive, unbounded laughter, until he had to close his eyes for the tears.” 

Hans is discussing the nature of illness and death with Joachim, emphasizing a bourgeois romanticism about illness that takes place under conditions of great privilege and comfort. His uncontrollable fit of laughter creates a tension between his earnestness and the substance of his ideas.

“On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless.”

Hans’s moral relativism clouds his ability to take seriously anything he witnesses or is told. Throughout the book, Mann suggests that Hans is diminished by this inability to commit himself.

“...Hans Castorp was still standing there trying to think what to do next, when quite unexpectedly he had a brilliant insight into what time actually is—nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purposes of keeping people from cheating.” 

During his stay at the sanatorium, Hans’s sense of time shifts. At this moment, he compares time to a thermometer that lacks a printed scale. This device is meant to keep patients from somehow gaming the system. In the same way, Hans senses that time is a mechanism that prevents people from cheating within the overarching scheme of the universe.

“Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week—of, let us say, four—is uncanny in its fleeting transience.” 

These words from the narrator suggests that the stakes of time’s passage are much higher than can be measured on a variable scale. The more life we try to grab, the quicker it slips from our grasp.

“It came to him that all these people were subject to an inner decay that would be halted only with great difficulty and that most of them were slightly feverish, but the realization did not bother him at all—on the contrary, there was a certain special intensity and intellectual charm to the whole scene.” 

Hans, now fully acclimatized to the routine of the sanatorium, is comfortable in a way he never was on the flatlands. Unlike Joachim and Clavdia, he has nothing to return to except the cold comfort of his engineering studies.

“So he had taken up residence as one of those physicians who not only supervised people’s stay here, but who also shared their sufferings, who did not battle disease from a position of personal wholeness and independence, but who bore its marks themselves.” 

Some of the doctors at the sanatorium are also sick; the institutional authorities who are expected to create a path to wellness are themselves subsumed into the routines and habits of illness. Everyone is eternally sick, according to Behrens, and the search for mastery is like the work of businessmen or politicians, a kind of absurd pantomime.

“Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing is his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at most, he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find and other life ‘cruel’—or better, flawed and ignorant.” 

Here is one of Settembrini’s most direct warnings to Hans that he should not dwell and got lost within the sanatorium. Settembrini also recognizes that the bizarre “mastery” of illness championed by Behrens has a connection to both capitalistic labor and to eroticism. 

“And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave.” 

In this scene, Hans Castorp sees the skeletal structure of his own hand behind the X-ray machine. X-rays were discovered by a German physics professor named Wilhelm Röntgen, whose own wife was the subject of the first X-ray of a human. When she observed the image of her hand’s skeleton, she famously remarked, “I have seen my death” (Markel "'I Have Seen My Death': How the World Discovered the X-Ray" 2012).

“Ah yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer. Beware of it in general as an intellectual stance. When it is not deployed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice.”

Settembrini argues that the technology forestalls judgment and that irony deflects the truth. In the same way, every diagnosis from Behrens inevitably leads to a longer stay at the sanatorium and then another diagnosis, and the soul is never fulfilled or satisfied.

“The constituent element of his love, therefore, was not the amiable, tender melancholy found in our little song. It was, instead, a rather reckless and unpolished variation of this folly, a fusion of frost and heat, like a man in a fever or an October day in these lofty regions.” 

When Hans finally admits his feelings for Clavdia, he does so from afar, without really knowing her. He diagnoses himself with a condition like love, “mastering” it as if it were a confusing and alienating form of illness.  

“You had only to keep asking about the value and meaning of the next smaller unit to realize that taken together they would not add up to a sum, but rather that such calculations led to diminishment, obliteration, shrinkage, and annihilation.” 

Hans considers the days of the weeks and the weeks within the years. Considered as mere data, a day is meaningless, an atomization without purpose. Purpose is only provided by human desire to do good or ill.

“Morality? It interests you, does it? All right—it seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability—but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.”

