[I am reading this 1924 novel in sections of about 100 pages each. The first three chapters make up the first section, although later chapters are much longer. I write about each part before reading on, and so far I have read the first 300 or so pages. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
23 July 2026
Chapters 1-3
What world are we in? Not quite one where even Mann’s original German readers would have been comfortable. He warns us in his Foreword that his protagonist’s story ‘does not happen to everybody,’ whatever that means, and that it is presented in the tense most suited to ‘the depth of the past.’ In terms of years (a word he doesn’t use in the Foreword) it isn’t long ago, not long before the Great War, but ‘the degree of its antiquity has nothing to do with the passage of time.’ Ah, time. It’s something both Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim talk about, a lot—perhaps unsurprisingly in a novel written by a philosophically-minded author about a period separated from the present by the ‘crisis that shattered its way through life and consciousness.’ Ah. If Hans Castorp is in Kansas, we readers aren’t, not any more. I suspect Hans isn’t too sure about it either.
These three chapters, covering only the first evening and full day of Hans Castorp’s stay in the mountain sanatorium, are full of disorientating moments. In the hundred or so years since The Magic Mountain was published we’ve grown accustomed to fictions in which nothing is quite what it seems. It’s perfectly reasonable for a 21st Century reader to ask questions that might not have readily occurred to a reader in 1924. Is the sanatorium a real place, or is it some representation of an afterlife? Or a before-life, if such a thing exists, in which a broken postwar consciousness—shattered, to use Mann’s own word—is seeking to come to terms with the unthinkable? Whether it is or not, why is Hans Castorp, a mere visitor—it’s Joachim who is the patient—showing so many symptoms of ill health, both ‘physical and psychic’? This phrase is used by one of the doctors, who had assumed Hans Castorp to be a patient. He’s sceptical when Hans tells him he’s completely healthy. ‘Then you are a phenomenon worthy of study. I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.’ This is in the short Chapter 1, and we’re already beginning to wonder what aspects of Germany’s ‘psychic health’ Thomas Mann is questioning.
Whatever, Mann has carefully assembled his main protagonist from highly recognisable components. Hans Castorp has been designed as a kind of Everyman, although one of a very particular time and place. Namely the comfortable upper echelon of the Hamburg bourgeoisie, when an orphan relative is expected to earn a living in order to keep himself in the manner to which his privileged upbringing has accustomed him. Despite his author-defined ‘mediocrity’, Hans Castorp—always referred to by his full name—has been able to pursue a long and, no doubt, expensive course in shipbuilding. At the age of nearly 23, he has just passed his final exams, unremarkably. And the adjective Mann uses about him in the first sentence of the novel is ‘unassuming.’ A lot of space in these early chapters is given over to Mann telling us all about Hans Castorp and, basically, how unremarkable he is. It’s an impression confirmed by the way he speaks and behaves, oozing conventionality. The only detectable emotion in this representative of a highly reserved society appears to be his love of home comforts. His main vice—he is surprised when an inmate refers to it as such—is smoking his beloved Maria Mancini cigars. He has packed 200 for his three-week stay.
So, a self-imposed authorial challenge. Mann has made Hans Castorp ordinary because, surely, he wants to reflect both the prewar and postwar German middle class back on itself. His mediocrity—the German word is mittelmäßig, with connotations of average, middle-range, and therefore not so pejorative as the English word—is a given so that we understand how much Germany needed, and perhaps still needs, to learn. Hans Castorp’s conventionality is a factor of how little he questions the straitlaced mindset of his upbringing. Discourtesy is almost as disgusting to him as the loudness of the sex—he can’t name it, even to himself—being enjoyed by the Russian couple in the next room. His own speech is marked by pedantry and precision of language, and he criticises Joachim for anything less. Joachim, he says, clearly doesn’t mean ‘lately’, the word he has just used, if an event happened eight weeks ago. It isn’t clear to him yet that up in the mountains, time is different.
Joachim’s main role so far has been to act as Hans Castorp’s guide to the sanatorium’s everyday life. It’s other characters who make an impression, the two doctors and several of the patients. Mostly, the latter provide opportunities for Hans Castorp’s dismay—or disgust—at their lack of propriety. Frau Stöhr, the gossipy woman with the low decolletage. The unknown person who lets the door slam, three times in a row. The young German who shoots his mouth off—not literally, or not yet—about his intention to use his service revolver to put a bullet in his own brain. And the slightly shabby Italian, Settembrini, who speaks very precise German and seems to politely mock Hans Castorp’s unthinking conventionality, unsettling him.
It’s on the first morning that Hans and Joachim encounter Settembrini on their walk. We know what our man is like by now, especially his limited world-view—but we can also see that his own sense of disorientation surprises him. It comes to a head now, when the Italian talks to him about his life and health. (I haven’t mentioned that Hans Castorp is anaemic enough for the chief doctor to recognise it at first sight.) Hans replies in a way that seems uncharacteristically open. ‘It is true that I am here only on a visit; but I am not very robust, and I cannot with truth assert that my work agrees with me so wonderfully well. It would be a great deal truer to say that it rather takes it out of me. I only feel really fit when I am doing nothing at all.’ Settembrini pushes him—‘As now, for example?’—and he thinks about it. ‘Now? Oh, now I am so new up here, I am still rather bewildered—you can imagine.’ Settembrini certainly can imagine. ‘Ah—bewildered.’
