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
Behrens’s son, Knut, comes to visit him over the holidays, and all the ladies dress well, each hoping to capture his attention. Hans and Joachim do what they can to avoid Knut and the university friends he brought with him. The holidays don’t alter the sanatorium’s daily schedule much, though a tree materializes inside the dining hall, and by Christmas Eve it has been decorated with tinsel and glass ornaments. People dress up for dinner that night, too, and even the perpetually casual Clavdia arrives dressed in a Russian-style gown. Settembrini dresses as he normally does.
Clavdia’s “Russian” gown implicitly links her sensuality with her Eastern sensibilities. Settembrini’s choice to dress as he normally does despite it being a holiday, meanwhile, emphasizes his rationality and his rejection of decadence of frivolous, superficial acts of celebration.
Themes
After dinner, the residents present their gifts to Behrens. The Russians give him a monogrammed silver plate, the uselessness of which is obvious to everyone. The other residents give him a chaise longue, which is at least a functional piece of furniture. On Christmas Day, a local professional singer comes to the sanatorium and gives a performance followed by singing lessons. Clavdia sits in the front row but leaves during intermission and doesn’t return afterward. Hans struggles to focus after her departure. Settembrini attends but makes ironic, teasing remarks about the performance.
The uselessness of the silver plate gestures toward the decadence and irrationality the book associates with Eastern culture. Of course, the irony is that the chaise lounge the other residents have gifted Behrens is a decidedly ornamental, useless piece of furniture: it’s hardly more functional than the Russians’ silver plate. The uselessness of both gifts points to the pointless, decadence that characterizes life at the Berghof: residents are so unaccustomed to making productive, practical use of their time that they can’t even recognize the uselessness of their gifts.
Themes
The Austrian horseman dies shortly after Christmas. Hans is especially struck by the death because the horseman’s cough was one of the first “signs of life” he heard when he first came to the Berghof. He required lots of costly treatment at the end of his life, the expense of which left his widow penniless. Joachim scoffs at this, feeling it was pointless of the man to try to stave off death in vain. Hans disagrees, feeling that Joachim—like Settembrini—is failing to honor suffering. When Hans tries to talk about the man’s death with his tablemates, they respond with hostility, finding it inappropriate of him to discuss such a grim subject.
Hans takes the Austrian horseman’s death poorly. His efforts to talk about the death with Joachim and his tablemates reveal that he still has lingering anxieties about illness and death despite his earlier attempts to form a detached, frank attitude toward illness, death, and the physical body in general. Hans seems to believe that a failure to honor suffering, death, and illness renders life itself meaningless, and he struggles to accept that his fellow residents don’t feel the same.
Themes
After the Austrian horseman dies, Hans and Joachim visit the man’s room and find his widow there, disheveled and grieving, beside her late husband’s corpse. Hans strikes up a conversation with the widow, attempting to showcase “both medical expertise and moral, religious sympathy,” about her late husband’s years of suffering and illness. The woman cries sporadically throughout the conversation. When the woman asks Hans what his profession is, he replies that he “had been” an engineer, prompting a shocked and upset look from Joachim.
Comically, Hans seems to be more focused showing off all the deep thinking he’s recently done on the subjects of life, death, and morality than on grieving openly with the Austrian horseman’s widow and honoring death. Also of importance here is Hans’s use of the past tense—he “had been" an engineer—to describe his life in the lowlands. Though he’s only been at the Berghof for several months now, he already seems to no longer relate to (or believe he’ll return to) his old life.
Themes
Get the entire The Magic Mountain LitChart as a printable PDF.
After they leave the widow, Hans reflects on how the conversation affected him. He argues that talking about death requires a person to use Latin—the religious sort of Latin that’s directly at odds with Settembrini’s humanist intellectual tradition. Hans, citing the play Don Carlos, talks about King Philip’s fear of God and his humility. He thinks these traits highlight a dignified form of humanity. At the same time, though, calling something “human” can also be bad in that it justifies laziness or weakness. Joachim, ever the disciplined military man, expresses his hatred of both traits. Hans agrees that the self-discipline, respect for authority, and acceptance of death are positive features of Joachim’s profession. He thinks more civilians should have these traits—traits Hans himself lacks.
Hans now turns to religion to understand death, marking a major shift in his earlier efforts to understand death through science. Hans’s perpetually changing views emphasize his youth. Meanwhile, his praise of Joachim’s self-discipline and acceptance of death seem to be genuine; and indeed, the book seems to portray these traits of Joachim’s in a positive light, as well. Joachim, unlike most other residents at the Berghof, acts in accordance with his beliefs, not only talking about his duty to return to his military service but actually taking steps to make that happen, dutifully recording his temperature, resting, and studying Russian language textbooks in the meantime to ensure that he’s prepared when (if) he’s finally allowed to return to his service.
