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 is obvious about his crush on Clavdia, and soon everyone around the Berghof knows about it. There’s not much to do at the sanatorium other than measure one’s temperature, and so romances—and gossiping about romances—are common. It’s difficult for Hans to find excuses to cross paths with Clavdia, so he looks forward to the mail distribution, which takes place every Sunday and which Hans looks forward to as a chance to socialize with her. However, he ultimately decides not to act on any opportunity, should it arise, limiting himself merely to fantasizing about it.
The book has established Hans’s passivity as one of his defining traits. It’s fitting, then, that he chooses not to act on his crush on Clavdia, limiting himself to dreams and fantasy.
Themes
One Sunday, as Hans waits for Joachim, who has gone off to check whether there’s mail waiting for either of them, he runs into Settembrini. Though in his dreams Settembrini often appears as a nuisance, in waking life Hans feels ashamed of his unconscious self’s rudeness and is even grateful to run into the older man. Settembrini asks after Hans’s health and then makes a few jokes about Russians, veiled allusions to Hans’s crush. Hans laughs—something Settembrini never does. Settembrini then asks if Hans has received a copy of his X-ray yet, and Hans dutifully produces a picture from his wallet. Settembrini dubiously exams the image, which he calls Hans’s “passport,” suggesting that it’s not unambiguous proof of Hans’s illness.
The tension between Hans’s dreams and his reality underscores his characteristic ambivalence, which goes hand in hand with his passivity. He feels torn between respecting and resenting Settembrini, and as a result he neither fully accepts nor rejects Settembrini as a mentor. It’s also notable that Hans is now carrying his copy of his X-ray in his wallet, treating it almost as a surrogate ID card—Settembrini seems to acknowledge this, referring to the X-ray as Hans’s “passport.” This indicates that Hans now sees his illness as a core part of his identity, placing exaggerated significance on illness despite Settembrini’s warnings against doing so.
Themes
Settembrini goes on, expressing disapproval that Hans is fine with wasting so much time here at the Berghof. He says such behavior is “foreign to [Hans’s] nature” as a young person, indicating that it’s unnatural to not want to seize life. He advises that Hans speak his own “civilized European” language and not let the “great deal of Asia” that dominates the atmosphere of the sanatorium influence his thoughts. He shouldn’t be tempted by Asiatic values, especially their laziness. He thinks this carefree attitude toward life is what makes patients of this background feel so at home at the Berghof. Instead, Hans should embrace the humanist project of putting his time toward progress and the betterment of humanity. Hans finds Settembrini’s moralizing rather annoying, but he keeps his thoughts to himself and lets Settembrini pull him out of the mail room to preach to him in private.
Settembrini’s language here is deliberate: he says it’s “foreign to [Hans’s] nature” to not want to seize life, implying that some “foreign” influence (i.e., someone who isn’t a “civilized [Western] European” has corrupted Hans and caused him to become directionless and lazy. In effect, he’s suggesting that Hans is letting his crush on Clavdia distract him from more important things. It could even be that Clavdia is motivating Hans’s choice to stay at the Berghof more than Hans even realizes at the moment. Settembrini’s advice to Hans not to waste his youth falls on deaf ears, however, as Hans disregards everything Settembrini tries to tell him. Hans’s outright dismissal of Settembrini reflects his youthful obstinance and naivety.
Themes
Once they are out of the mail room, Settembrini pulls a package out of his jacket and hands Hans a flyer containing official letterhead for the “International League for the Organization of Progress,” of which Settembrini is a member. He tells Hans that this organization is “its own self-perfection.” It's comprised of members from France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and some from Germany. Members are invested in education, overcoming class struggle, and general social improvement. They have established local chapters across Europe and are in the process of writing Sociological Pathology, an encyclopedia that will catalogue different kinds of human suffering, the chemicals that cause them, and possible methods of eliminating such suffering. Settembrini’s job in all this is to write a separate volume about human suffering in literature.
The encyclopedia Settembrini is working on aims to understand suffering in order to eradicate it. Yet there is a fundamental irony to his project, which takes the rational task of empirical research to such an extreme—is it rational to believe that all suffering can be eradicated?— that it becomes absurdly irrational. Although the novel decidedly casts Settembrini and his Western ideals in a more positive light than, say, Clavdia Chauchat, it also points out his shortcomings. Settembrini’s steadfast belief in rationality as a means toward enlightenment ironically causes him to misunderstand the world.
Themes
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Hans congratulates Settembrini on being chosen to do such important work. Settembrini says it’s especially fortunate that he can do so at the sanatorium—something that’s not an option for Hans, who is a physical laborer and can only do his work “in the world below.” Because of this, Settembrini cautions Hans, Hans “can be a European only in the flatlands.” He thinks that Hans should leave the Berghof. Hans, taken aback, say this is simply not possible anymore, given his illness. And it’s hypocritical of Settembrini to suggest this, given that he doesn’t dare disobey Behrens’s orders to stay at the sanatorium until he’s fully healed. Hans lashes out at Settembrini, demanding to know why Settembrini—a self-declared humanist—hates the body so much.
Settembrini has previously hinted that Hans needs to leave the Berghof, but he’s failed to get through to the stubborn youth. Now he directly orders Hans to leave the Berghof, re-enter “the flatlands” below, and do his part to improve society. Hans is justified in accusing Settembrini of hypocrisy: it does seem that Settembrini isn’t quite acting on the advice he gives Hans. One can hardly consider living at the Berghof and going on long, self-indulgent tangents about humanism to be a particularly productive, meaningful use of one’s time.
Themes
Settembrini, seemingly both amused and disappointed by Hans’s accusation, says that while he has nothing against the body in general, as a humanist and proponent of rationality, he has come to loathe the human mind’s necessary attachment to the debased physical body. To further illustrate his point, he brings up the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, of which Voltaire “rose up against,” meaning he “protested” the awesome force of nature that had brought so much destruction upon humanity. Nature is like the body, explains Settembrini: one must respect it when it perpetuates beauty, freedom, and happiness—but one must fight against it when it brings about illness, death, suffering, and base lust. Before Hans can respond to what Settembrini has said, Joachim appears with their mail, interrupting the exchange.
Hans’s accusation that Settembrini loathes the human body is either a deliberate or a misguided interpretation of Settembrini’s beliefs. As Settembrini clarifies here, he doesn’t hate the body for its sinful, debased nature. Nor does he hate the body all the time. Instead, he hates that the body’s physicality limits the human mind’s potential. If humans were not made of flesh—that is, if they were immortal—then they could theoretically go on living and learning and improving forever. But the body’s physicality—its vulnerability to pain and illness and decay—limits the mind’s capacity to progress and succeed.
Themes