What’s going on? Settembrini has proudly announced himself as a humanist. Just before his admission about his own anaemia Hans Castorp had casually responded to the Italian’s rather pointed remark concerning work, and how hard it is, with this: ‘That’s true enough, God knows—or the Devil does.’ Settembrini’s eyebrows go up—he clearly wants to get under Hans Castorp’s skin—and this is his cue to introduce his own humanism. He doesn’t take the direct route. ‘Oh, so you call on the Devil to witness that sentiment—the Devil incarnate, Satan himself? Did you know that my great master wrote a hymn to him?’ Hans Castorp is bemused—‘I beg your pardon, a hymn to the Devil?’—and Settembrini explains. ‘The very Devil himself, and no other. It is sometimes sung, in my native land, on festal occasions. O salute, O Satana, O ribellione, O forza vindice della ragione!…’
Accidentally, I discovered through my e-reader copy that Settembrini must be a key character. He is mentioned over 600 times in the novel, and he is the first person to trouble Hans Castorp for any reason beyond those of social propriety. The poem he quotes, set to music by the Italian composer Carducci, is a celebration of a new Italy based on reason and social progress—and, by implication, in opposition to religious traditions. In The Magic Mountain, often cited as a work of philosophical enquiry, Settembrini and his world-view are clearly going to have big part to play.
This is only one conversation, albeit an important one. Mann has warned us in the Foreword that he ‘shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail’ and, between Hans Castorp’s arrival and the end of his first day, this means that we follow him through every moment. But it isn’t simply a stream-of-consciousness account. The new ideas and impressions relentlessly coming at Hans Castorp—he isn’t at all used to this—are at least as important as their effect on him. Illness and the body’s vulnerability are constantly in the foreground, and this would be enough of an unwelcome novelty to the self-absorbed Hans Castorp. But death is a constant too. He hasn’t even arrived at the sanatorium when Joachim refers to it for the first time on their ride from the station. ‘The highest of the sanatoriums is the Schatzalp—you can’t see it from here. They have to bring their bodies down on bob-sleds in the winter, because the roads are blocked.’ This is so matter-of-fact that Hans doesn’t catch his meaning at first. ‘Their bodies? Oh, I see. Imagine!’ During this first meeting after Joachim’s five months up here, he finds his cousin’s manner odd. He has ‘twisted his mouth into an expression of disgust that was as unlike him as the shoulder-shrug. It looked irritable, disproportionate.’ Hans Castorp, always frank, lets him know. ‘You have such a queer way of talking….’ No, he’s definitely not in Kansas any more—and neither is Joachim. When they reach Hans’s room, he cuts out the small-talk. ‘An American woman died here the day before yesterday….’ Thanks, Joachim.
But Hans Castorp is no stranger to death. Chapter 2, between the first evening and the first full day, is made up of his biography—and, not at all accidentally, details of the people who died during his childhood. ‘His father and mother he had barely known’—this is the first paragraph—‘they had both dropped away in the brief period between his fifth and seventh birthdays; first the mother, quite suddenly, on the eve of a confinement….’ I realise, as I re-read this line, that there would have been a new brother or sister for Hans had his mother not died. This fact is never mentioned, but it adds to the body count. In fact, death is foregrounded to an extraordinary degree in this chapter when his grandfather dies. Hans had spent years of his childhood with this man, a traditionalist, even reactionary figure in local politics. The ‘christening bowl’ mentioned in the chapter title is Hans’s link to seven generations of Castorps, lovingly enumerated by the old man whenever Hans asks to see it. Which is often.
Hans had always considered his grandfather’s portrait, in full traditional council regalia, as representing the essence of the man. I’m paraphrasing, but only when dressed in these clothes does he seem fully realised, fully real to the boy. And, in his coffin, ‘there he lay, with a stern yet satisfied expression, on his bed of state.’ To Hans, he looks perfect. ‘What he gathered as he stood now by the bier in the dining-room, was that Grandfather had finally and formally surmounted his interim aspect and assumed for all time his true and adequate shape. And that was a gratifying result … even though Hans Castorp wept, as he had at sight of the mother he had abruptly been bereft of, and the father who, so little time after her, lay in his turn still and strange before the little boy’s eyes. Thus for the third time in so short a space and in such young years did death play upon the spirit and senses—but chiefly on the senses—of the lad.’ Enough said.
In the sanatorium, the doctors are tactful about it—the dead are discreetly removed during mealtimes—but death is a constant presence. Joachim describes a harrowing Extreme Unction scene in which a young girl screams at the sight of the priest, and tries to hide. He also tells Hans how good one of the doctors is at calming the ‘feeble’ ones—he means cowardly, and Hans Castorp isn’t impressed. ‘I say, that’s pretty steep. Goes at him like that, and simply tells him not to behave that way! To a dying man! But after all, a dying man has something in a way—sacred about him. One can’t just….’ I guess he’ll learn. There isn’t much that’s sacred up here—and, suddenly, I’m reminded of the fact that Germany after the War would have a very different idea of death from prewar Hans and the like.
There are other references to death, but that’s enough. I need to say more about Hans Castorp, and subtle (or not so subtle) changes that come over him during his first full day. These start absurdly enough with his discovery that his beloved cigars taste awful now. This doesn’t stop him trying to smoke them, often throwing them down in disgust before he’s finished. But that’s nothing. A much more welcome discovery—and this chimes very well with what he told Settembrini: ‘I only feel really fit when I am doing nothing at all.’ The lounge chair on his balcony seems to be his new best friend: ‘he was uncommonly comfortable, he decided, with distinct satisfaction. He did not recall in all his experience so acceptable an easy-chair….’ And there follows a whole paragraph on the virtues of this particular item of furniture. That’s the thing with the middle classes—and Hans Castorp in particular—they like nice things.
