Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Magic Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time
Coming of Age
Death and Illness
East vs. West
Abstract Ideals vs. Lived Experience
Summary
Analysis
As Hans and Joachim walk, Hans observes what a nice man Behrens is, noting the cleverness of his calling a thermometer a “mercury cigar.” And that reminds Hans—he’d like to go smoke a real one now. Hans assumes that Joachim still isn’t smoking, and he can’t understand how anyone could not smoke—he certainly couldn’t go a single day without tobacco. Joachim thinks this is a “a sign of a rather weak will,” and that’s what Behrens was suggesting when he called Hans a civilian, though Behrens didn’t necessarily mean it in a bad way.
That Hans smokes cigars, an activity he considers one of life’s pleasures, while Joachim abstains reinforces the cousins’ opposite personalities: while Hans is self-indulgent and laid back, Joachim is upright and principled. Joachim astutely points this out when he claims that Behrens, in calling Hans a “civilian,” was pointing to Hans’s “weak will.” This scene further establishes the symbolism of illness in the book. While genuine medical conditions like tuberculosis have nothing to do with a person’s temperament—one can’t choose whether they get sick—the book gradually establishes a symbolic link between illness and passivity.
Themes
Hans and Joachim start to climb a hill, but the task becomes too taxing for Joachim, so he tells Hans to go on ahead. Hans does so and encounters a group of men and women. A young girl with messy hair and half-closed eyes (Hermine Kleefeld) walks toward Hans and whistles as she passes by—but the whistle comes from her chest, not her lips. Hans is shocked, and when he sees that she’s laughing, he realizes she was playing a prank on him.
It’s not yet clear how the girl has managed to whistle from her chest, but the strange talent is plausibly a side effect of the girl’s medical condition. This silly encounter further establishes Berghof residents’ casual, unserious attitude toward illness.
Themes
Hans asks Joachim, who has caught up to him by this point, about the girl. Joachim calmly explains that the girl, Hermine Kleefeld, uses her “pneumothorax” to whistle. He explains that pneumothorax is a surgery Behrens performs, wherein nitrogen gas is put into the body through a small incision in order to give a sick lung time to rest. People who have had the surgery tend to bond over their mutual experience, and some of the patients here have formed a group, the “Half-Lung Club.” Hermine Kleefeld is an important member of the club due to her special whistling talent.
Pneumothorax was a legitimate method of treating tuberculosis. That residents who’ve had the procedure bond over their mutual experience suggests that contrary to Joachim’s and other residents’ casual attitudes toward death and illness, there is something transformative or at least meaningful about the experience of being ill: sick people, the Half-Lung Club suggests, have a perspective that healthy people lack.
Themes
Hans finds the notion of a “Half-Lung Club” hilarious and starts to laugh. He doesn’t understand how seriously ill people can be so cheerful. Joachim pauses a moment and then suggests that perhaps being sick and dying aren’t such a big deal—after all, they’re all just doing nothing up here. Perhaps things are only serious in the outside world, “down below in real life.” Joachim thinks Hans will see what he means once he’s been at the sanatorium awhile, and Hans agrees.
Hans’s laughter suggests (or perhaps attempts to conceal) his discomfort at the Half-Lung Club. Joachim, meanwhile, feels differently. To him, the Berghof is really quite unremarkable—death and illness are unavoidable parts of life, after all. Instead, it’s the goings on “down below in real life”—meaning the political unrest across Europe, or perhaps simply the normal types of problems that people in ordinary society tend to suppress—that Hans should be concerned about.
Themes
Get the entire The Magic Mountain LitChart as a printable PDF.
Hans suddenly shifts his focus to his cigar, noting how awful it tastes. He can’t figure out why this might be—is it because he slept badly last night? He also notes his hot, flushed face. Joachim says he felt the same way when he first arrived and that it’s difficult to adjust to life up here, at first.
The horrible taste of Hans’s cigar symbolizes the growing hold the Berghof has on Hans. Cigars are a material good of the ordinary world, and Hans gradually loses the ability to enjoy them the longer he spends at the Berghof. It’s as though the mountainous (and perhaps magical) setting of the Berghof has cast a spell on him.
Themes
Hans and Joachim find a bench nearby and sit down. Hans asks Joachim if there have been many deaths since Joachim first arrived. Joachim says yes, though the staff deal with them in secret so nobody really hears about them. Hans observes that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and Joachim agrees.
It's curious that the staff deal with deaths behind the scenes—perhaps they don’t want dying patients to have to confront the very real threat of death any more than they have to.
Themes
Joachim recalls a time he happened to witness something the staff had tried to hide from the other residents. He’d overslept and was in his room later than all the other residents when Barbara Hujus, a young Catholic girl, was brought the viaticum—the Catholic ritual for the dying. She’d been a lively teenager when Joachim first arrived, but her condition took a sudden turn for the worse, and her condition deteriorated rapidly. That day, Joachim was walking down the hall when he saw an altar boy and a priest enter Barbara’s room, carrying a cross and the viaticum.
Despite the staff’s attempts to prevent residents from seeing the dead, Joachim’s gruesome story about witnessing the priest and altar boy visit Barbara Hujus’s room indicates that it’s impossible for residents to avoid the reality of death altogether, given the prevalence of serious or sudden illness in a sanatorium.
Themes
Just then, Joachim heard a ghastly scream, full of “misery and terror and defiance […] and such ghastly pleading.” It was Barbara, who had crawled under her blanket as soon as she saw the priest, desperately refusing to receive the sacrament for the dying, kicking with all her might. Hans is confused. If she was strong enough to resist so fiercely, then why was she given the sacrament for the dying? Joachim explains that she was weak, and it was only her fear that had given her this momentary strength. Many people react this way, he explains, and Behrens knows how to respond to calm them. He simply and frankly tells them not to “make such a fuss.”
Joachim’s story reveals that, despite residents’ outwardly casual attitude toward death, a fear of one’s own mortality (especially when it’s imminent, as in Barbara’s case) is engrained in all humans. Behrens’s advice to dying patients not to “make such a fuss” might seem cold and detached, but perhaps it’s also helpful: death comes to the dying (a group to which all humans, even those who are presently young and healthy, belong) regardless of how they respond to it, and so isn’t it better to accept rather than resist one’s fate?
Themes
Hans is aghast—surely a dying person deserves more respect than this. Joachim agrees, but he thinks it’s ultimately disruptive for people to cause a commotion “in such a weak-willed way.” But Hans fiercely rejects this, insisting that the dying deserve “nobler” treatment than what Behrens is giving them. Suddenly, the men see a man (later revealed to be Settembrini) walking toward them, and Joachim urges Hans to be quiet. The man, who has a “delicate” build, a moustache, and is dressed in checked trousers, approaches and greets them.
Hans’s shocked response to Behrens’s suggestion that the dying not “make such a fuss” reinforces his present attitude toward death and illness: he believes they are somehow “nobler” experiences that demand and deserve respect. Joachim, on the other hand, finds it “weak-willed” or even self-indulgent to make such a big deal about death.
Themes