When Hans finally speaks to Clavdia she expresses her philosophy. What she says mirrors what Hans has thought before; consequently, we are not encouraged to take Clavdia as the libertine she makes herself out to be but merely as someone who has a better understanding of her own self-deception. 

“And you started in on ‘time’ your first day here. When what we’re here to do is to get healthy, not more clever…” 

In contrast to Hans, Joachim has one goal; to get back to the mainland and continue his training. Though he has already been infected (not only by tuberculosis, but by the language and thinking used to treat it) he fights to be purposeful and healthy again.

“Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill. Indeed, man was ill by nature, his illness was what made him human, and whoever sought to make him healthy and attempted to get him to make peace with nature...wanted nothing more than to dehumanize man and turn him into an animal.”

Neither Settembrini or Naphta are perfect models for thought or behavior, but both are serious and purposeful thinkers, and Mann gives a great many pages over to their arguments. Here, Naphta gives advice in stark contrast to Settembrini’s health-oriented optimism and to Behren’s mindless technocratic fatalism. 

“I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken.” 

This is Hans’s revelation on the snow-capped mountain, an idea Mann (or his translator) thought to emphasize in italics. It only partially agrees with Settembrini’s distrust of illness, replacing the older man’s reverence for progress and science with a moral object. Importantly, Hans’s return to the sanatorium quickly erases this thought.

“Yes, he was a fine fellow. Rhadmanthus always talked about his being a zealot. But his body wanted things otherwise. Rebellio carnis is what the Jesuits call it. He was always concerned about his body, in an honorable way, I mean. But his body let something dishonorable invade it, played a trick on his zealotry. But, then, it is more moral to lose oneself or let oneself be ruined than to save oneself.” 

Speaking with Clavdia, Hans discusses Behrens’s opinion of Joachim (Settembrini calls Behrens Rhadmanthus) and Joachim’s surrender to sentimentality and forgetfulness on the eve of his death. However, Hans attempts to mask his bourgeois neutrality with a rakish expression of immorality he does not ever enact.

“For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too, no matter what you may say, and he uses it to put us in his pocket.”

This describes Peeperkorn’s different approach to philosophical questions through the exertion of willful and physical “personality.”

“Both viewpoints seemed to fit him, to cancel one another out when you looked at him: both this and that, the one as well as the other. Yes, this stupid old man, this masterful zero!” 

Hans mistakes Peeperkorn’s unreserved expression of egotistical will for something equivalent to an argument, simply because it silences the arguments of others. “Stupid,” in this instance, is the compliment one bourgeois gives to another for having silenced all troublesome contradictions, allowing life to go on without examination.

“Passion means to forget yourself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves. C'est ça. You haven’t the least notion of how repulsively egotistic that is of you and that someday it may well make you the enemy of humankind.” 

With this, Clavdia chillingly predicts not only the course of the first world war but also the second, which Mann would live to see destroy his country.

“Man himself is the divine in that he feels. He is the very feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him.”

Peeperkorn rarely expresses himself in full sentences, but this is as close as he gets to laying out his own philosophy, which is one of amoral sensation. Though Hans is briefly held under its sway, the result of this philosophy is demonstrably annihilating, resulting in Peeperkorn’s sensual and bizarre suicide.

“[A] demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained candor that he could instill in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing. The demon’s name was Stupor.”

This describes the atmosphere of the final days of Hans’s dreamy stay at the sanatorium. People squabble without reason, take up and then drop their lonesome enthusiasms, and await their deaths.

“Oh my, oh my—that was all very pretty, was what any honest man would have to say. And yet behind this sweet, lovely, fair work of art stood death.” 

Among the final hobbies Hans takes up is the gramophone. While listening to a light operetta about a soldier, Hans has an astonishing realization; namely, that art can have a meaning beyond just being the immaterial debris produced through the mastery of indifferent technical implements. This is a lesson he will forget as quickly as the other lessons in his life.