This is all droll enough, but it signals the change that is coming—or is it, rather, confirmation of Hans Castorp’s ‘true and adequate shape’? This is the phrase used about his grandfather in death, and now it’s resting that becomes Hans’s true calling. ‘Rest cure’ periods of an hour or more, at set times during the day, immediately become Hans’s favourite thing. Not only that—often, he can hardly keep himself from dozing off at inappropriate moments, and is thinking about his bed long before bedtime. He has a tricky evening with Settembrini but, finally, ‘he lay down and put out the light, letting his hot and troubled head fall upon the American woman’s dying-pillow.’ Bless. So…
…the end of another busy day? Maybe so, but now he’s in for a busy night. He’s kept awake by a rampant carpet-beater outside…. What? What? Ah, not a carpet-beater, but his own heart. Stirred, perhaps, by illicit thoughts: ‘He recalled an impression amongst the host received that day, an observation he had made, and then, with shrinking and delicacy, sought to forget.’ In his chastely self-censoring way, he decides not to think about ‘the look on Joachim’s face when they spoke of Marusja [a young patient] and her physical characteristics.’ Hah. Instead, ‘Hans Castorp saw and understood what it meant, saw and understood in a manner so new, so sympathetic, so intimate, that the carpet-beater outside redoubled the swiftness and severity of its blows.’ I bet it did. He tries to concentrate on the insipid music reaching him from a nearby hotel.
This carries on, and then the Russian couple start. He had hoped they wouldn’t bother, but had always known they would, and… oh, never mind. Eventually, he gets to sleep—‘but with sleep returned the involved dreams, even more involved than those of the first night—out of which he often started up in fright, or pursuing some confused fancy.’ He dreams of the two doctors, clownish pastiches of themselves, then various patients, in strange new guises or roles. Madame Chauchat, the door-slammer deemed charming by some, figures twice. Hans Castorp keeps trying to remember who, or what she reminds him of—this has happened three times so far—and, in his dream, he realises. He wakes up to make a mental note of it, then dreams of her again: ‘the unmannerly female glided noiselessly to Hans Castorp’s side and without a word reached him her hand—not the back, but the palm—to kiss.’
Oh yeh? The hand is broad-fingered, far from well-manicured, but the effect on poor, prim Hans Castorp is electrifying. He can’t name the effect she’s having on him, but we can: ‘there swept over him anew, from head to foot, the feeling of reckless sweetness he had felt for the first time when he tried to imagine himself free of the burden of a good name, and tasted the boundless joys of shame. This feeling he experienced anew in his dream, only a thousand-fold stronger than in his waking hour.’ It’s with this revelation that Chapter 3 ends—and I’m left wondering what counted for sexual awareness in Hans Castorp’s version of Kansas. Has he spent his whole life avoiding even touching himself?
Chapter 4
This single chapter takes us to the end of Hans Castorp’s three-week stay… except, as I’m sure we all knew from the beginning, his annoying little ailments prove not to be little at all, and the doctors strongly advise him to remain in the sanatorium. Helpfully, Thomas Mann has already had him calculate—on Joachim’s behalf, he had thought—the monthly cost of residency there. And, reader, it’s as though Mann is deliberately making it easy for himself—the interest on Hans’s legacy from his grandfather is more than enough to cover it. Better still, the pleasure-loving Hans is impressed by the quality of the accommodation and food, not to mention the people he is meeting. He would be a fool not to stay. Of course, he’ll have to recalibrate a few things in his mind, like the bizarre little non-flirtation with Madame Chauchat. He had assumed it to be a prim version of a holiday romance, and would not have let things go so far if he had known he was there long-term. So far, that is, as in no distance at all in any reasonable terms, but he considers himself to have behaved almost recklessly. Of course, it’s been an authorial game all along—had he known he was staying, it wouldn’t have happened. He would have treated her like the women ‘of the wrong sort’ he has encountered in his narrow Hamburg circle—yes, that is how he considers her—and where would the fun have been in that?
Mme Chauchat is one of the two people in the Thomas Mann scheme of things who begin to take charge of Hans Castorp’s education. I doubt she would think of herself as any kind of teacher, not that her take on things matters at all in this case… but Settembrini considers it his moral duty to put Hans Castorp’s thoughts into some sort of order. He’s the other key participant so far—I’m sure there’ll be others—in what is overtly becoming a Bildungsroman. Several subsections of the chapter consist of little more than lectures from him. At first, the two cousins had found him slightly absurd, and Joachim continues to yawn through his lessons in European politics or whatever. But Hans slowly changes his mind, and now feels guilty about having mocked both his Bohemian manner and, let’s face it, his poverty. And he, Settembrini, offers a handy critique of how he views conservative young men like him.
‘If our engineer here has been making observations in harmony with my own, that only confirms my surmise that he is an intellectual amateur and up to the present, as is the wont of gifted youth, still experimenting with various points of view. The young man with parts is no unwritten page, he is rather one upon which all the writing has already been done, in sympathetic ink, the good and the bad together; it is the schoolmaster’s task to bring out the good, to obliterate for ever the bad, by the methods of his profession.’ I suspect that had you asked Thomas Mann what he thought of young prewar gentlemen, he would have said exactly this. The role of his main protagonist will be to become properly shaped and moulded.