Themes
Hans shifts his focus to Settembrini, critiquing the man for believing his humanist understanding of humanity is the only dignified way to think about life. Just before Hans and Joachim part ways to retreat to their separate rooms, Hans condemns the sanatorium’s practice of hiding death (staff will likely remove the Austrian horseman’s body from the premises while everyone is eating supper) as “immoral.” Hans decides that from this day forth he’ll start being more attentive to the more severely ill residents of the Berghof, even if it means just saying hello or stopping to chat for a few moments. Joachim answers that this would be against the rules, though he doesn’t have much of an issue with it. He also thinks Behrens would make an exception if Hans explained his idea to him.
Hans, in condemning the sanatorium’s practice of removing dead bodies discreetly as “immoral,” attaches great underlying meaning to a procedure that the sanatorium most likely has in place for practical reasons—it would be upsetting and disruptive to cart out corpses in the middle of the day when the facility is bustling with the goings-on of daily life. In this way, Hans shows that he’s more concerned about abstract ideals than on concrete, practical reality. His new plan to visit severely ill patients, on the other hand, could function to match Hans’s abstract ideals about dignifying death with the practical action of treating the dying with dignity, though it remains to be seen whether Hans’s plan will achieve the results he wants it to or will become just another of his passing fancies.
Themes
Hans sets his sights on a young woman named Leila Gerngross, who is deathly ill and likely won’t live until next spring. Her parents had arrived at the Berghof wanting to take Leila home, but Behrens told them it simply couldn’t be done—she’s too fragile. Hans walks into town and buys her a potted hydrangea and attaches a card to it, sending his and Joachim’s regards. Leila is overjoyed to receive the gift and takes great care to keep it watered and healthy. The next day, Hans and Joachim visit Leila in her “chamber of suffering.” The thin, blonde girl thanks them for her gift. Hans speaks to the girl gently and emotionally, making polite conversation with Leila’s parents.
Hans project of visiting the Berghof’s most seriously ill patients is an improvement from his earlier efforts at dignifying death. After all, instead of ignoring death, he is actually acknowledging it.
Themes
Hans and Joachim get up to leave after Leila shows signs of exhaustion, and Frau Gerngross follows them out. Beside herself, she laments being the one who made her daughter ill: she had a mild case of the disease when she was a young girl but was told she’d fully recovered. Apparently, she laments now, that was not the case. She thanks Hans and Joachim for acting as “a nice little flirt for [Leila]” to help her forget the suffering that otherwise characterizes her sickly existence. The mother’s response to Hans’s attempt at dignifying the sick leaves him feeling disappointed and a bit annoyed.
Frau Gerngross’s description of Hans and Joachim’s visit to Leila as flirtation annoys Hans because it devalues the serious work he was trying to do. Frau Gerngross is suggesting that the visit didn’t dignify Leila’s suffering but in fact distracted Leila from her impending death. Ironically, Hans’s annoyance at hearing that he effectively cheered Leila up reveals that his supposed plan to dignify suffering is more for himself than it is for the dignity and welfare of those who suffer.
Themes
Hans’s next target is a young man named Fritz Rotbein, to whom Hans and Joachim hand deliver a bouquet of roses. The young man actually weeps out of gratitude—before shifting the conversation’s focus to the thriving European flower business, talking of wholesale markets throughout the continent. He was a businessman, he explains, and got sick during a trip to England to undergo training. By the time his illness received the correct diagnosis, the infection had progressed too far. Rotbein tells all this to Hans and Joachim in a calm, businesslike manner. Before Hans and Joachim leave, Rotbein begs for them to visit him again. They say they will, but Rotbein undergoes an unsuccessful operation and then dies before they get the chance.
Hans and Joachim’s visit to Fritz Rotbein further suggests the self-indulgent nature of Hans’s supposed efforts to dignify suffering. All their visit really does is allow Hans to feel self-satisfied about making Rotbein weep with gratitude—delivering flowers to a sick person is more a display of good manners than a revolutionary approach to dignifying sickness and death. And what’s more, the visit doesn’t alter the outcome of Rotbein’s suffering: he dies anyway, regardless of how “dignified” Hans made him feel in his final days.
Themes
After Leila Gerngross dies, Hans happens upon Behrens in the hallway. Behrens tells Hans he’s on his way to visit “Lady Overblown” and asks if Hans would like to accompany him. Hans follow Behrens into the room of a nervous-seeming woman who laughs uncontrollably at everything Behrens says. After Behrens leaves, the woman and Hans chat. She notes his new practice of “visiting high-ranking patients.” She laughs at his “amusing and kind” act.
