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
Hans sits down at a seat near the door and tries to act like he’s been there the whole time. Hardly anybody notices him, which is good—he’s pale, bloody, and looks generally awful. However, Madame Chauchat is in front of him—and she turns around to face him when he walks in. She looks just like Hippe. He looks at her horrible posture—so unlike the graceful way the women in his usual social circle hold themselves—with disgust. But in that moment, he recognizes in her the same freedom from honor he saw in Herr Albin. As he looks at her, his thoughts grow jumbled, and he can’t pay attention to Krokowski’s words.
Hans’s feelings toward Clavdia are as ambivalent as his feelings toward the Berghof: he is simultaneously drawn to and disgusted by the way she disregards the social norms and values of his bourgeois society. At the same time, though, her poor manners and slouching appearance suggest the freeing quality of illness Hans first noted in Herr Albin.
Themes
Hans tries to focus. The subject of Krokowski’s lecture is “the force of love,” Krokowski’s specialty. Krokowski’s speech is both lyrical and intellectual, and it seems to affect both the men and women of the audience—but not Hans—emotionally. Hans hasn’t heard anyone say the word “love” so much in his entire life, and he starts to feel uncomfortable. Krokowski says love is among the most puzzling, discomforting of all human instincts. He presents passion and chastity as dueling forces, suggesting that fear seems to cause chastity to triumph in society. But this is merely an illusion, and beneath the surface, repressed love and passion linger. And the way this repressed passion presents itself on the surface, Krokowski explains, is as illness. The room collectively sighs as he voices this conclusion.
The lecture’s focus on “the force of love” is comically relevant to Hans’s life, since his growing, suppressed love for Clavdia corresponds with his declining health. Krokowski portrays love as irrational and instinctual: a force as mysterious as it is powerful, and one that modern society—out of fear—seeks to repress. Hans’s discomfort at Krokowski’s talk of love, with its coded allusions to sexuality, reflects his youth and inexperience at this early point in the novel. He is young, and his understanding of the world is limited to what his bourgeois upbringing has taught him. Hans, in short, was brought up in the very society that fears (and so suppresses) love.
Themes
Hans watches Frau Chauchat fix her hair and becomes distracted by her stubby, unrefined hands. He thinks about Krokowski’s theory about bourgeois forces stifling love. Hans thinks about how enticingly women dress, and he suddenly feels overcome with zeal for life. He realizes that to truly enjoy one’s life, one must consciously remember that it is “magical.” Of course, Hans counters, there’s a logical explanation for why women dress the way they do: to entice men in order to procreate and bring about the next generation. Hans thinks that sickly women like Madame Chauchat should really be forbidden from dressing this way. It’s illogical for a man to be attracted to a sick woman—just as it was illogical for Hans to be attracted to Hippe. Hans looks up at Krokowski just then and thinks he looks like Jesus on the cross.
Hans makes a few key observations in this scene. First, he seems to accept Krokowski’s notion that bourgeois social norms stifle love, and he questions whether he is really going about life the right way: is it better to rationally suppress one’s dark, inner urges or to live a “magical” life full of unrepressed, irrational bursts of passion, even if they ultimately lead to self-destruction? Here, Hans’s disgust toward Chauchat seems slowly to shift toward attraction. Through the Christ-like figure of Krokowski, he has seen the light.
Themes
Krokowski ends his lecture by raising his arms toward the crowd and praising “psychic dissection,” urging his audience to come to him and let him relieve them, through analysis, of “hidden suffering, of shame and affliction.”
Krokowski’s practice of “psychic dissection” is his tongue-in-cheek term for psychoanalysis. By calling it a “dissection,” he reinforces the link between repressed passion and physical illness. To understand illness, one must cut into the self to reveal the “hidden suffering, of shame at affliction” that lurks beneath the skin.
Themes
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After the lecture, Krokowski heads out to the lobby. The residents follow him, crowding around him as though in a trance. Hans thinks he looks like the Pied Piper. Hans reminds himself that he’s only a visitor at the sanatorium and has no use or interest in Krokowski’s analysis. Hans wonders if Frau Chauchat lets Krokowski dissect her mind, too.
As usual, Hans remains ambivalent, torn between two opposing sides. On the one hand, Krokowski’s invitation to release repressed passions appeals to him. On the other, he clings to his rational, bourgeois sensibilities. This is why he compares Krokowski to the Pied Piper, a folkloric villain who leads a village’s children off a cliff to their deaths: he feels that acting on irrational passions will only lead to self-destruction, and he’s not convinced this is the path he wants to go down.
Themes
Joachim finds Hans and asks him how his walk went. Hans admits that he walked a bit too far and that the walk might have harmed more than helped him. They do not discuss the lecture—and they never will.
Hans’s comment that the walk hurt more than helped him could refer to the physical toll the walk took on his body, but it could also allude to the realization he made about the link between Clavdia and Hippe. Even at this early stage, Hans seems to register that Clavdia poses a threat to him.
Themes