This comes on Hans Castorp’s third day. The chronology skips over the second, beautifully summery, and to this wintry third. Seasons? Up here? Forget it, says Joachim. (I’m paraphrasing.) Settembrini meets the cousins after Hans has just bought two blankets—but definitely not the fur sleeping bag, the mark of a long-term resident. Settembrini is chatting about the annoying people on his table—he’s easily exasperated—and the silly Frau Stöhr’s name comes up. Innocently enough, Hans says it’s the most miserable of states to be both stupid and an invalid—shouldn’t illness be associated with more refinement? Oh dear. Cue a long discourse from Settembrini on the horrific nature of illness, on how refinement is the last thing it should evoke… and so on. He defines poor Hans as an intellectual dilettante, which is when his ‘no unwritten page’ remark comes. Hans has no idea what he thinks, so he doesn’t bother really thinking at all.
Later, Joachim talks about how bored he is by Settembrini, but Hans disagrees. Whereas Joachim has thrown in his lot with the unthinking certainties of army life—did I mention that?—Hans is starting to recognise the narrowness of his own horizons. Up to a point, that is—there are plenty of occasions when he falls back on the certainties of his own conservative upbringing—but Thomas Mann is laying some tentative foundations for later… as during Hans Castorp’s first experience of the Sunday band concerts. The bland, ‘insipid’ repertoire suits Joachim, although Hans is unimpressed. When Settimbrini arrives, Hans makes some conventional enough observations on the pleasures, even importance of music. Unsurprisingly, it’s a cue for Settembrini to be unimpressed all over again.
By now, I was starting to rather like Settembrini. He may be fixated on the growth of the individual, but there’s something refreshing about the way he bristles at the ways bourgeois society seeks to stifle original thinking. And he has seized upon Hans Castorp as someone he can work on. His unthinking acceptance of the value of music, for instance. Settembrini doesn’t dislike it, but… ‘this is not to say that I set great store by it; not as I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.—Music? It is the half-articulate art, the dubious, the irresponsible, the insensible. Perhaps you will object that she can be clear when she likes. But so can nature, so can a brook—what good is that to us?’ Ah.
The problem for Settembrini is that music does nothing to advance human thought, or action. He, a writer, can only see true value in ‘the Word’, whereas music…. ‘What if it dulls us, sends us to sleep, works against action and progress? Music can do that too; she is an old hand at using opiates. But the opiate, my dear sirs, is a gift of the Devil; it makes for lethargy, inertia, slavish inaction, stagnation.’ In his own phrase, which forms the section title, it is ‘politically suspect.’ Thomas Mann would have known all about Karl Marx, and the reference to opium must be meant to strike a chord. It isn’t only ‘the masses’ who are fed opiates—in their case, religion—but the rest of us, too. Music takes its place alongside the other bourgeois pleasures that fill our time and keep us satisfactorily docile.
These are only occasional conversations. Meanwhile, Hans Castorp is quickly becoming accustomed to the daily routines, time passes—and Thomas Mann is interested enough in the way it does so to offer an entire sub-chapter on the theme, A digression about our sense of time. I suppose you might say it’s a digression on how the comfortable classes, with plenty of time on their hands, obsess about it. People like Hans Castorp, for instance, who we remember talking to Joachim about how a three-week stay will seem to pass faster and faster as time goes on. And now, in this special sub-chapter, Mann describes how ‘it is generally believed that interesting and novel ingredients help to ‘pass’ the time, meaning that they abbreviate it, whereas monotony and emptiness clog and block its course. That is not necessarily accurate. Emptiness and monotony may well stretch for a moment or an hour, leading to ‘boredom’, but they abbreviate larger magnitudes of time….’
Mann doesn’t leave it there. For instance, the theme fits nicely into Settembrini’s complaint about music. When Hans says how pleasant it is to spend time listening to it, he pounces, and we realise that he’s arguing that this is the problem with it. As this time passes, the listener isn’t engaged with something more constructive. Up here, time might seem empty—but we don’t have to be passive about it. Settembrini himself always attends the fortnightly concerts, but arrives late and only stays for fifteen minutes. This is when Hans first asks him whether he likes music, and Settembrini’s reply is typical. ‘Not on command, not by the calendar. Not when there’s a hint of the pharmaceutical about it and it is meted out to me for my health. I am protective of my freedom.’ Ah, freedom, his favourite topic. He’ll come back to that later in the chapter.
But other things are going on, and Thomas Mann cleverly evokes Hans’s increasing familiarity with the routines, the other inmates, the weather…. As readers, we return often enough to the characters, for instance, to make them plausibly present when Hans is with them, but not remarkable enough to hook our attention for long. Yes, this is the young woman who eats next to nothing, this is the depressive Russian who speaks hardly a word, this is the Mexican woman in mourning, fixated on her one phrase, Tous les deux. (Don’t ask.) But that’s it with institutional life—you know who everybody is, but little more. And, as familiarity increases, the sense of novelty Hans felt in the first three chapters is entirely gone… and the time passes unremarkably.
Except. His neighbour at the dining table—there are seven tables in the dining-room, but the patients stick rigidly to their own places—is an old woman who Hans speaks to more than anybody else. He knows how to do the conventional gallantry of the young gentleman and, for a time, they play a little game of mock-flirtation. I mention her because she takes an increasingly open interest in Hans’s attentive glances towards Mme Chauchat. He is encouraged by the fact that she has noticed, and it gives him a degree of courage. A tiny degree—after days, he is still not exchanging pleasantries with Mme Chauchat. Once, when she lets a napkin fall (definitely by accident), ‘his limbs twitch, pulling him halfway out of his chair, his reflex being to rush to her aid across the eight-metre gap and around an intervening table, as if it would spell disaster should her napkin touch the floor… She catches it just before it does, but from her stooped position, bowing towards the floor, clutching the napkin by its corner, her expression dark and obviously irritated by this irrational minor panic to which she has succumbed and for which she seems to blame him, she glances back at him once more, registers his frozen leap, his startled eyebrows, and turns away with a smile.’
