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
Winter arrives, and its intensity alarms Hans even though he has sufficiently prepared for it—he now has a sleeping bag to shield him from the cold, just like all the other residents of the Berghof. Eventually Hans realizes that he’ll be spending Christmas here, and the thought troubles him. Residents take Christmas very seriously, putting lots of thought into the communal gift they plan to give to Behrens on Christmas Eve. Settembrini suggests a book-in-progress called Sociology of Suffering, but nobody other than a bookseller resident agrees with him. As of yet, the residents haven’t reached a consensus, with the Russian residents wanting to give Behrens a gift of their own.
Hans’s apprehension about spending Christmas at the Berghof further illustrates his characteristic ambivalence. Sometimes he seems in no hurry to leave and return to his real life “down below,” but other times he seems guilty or anxious to be wasting so many months of his youth recovering at the Berghof. The detail of the Berghof’s Russian population not cooperating with the other residents and opting to give Behrens a gift of their own reinforces the tension between Eastern culture and Western culture that the novel has established thus far.
Themes
Despite the toll the intense cold takes on his body, Hans stays out on his balcony late into the night, enjoying the winter night. During the day, Hans and Joachim take walks in the snow, and Hans is more prone to indulgent rambling than he was when he was down in the flatlands.
Hans’s choice to lie out on his balcony despite the cold’s negative effects on his body is yet another instance in which he acts—and apparently consciously so—against his self-interest. If he’s wary about spending the holidays at the Berghof, one wonders, then why would he do something he knows will take a toll on his health and almost certainly extend his recovery?
Themes
Lots of residents read at the Berghof, though it’s mostly new or short-term residents, since people who’ve been there a long time have long since learned how to pass the time without intellectual stimulation. Currently, a pamphlet that Herr Albin introduced to the population, The Art of Seduction, is circulating among the residents. Magnus, the brewer resident, claims that the book gives women “immodest ideas,” and this only makes the book more coveted. But other than Settembrini (who consumes himself with writing about how to eliminate suffering) and Joachim (who studies his Russian textbooks), most residents don’t use their rest cures to exercise their brains.
The fact that so few residents seek out intellectual stimulation reinforces the sanatorium’s atmosphere of idleness and decadence. It also supports Settembrini’s warning to Hans that an unhealthy fixation with death and illness is ultimately self-destructive, in this case leading to intellectual decay.
Themes
Hans, having lost interest in Ocean Steamships, the only book he packed, acquires new books about anatomy and biology, his new primary interests. He spends hours reading about the mystery of life. Ultimately, the books teach Hans that nobody knows what life really is or where it comes from—it seems to be born of itself. But since that would be a “miracle,” scientists hypothesize about organic matter originating from inorganic matter—the most basic and lifeless of all substances.
In this chapter, Hans begins his coming-of-age journey in earnest, absorbing himself in books to try to discover the meaning of life. Of course, the irony is that Hans’s careful study of life replaces the lived experience of life.
Themes
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Life, Hans muses, is warmth: it is the warmth that happens as the physical body tries to “preserve form.” This process, he reflects, is “existence in its lewd form.” It is not the ideal, beautiful form found in works of visual art and poetry. Instead, it is that which comes from “substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh.” Hans thinks about all this as he sits on his balcony, wrapped tightly in his blankets, and gazes out upon the wintery night that lays before him.
Hans’s idea that the physical body tries to “preserve form” isn’t quite original: it’s more or less what Behrens said to him in the previous chapter. While Hans seems to regard his research and his philosophical musings as serious intellectual work, he’s really just parroting what other people have told him, shifting his views with each new idea he encounters. His inability to formulate original thought further illustrates his youth and inexperience.
Themes
Hans pores over textbooks about asexual and sexual reproduction, about the mysteries of certain anatomical processes, and about pathological anatomy. He reads about “parasitic cell fusion and infectious tumors,” and about how they take over formerly healthy, functioning bodies. Hans comes to wonder if life is merely “an infectious disease of matter” itself. “The first step toward evil, toward lust and death,” Hans muses, comes about when an outside source—a parasite—takes hold of the body. It happens when the inorganic becomes organic, which is really just “the sad progression of corporeality into consciousness.” And this, Hans notes, is no different than a disease taking hold of a living being and making it hyperaware of “its own corporeality.”
The more Hans reads about anatomy and biology, the less he is able to consider life apart from its relation to illness and death. In this way he devalues life, seeing it as pointless: as merely a rest stop on the way to corruption, illness, and death. When Hans describes the process by which a disease makes a sick being hyperaware of “its own corporeality,” he seems to embrace Settembrini’s understanding of illness. In that view, illness has no meaning or value in itself: it merely serves to reveal the tragic but inevitable limitations of the physical body.
Themes
The weight of these heavy textbooks on Hans’s chest as he reads them makes it difficult for him to breathe. He imagines a personified version of his own life facing him while he reads, her arms parting to reveal the intricate anatomical systems hidden beneath her flesh. He smells her organic smell, and he feels a mixture of “lust and dismay” as she kisses him on his lips.
The “lust” Hans feels toward this personified version of his own life before him, her organic smell suggesting the decay of flesh, indicates his growing attraction to death as the path toward understanding life. Yet the “dismay” he also feels suggests that he registers, at least on some level, the self-destructive nature of this pursuit.
Themes