“Lady Overblown,” rather justifiably, characterizes Hans’s ongoing mission to dignify suffering as “amusing and kind” rather than revolutionary or particularly beneficial to anyone. Her description undermines the seriousness of Hans’s project and gestures toward its underlying childishness.
Themes
Then the Overblown Woman (whose real name is Frau Zimmermann) tells Hans the origins of Behrens’s nickname for her, assuring him that it is terribly funny and laughing nonstop as she tells it. She’d been only slightly ill when she first arrived at the Berghof . She had a pneumothorax, and the procedure was immediately successful. Then she took a trip to Zurich, just for fun, during which she realized she needed an oxygen refill—and the doctor who performed it “had overblown her!” This resulted in her heart constricting and caused her to experience shortness of breath. When Frau Zimmermann returned to the Berghof, her condition was grave, and Behrens shouted that she was “literally hovering between life and death.”
The Overblown Woman’s story likely horrifies Hans as it exemplifies two ways of thinking about death and suffering that he disdains: an overemphasis on the physical body and its lightheartedness. Hans believes that suffering is a dignified state of being that people should acknowledge and regard with the utmost seriousness, and yet the Overblown Woman’s frank, humorous account of her own past experiences with suffering challenges that narrative.
Themes
Hans isn’t sure what about Behrens’s remark Frau Zimmermann finds so funny—is it that she doesn’t believe him, or is that she simply finds the fact of her “hovering between life and death” funny? Hans sends her flowers later, but he never meets with her again—she dies before he can.
When suffering patients fail to take their suffering as seriously as Hans thinks they ought to, he abandons them. This reveals the self-indulgence at the heart of his supposed mission to dignify suffering.
Themes
Sometime later, Settembrini confronts Hans about his recent “deeds of mercy.” He calls Hans “one of life’s problem children, a fellow whom others must look after.” He reminds Hans that Hans once gave Settembrini permission to do just that—look after Hans and guide him in the right direction. He advises Hans to “let the dead bury their dead.” Hans disregards Settembrini’s perspective but outwardly makes a show of heeding his advice.
Settembrini’s advice to Hans to “let the dead bury their dead” is a quote that Jesus speaks in the Gospel of Luke. It means to let the spiritually “dead” (nonbelievers) go about their business so that believers can focus on the more important work of serving God. In this context, Settembrini seems to be urging Hans to not care so much about dignifying the dead and to instead focus his energy on living a good, meaningful life. But Hans, seemingly feeling that Settembrini is condescending to him when he describes Hans as “one of life’s problem children,” stubbornly rejects the older man’s efforts to help him. It’s clear that Hans hasn’t matured all that much over the past several months.
Themes
Hans and Joachim also visit Tous-les-deux’s son, Lauro, having first sent him flowers. But they find the young man’s behavior gaudy, dramatic, and wholly unenjoyable, though they choose not to judge him for it. They do enjoy their visit with Anton Karlovitch Ferge, a Russian man recovering from a pneumothorax that almost killed him. During one visit, the young man recounts his grotesque experience of undergoing the procedure—the “filthy ordeal”—without anesthesia. He also tells them about his life in Russia prior to his stay at the Berghof. Overall, Hans and Joachim appreciate the man’s frank, unaffected demeanor.
Hans’s choice to continue visiting the Berghof’s sickest residents confirms that he has disregarded Settembrini’s advice, obstinately believing he knows better than his mentor. Meanwhile, Hans and Joachim’s approval of Ferge’s frank, casual attitude toward his horrific medical history reveals an almost morbid but delighted fascination with death. Increasingly, it seems more the case that Hans is paying visits to the sick to satisfy his own perverse curiosity than to perform any sort of public service to the dying.
Themes
Hans also enjoys his visits to Karen Karstedt, one of Behrens’s outpatients whom he recommended the cousins visit and go on outings with around Davos-Dorf, including bobsled races. They also see a performance at the Bioscope Theater in Platz, watching a performance of an obscene tale of lust that featured naked bodies and the portrayal of lewd, unadulterated desire. They also go to a cemetery on Dorfberg one day, despite Joachim’s protests that they shield Karen from any reminders of her own mortality. They wander around the cemetery, noting the dates and names that adorn its various tombstones. Eventually they happen upon an unoccupied plot. When the cousins look at Karen, they find her smiling and looking “bashful and demure.”
The implication here is that Karen and the cousins have happened upon Karen’s marked (and soon to be occupied, depending on how much longer she can stave off death) grave. Karen’s “bashful and demure” smile, compared with the cousins’ awkward, stunned silence suggests that, contrary to Hans’s opinion, people who are suffering don’t need his help to understand or come to terms with their own mortality: in fact, it’s he who remains most perplexed and apprehensive about death.
Themes