Embarrassing? Not at all. ‘This incident made Hans Castorp feel ecstatically triumphant.’ She’s registering an interest… except ‘the backlash was not long in coming, because Madame Chauchat did not turn to face the room again for two whole days.’ It isn’t surprising that Hans doesn’t know how to read any of the signs. I’m assuming she thinks he’s little more than a foolish boy.
Whatever, it has finally become clear why she as reminds Hans so vividly of someone or something. He had first noticed on the first day, when he saw her properly, ‘from the front, her narrow eyes and wide cheekbones. What, he thought… What and who on earth does she remind me of?’ This thought comes to him at least another couple of times before, finally, he has a dream that gives him a proper clue. He finds himself in a classroom, and she lends him her special pencil. He must remember to return it, she says. Fine. But then a real memory occurs to Hans, one from his adolescence that he has buried since then. A sub-chapter is dedicated to a boy who is fairly overtly presented as Hans’s first crush. Pribislav Hippe, a boy who is hardly known to Hans, must share the same East European ethnicity as Mme Chauchat. And in Hans’s memory he looked almost exactly like her. Ah.
This non-friendship—it had gone no further than Hans plucking up enough courage to ask him for his pencil—goes on for perhaps a year. The young Hans relishes any chance to see Hippe, or even nod a half-greeting on a corridor. And then he doesn’t. In the telling of it, Hans moves on from the episode is soon forgets it. But now, maybe ten years later, he’s thinking about both him and his latest crush, at the same time. He stares at the back of her head, and remembers. ‘Pribislav had held his head like this, but he was an exemplary pupil who had lived honourably (even if this was not the reason Hans Castorp had borrowed the pencil from him), whereas it was clear that Frau Chauchat’s slovenly posture, her door-slamming, and her rude looks were linked to her sickness….’ So what on earth can be the connection? ‘Hans Castorp’s thoughts became jumbled as he stared at Frau Chauchat’s limp back. They ceased being thoughts and became reveries….’ If this is a sexual awakening, it’s got a long way to go yet.
So has Chapter 4. Did I mention it’s almost as long as 1-3 combined? And that Chapters 5-7 occupy the remaining three quarters of the novel? The form matches the fluid, ambiguous passage of time—Hans Castorp’s first day (Chapters 1 and 3) had needed almost as many pages as the next three weeks, so that’s what Thomas Mann had given them. Plenty happens in Chapter 4—band concerts, a steamy Freudian lecture from Dr K (tell you later), Hans’s ill-advised solitary walk into the mountains, at least three long exchanges with Settembrini…. But mostly, it’s routines, and neither the author nor anybody else ever affords those things much attention. With Thomas Mann, I feel as if I’m in the safest of hands.
Hans is clearly going to be up here a long time, and in the Foreword Mann had explained that the reader will be too. Ah, we think, maybe that’s why this is such a huge book…. ‘It is not in the wink of an eye that the storyteller will conclude Hans’s story. The seven days of the week will not suffice, nor will seven months. The best thing would be if he were not to define in advance how much earthly time will elapse while he is cradled in its web. For goodness’ sake, surely it cannot be seven years!’ We might not have understood quite what he meant then, but we’re catching up. I suspect we’re ahead of Hans Castorp, at least.
A couple more adventures before that third conversation with Settembrini—all of them definitely forming a part of Hans Castorp’s education. On the day after the band concert, Hans decides he wants to demonstrate his own originality and independence by going for a long walk. Silly boy. It exhausts him so much he can’t manage the final section, back to the sanatorium, and has to cadge a lift on a cart. Is it the first sign of his sickliness? Maybe not—it joins his propensity to fall asleep, the heat-flush that hardly ever seems to leave his face, even the strange taste of his beloved cigars…. Anyway, he’s back before the late morning lecture given by the assistant medic, Dr K. He’s always urging Hans to visit him for a consultation—he’s the one who told him he’s never met a healthy person in his life—and his lecture is a resolutely Freudian take on the interdependence of physical and psychic illness. It leaves his audience feeling dazed. ‘It looked as if they were crowding after him in concentric circles from all sides, hesitantly, but automatically and in stunned unanimity, like the children flocking behind the Pied Piper.’
And then, in a sub-chapter whose title references their ‘two grandfathers,’ the deepest-digging conversation yet with Settembrini. Hans Castorp ‘listened to the Italian’s tales, which introduced him to a strange and completely new world. Settembrini talked about his grandfather, who had been a lawyer in Milan but above all a great patriot with a reputation as something of a political agitator, speaker, and magazine editor. The reference to the two grandfathers is telling. It demonstrates how Hans is beginning to understand how a man could devote his life to beliefs and objectives completely opposed to his grandfather’s. Settembrini’s grandfather would have been deemed an outsider and troublemaker in conservative Hamburg, and yet his sincere pursuit of social justice for all definitely seems to be worthy of Hans Castorp’s attention.
Meanwhile, Thomas Mann’s presentation of Hans’s point of view is complex, based on the (fairly invisible) narrator’s relationship with him and his highly uncertain world view. When Hans arrived, his image of society—i.e. his understanding of the forms taken by social hierarchies and inter-relationships—was rudimentary at best. Now, he is coming to realise not only that these things need to be navigated, but that it’s really difficult. How should he behave? What should he do about the growing realisation he has that he’s never thought about any of it before? I’m a quarter of the way through, and I’m wondering if, by the end, he’ll have a better idea of how he should live. I can see why Thomas Mann is keen to let us know it’s going to be a long journey.
Chapter 5, first half
We’ve realised for some time that the passage of time accelerates as the novel progresses. By the time we’re halfway through this chapter, glorious summer days—Hans misses them, in his bed—are replaced by definite signs of winter. At the opening of this chapter, not for the first time, Thomas Mann takes off whatever cloak of invisibility he normally wears to draw attention, again, to just how time passes. Or, more precisely, to how an author might represent how it feels for his main character. After remarking on the amount of space taken up the novel by Hans Castorp’s first three weeks (Chapters 1-4), he suggests his next three ‘will require hardly as many lines, indeed barely as many words and instants, as the previous three required pages, sheets, hours, and days of work; we predict that these three weeks will be behind us and buried in a flash.’
He isn’t wrong, and I’ll come back to that. But what is interesting is how Mann makes Hans Castorp’s slow evolution into a fully functioning adult feel plausible within the time-frame. I don’t only mean the three weeks of the standard ‘rest cure’, i.e. complete bed rest, but also the weeks of late summer and into the autumn. The weather is always there, of course, in the background. It isn’t at all predictable—the trend might be cooling, but there are two weeks of full sunshine in mid-October—but it helps the reader to appreciate the way time passes. It isn’t smooth, but it is unrelenting—and it gives Hans Castorp time to learn. But not yet…
…because the chapter opens with Mann devoting a whole page to explaining his task of presenting how ‘time seems to us precisely as long or short, expands and contracts precisely as it does for the hero of our story, young Hans Castorp, who has been so unexpectedly entrapped by fate.’ First come those three weeks, in a single sub-chapter of twenty pages or so. Time drags, but we are shown how a whole afternoon can pass almost without notice, how days merge into one another, ‘monotonous’ but not at all unendurably boring. (Mann is keen to make this distinction.) Meals arrive, also soon merging into one, so that each day’s soup, for instance, becomes the ‘soup eternal’ of the chapter’s title. After each meal, Joachim visits, and Hans hardly feels he’s missing out on the routines of the place. He gets all the news—not much, to be honest—from Joachim. Some writers would summarise it at little more length than this paragraph I’m writing now, but it’s a part of Mann’s project to take us inside the experience—which is why a single visit of maybe an hour by another character occupies very nearly half this sub-chapter.
The visitor is Settembrini, and I’ll come back to their conversation. But, as a kind of counterbalance—it really does seem that calculated—almost as soon as Hans Castorp is back in circulation the other key player in his life up here, Mme Chauchat, occupies just as much space: ‘his infatuation … had progressed enormously during his reclusion. Her image had floated before him as he looked out into the slowly brightening room when he woke early, or into the thickening evening twilight—it had been floating before him when Settembrini had entered…’ and so on. The author is only mentioning it now and, discarding his cloak of invisibility again, he explains why: ‘if we passed over the fact that this was the remedy that helped him to pass the hours so effortlessly, then only because we empathize with the qualms that infused his alarming delight at these images and faces. Yes, they were accompanied by alarm and agitation, hope that intensified into something undefined, unrestricted, and utterly fantastical….’ In other words, Hans Castorp had hidden from the implications of how his thoughts were tending, so the author had decided to hide them from us. It’s a kind of psychological super-realism.
In this same, second sub-chapter Hans and Joachim go for their x-rays. After something approaching social comedy, when he is taken aback by the arrival in the waiting room of Mme Chauchat—‘all of a sudden, having not been there a second earlier, she was sharing the cramped area with the cousins’—it becomes an extraordinary memento mori. In real time, he looks firstly at Joachim’s ‘internal portrait’—Dr Behrens’s little joke—and then his own. Holding up his hand, ‘he saw the flesh in which he walked decayed, annihilated, reduced to weightless mist with the delicately crafted skeleton of his right hand inside it, and, floating black and free around the top joint of his ring finger, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him’—another reminder of the transitoriness of life.
Have things moved on in Hans Castorp’s little world since the time when he had been only a temporary guest? Definitely. Or not at all, depending on how you look at it. His status has changed—except nobody really cares, because that’s the nature of this kind of accidental community. Does Mme Chauchat care? Hans doesn’t know, and at first he agonises over every glance, every accidental contact. So, just as before? Maybe…. But with Settembrini, it’s a definite yes. When he makes that after-dinner visit about half-way through the ‘cure’, it’s to establish for certain that Hans Castorp is ready to accept him as a mentor. In fact, Hans is delighted with the idea, and lets Settembrini know that he finds his storytelling wonderfully engaging, and his ideas revelatory.
I know—spoiler alert—that there will eventually be an alternative mentor for Hans, someone to counterbalance Settembrini’s ‘humanism’. But not yet. Mann must have decided that his hero first needs to learn the rudiments of independent thought, and he isn’t there yet. He almost hero-worships Settembrini’s originality—although he still mocks his ‘pedagogy’ with Joachim. But that’s to do with his almost adolescent lack of confidence, as though he needs the security of a comfortable show of shared disdain. And then, at the end of his rest cure, there’s Mme Chauchat. She, of course, has an entirely different part to play in Hans’s development—to put it simply, the physical. Hans himself, conventionally enough, regards the soul and body as entirely separate, and he isn’t in any way ready for her disturbing presence. Like a schoolboy, he fixates on her physical appearance. In the confines of the small waiting room as they wait for their x-rays he doesn’t mentally undress her—it’s far deeper than that. Literally.
‘She was of only medium height — a height that Hans Castorp considered pleasing and proper — but relatively long-legged and not broad in the hip. She wasn’t sitting back but leaning forwards, her folded arms on the thigh of her crossed leg, her back rounded and her shoulders slouched forwards so that her neck vertebrae protruded — indeed, her spine was almost visible under her tight sweater, and her breasts, which were not as pert and full as Marusya’s but small and girlish, were pressed together from both sides. Suddenly, Hans Castorp remembered that she was also sitting here in anticipation of being given the rays. The counsellor was painting her; he was rendering her external aspect in oils and pigments on canvas. Now, however, in the half-darkness, he would direct rays of light at her that would reveal the inside of her body….’
And yes, Behrens is an amateur portraitist, with her as his model. You can imagine what feverish thoughts that has already led to in poor Hans Castorp’s mind, to be added to the information given by his table-companion that Mme Chauchat receives a gentleman visitor from the outside world. He agonises over what kind of visits they might be. ‘It did seem broadly possible that the Russian visitor’s relations with his countrywoman were of a chaste and harmless nature, but Hans Castorp had been inclined for some time now to regard chastity and harmlessness as poppycock — just as he could not bring or persuade himself to view a relationship between a brash-tongued widower [i.e. Behrens] and a narrow-eyed, soft-stepping young woman based on an oil painting as any different.’ Poor Hans is in far deeper than he can cope with, no more sure of what to do than he was with Pribislav Hippe.
All that is certain is that he will be here at least until the end of winter—it’s now late September—so he needs to organise what he needs. He has already composed a careful letter to one of the uncles who now comprise his only family, for money, clothes and other necessities… and that’s it. It’s as though a long prologue is over, and Hans Castorp is established as a proper resident. And Thomas Mann was right—since the provisional diagnosis at the end of Chapter 4, the change in the seasons is going in a flash. It gives Mann the opportunity to move things on in a way that seems quite speedy, despite the passage of many weeks. Names start to become attached to familiar residents, routines are properly established… but the main developments are happening in Hans Castorp himself. That is, his mind, soul and body—entities he is coming to realise are not at all as separate as he once let himself believe.
Mann is adhering to a lot of the conventions of the bourgeois novel. He guides his characters into chance meetings that lead to important conversations—or, in the case of Mme Chauchat, the predictable routines of the day lead not to conversations but to internal speculations that become increasingly feverish. In an environment in which Mercury is king—the residents take their own temperatures six times a day—a point or so of a degree is to be taken very seriously indeed. After at least one particularly febrile encounter, Hans’s reading even reaches 38 degrees, a real marker. It leads to conversations with whoever will listen about the links between mind and body. Both doctors are fascinated by it too. Krokowski’s fortnightly lectures are too uncomfortable for Hans to be able to discuss with the ultra-conventional Joachim. But, after one of those chance encounters, he can get Behrens to speak in thrillingly sensuous terms about the physiology of bodily fluids. Hans’s frequent interruptions suggest to us what effects, psychological and physiological, all this high talk is having on him.
This comes several weeks after Hans’s return to what is considered normal in these parts. In that time, his obsessive, self-questioning infatuation with Mme Chauchat preoccupies him almost constantly. The convalescent life of the sanatorium, and of Hans Castorp himself, carry on in their usual way. Different people behave in the ways that come to define them, different treatments and outcomes are discussed routinely… and, at the same time, Hans finds himself immersed in an interior struggle that leaves no space for some of his usual social concerns. Some of the younger residents are starting to laugh at his behaviour, not hiding their quiet mockery as he stares at the door waiting for Mme Chauchat’s arrival—and more openly when he blushes at her entrance… and he doesn’t care. They are laughing because his behaviour is so naïve. As days and weeks pass, he still never speaks to her except in the blatantly engineered chance encounters with her.
Mann offers a couple of examples. In one of them, Hans has noticed a beam of sunlight, ‘forcing her to shield her eyes with one hand as she talks to her concave compatriot to her right. It is a nuisance, though not a great one….’ But, after painstakingly tracking the path of the beam, ‘he makes a decision. Wordlessly he gets to his feet, walks diagonally across the room between the tables with his napkin in his hand, pulls the curtains together back there, checks by glancing over his shoulder that the evening sun is now blocked out and Frau Chauchat rescued… and sets off back with a show of serene composure. … Frau Chauchat immediately felt some respite and looked around. She held this pose until Hans Castorp had reached his table again and, sitting down, glanced in her direction, whereupon she thanked him with an astonished, friendly smile, which involved thrusting her head forward rather than inclining it. He acknowledged her smile with a bow. His heart stood still; it seemed to have stopped beating. Only later, when it was all over, did it start to pound, and only then did he notice that Joachim was staring down at his plate, just as he realized after the event that Frau Stöhr had elbowed Dr Blumenkohl in the ribs and, stifling her laughter, was browsing their own table and the others for complicit looks.’ You get the picture.
This is the background to his conversation with Behrens. He has manoeuvred his way into an accidental meeting with him after lunch and, as Joachim realises stolidly, faux-accidentally mentions Behrens’ paintings. The upshot, as Hans wanted, is a tour of Behrens’ display of work. Hans Castorp is only interested in one of the portraits and, despite its being rather an approximate likeness, he sees it at the far end of the room. Once in front of it, he almost automatically takes it down to look more closely—and he hasn’t relinquished it when he urges Behrens to tell him everything about the skin in general, and Mme Chauchat’s in particular. And what lies beneath it. This physical closeness to her not-quite likeness, while having the doctor speak so intimately of the workings of the mind and body in harmony, becomes another almost ecstatic moment for Hans. He immediately goes to tell her he’s madly in love with her—except, obviously, he does no such thing. But he knows for certain now that he is. In love with her….
Meanwhile, his routine encounters with Settembrini continue—and one develops into another of Thomas Mann’s verbatim accounts of what we are clearly to regard as an important conversation. (How many is that now?) It begins during Hans Castorp’s weekly high points, the Sunday ritual of the retrieval of the post, not delivered individually on that day. ‘A week ago, at the counter, he had come into such close contact with Madame Chauchat that she had even knocked him slightly and said ‘Pardon’ to him with a quick turn of her head — to which he had managed to respond, with blessed, feverish quick-wittedness: ‘Pas de quoi, madame!’ It was one of life’s boons, he thought, that every Sunday afternoon without fail the post was distributed in the front hallway!’ Has he moved on a single millimetre from his adolescent crush on Pribislav Hippe? It seems not.
Anyway, on this particular Sunday Hans is congratulating himself on having reached the high point of the week—that is, he’s allowed seven days to pass—when Settembrini collars him. He is irritated—Settembrini is the ‘organ-grinder’ at these moments—but ‘it was not only with shame and disillusionment that Hans Castorp spied this smile but also with a sense of needy gratitude.’ Yes, he’s missed his chance with la Chauchat, but he knows he will benefit in some way from a conversation with the Italian instead. Settembrini almost certainly knows what Hans is up to in the mail room, and Hans realises he’s looking out for the side of his nature that isn’t fixated on the carnal. Good old straight-talking, no nonsense Settembrini, yes?
Well, up to a point. It’s in this conversation that the strict limits to Settembrini’s openness are made plain. He isn’t open at all, but determined to lead Hans in the direction he favours, European rationalism. Not Asiatic, not Slavic, but European. We come to understand even more clearly than before why Mann has chosen to endow both Mme Chauchat—and her predecessor in Hans’s strange emotional universe, Pribislav—with a kind of ethnic otherness. Hans is always musing on this—‘her greyish-green eyes, whose slightly Asiatic positioning and shape bewitch him to the core.’ He had been thinking about both of these while hoping to see her in the mailroom, and it’s the ‘Asiatic’ tendency that Settembrini warns him against now. Suddenly, she has acquired a symbolic status in the novel, because she personifies one side of the duality in Hans.
Settembrini isn’t only talking about sex, as nobody ever calls it in this novel, but about the whole of that part of our nature that shies away from the rational. He insists he isn’t referring to the Church’s separation of soul and body when Hans interprets his meaning this way: ‘nobility is sealed in the mind, in reason, which is why it is futile for you to raise a charge of Christian obscurantism….’ He is back to the idea that non-rationalist activities, including, it seems, every aspect of non-European anything, are anathema for anyone who wants to make a change in the world.
This is what it’s really about. Time—yes, that again—is there for us to use for the good of the world. He genuinely approves Hans’s choice of career, and always addresses him as Engineer. Hans is showing that he has some contribution to make ‘in the world,’ as valid as any intellectual activity he, Settembrini, might undertake. And what an undertaking it is for the Italian. The framing device for his conversation is a letter he has received commissioning him to write for a great Encyclopaedia of humanistic thought. Specifically, this is to be about the identification of what it is that causes suffering, and what can be done to eradicate it. Settembrini is taking the literary canon, and is pleased because suffering is one of its favourite themes. The notes to my edition explain that just before the First World War there really was such a project under way. I’m delaying judgment on it for now, given that the overarching structure of this novel is that of a retrospective portrait of prewar society. Oh, the optimism….
Hans is always impressed, partly because he has no properly formed replies to Settembrini’s arguments. He can, as both of them appreciate, make use of the forms of debate in order to express his less than total conviction of Settembrini’s humanist agenda… but this isn’t the same thing, as Settembrini forces him to acknowledge. The Italian has just explained he bitterly resented not being able to attend an important conference for reasons of health, and Hans is straight in: ‘What do you have against the body?’ Hans’s thoughts at this point are shown in italics. ‘What am I talking about? This will be monstrous. But I have now put myself on a war footing with him and I shall delay his having the final word for as long as possible. He will have it, that’s clear, but it doesn’t matter — I will make the most of this, I will goad him.’ He goes further. ‘You’re a humanist, aren’t you? How can you be opposed to the body?’
This is such a weak jab that Settembrini relaxes. He knows as well as Hans does that Hans is scratching around for reasons not to do anything that would disturb his comfortable life in the sanatorium, especially while the slant-eyed Asiatic-looking patient is there. It isn’t the body he objects to, but ‘analysis’ like Krokowski’s, ‘if it is tainted with the execrable stink of the tomb. With the body, it is no different. It must be respected and defended when it promotes its emancipation and beauty, of the liberty of the senses, bliss, and passion. It must be despised if it resists the movement towards the light as the principle of heaviness and inertia; it must be abhorred when it stands for the principle of disease and death, when its specific spirit is the spirit of perversity, the spirit of decay, of lechery and disrepute…’ Well, that’s told him…
…except it’s in the very next chapter that Hans ambushes Behrens, and receives those highly interesting lessons in human biological functions, with particular reference to the woman whose portrait he holds in his lap as though he’d forgotten he was still enthusiastically clutching it. Thre’s obviously a lot more clarification to be gone through before Hans Castorp sorts out what on earth is going on inside him.
We can read it for you wholesale 