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
In total, Hans remains at the Berghof for seven years. During his time there, he sits at all seven of the dining hall’s tables. His final place is at the Bad Russian table, and at this point he has grown a misshapen little beard. None of the medical staff “invent diversions for him” any longer. Instead, they only ask him if he’s slept “well,” and this is only a formality. Behrens hardly speaks to him. He no longer requires supervision—nobody expects him to do anything rash or dangerous, and he’s “no longer even capable of forming the thought of a return to the flatlands.”
Hans’s final place at the Bad Russian table (and the little beard he has grown by the time he moves there) marks the transformation he has undergone since first arriving at the Berghof. Though once he rejected the idleness, irrationality, and subversion of bourgeois social norms he encountered at the sanatorium, he now embraces them wholeheartedly. And, as the fact that staff no longer “invent diversions for him” to remain there indicates, he’s no longer in denial about his transformation and no longer needs to feign illness to justify staying at the Berghof.
Themes
Throughout the years, more deaths occur. Consul Tienappel, Hans’s great-uncle and former guardian, dies; Hans learns about the death via telegram. Hans writes a letter in response and tells his family that his present condition prevents him from returning home to pay last respects to his late uncle. This death breaks Hans’s last connection to the flatlands, and from that point forth he writes and receives no more letters. He also no longer orders Maria Mancinis, having since found a different, suitable brand to buy up in the mountains.
Hans cuts ties with the people and pastimes that connected him to his old life. The finality of Hans’s decision to abandon the person he was and the life he might have lived comes through in the fact that even the death of his former guardian can’t compel him to leave the Berghof.
Themes
In Hans’s seventh year, “the rumble of thunder” arrives: World War I. The war catches Hans, who hasn’t bothered to read the paper in quite some time, completely off guard. Settembrini had tried to keep Hans informed of all the events happening in the world below, but Hans was too busy “‘playing king’” to pay him much notice.
It's almost comical that the arrival of World War I—a major conflict, and one close to home, too—catches Hans by surprise, but it also speaks to his total isolation from the real world. He’s been so preoccupied with his abstract, hypothetical musings—with “playing king,” that he has no energy left to muse over things that really matter: and that will soon come to impact his life in a real, unavoidable way.
Themes
Settembrini and Hans’s relationship has also changed. Whereas in the beginning it was Settembrini who sat beside Hans’s bed and tried to correct Hans’s misconceptions “about matters of life and death,” now Hans sits beside Settembrini’s bed and listens to him talk about “the world situation.” Settembrini hardly gets out of bed these days—Naphta’s suicide affected him greatly. Lately, Settembrini’s contribution to Sociological Pathology has been stalled indefinitely, and he’ll now deliver his findings about human suffering in literature orally rather than in written form. As tension builds throughout Europe, Settembrini finds that his humane, pacifist ideals clash with his humanist desire for freedom and progress. Settembrini reacts to the assassination of the archduke with both horror and admiration for the act that “was committed to free a nation […].”
Settembrini, unlike Hans, ultimately proves himself capable of acknowledging the limitations of his abstract ideals. The assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist (regarded as the event that instigated the start of World War I) exemplifies these limitations, forcing Settembrini to accept that his belief in pacifism and his regard for human life falter when a violent event like an assassination “[i]s committed to free a nation […].” In this way, Settembrini accepts that the real world is imperfect and ugly and incapable of adhering to the standard of perfection his abstract ideals lay out. But one must choose to live in that imperfect world nonetheless: it is the only option.
Themes
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When war is finally declared, the Berghof erupts in chaos. It’s only now that Hans—“our sleeper”—begins to rouse and look around. Finally, “the enchantment [has been] broken,” and Hans is “set free—not by his own actions […] but set free by elementary external forces, for whom his liberation was a very irrelevant matter.”
Hans has separated himself from reality over the past seven years. But now reality—in the form of a major global conflict—comes to call, and at long last “the enchantment” of the Berghof has been broken. Notably, Hans re-enters reality, but “not by his own actions”: the war forces the issue.
Themes
Ever since Hans’s spell was lifted, the Berghof has been in a chaotic state, with all the panicked residents rushing to pack their bags and retreat to safety in the land below. Hans, meanwhile, freed from his former state of disillusionment, remains calm and collected. Settembrini encounters Hans as he is packing his bags. He embraces Hans and kisses him, lamenting that Hans will be returning to the world under such unfortunate conditions—he wishes it could’ve been Hans’s choice to return, but such is life. He urges Hans to fight courageously, and then he bids him goodbye.
The involuntary nature of Hans’s return to reality prevents him from completing his self-education: one can reliably assume that, had the start of the war not brought about this long-delayed reality check, Hans would continue to waste his life away at the Berghof. Settembrini’s farewell to his young mentor is thus tinged with remorse: he wishes his lessons could have gotten through to Hans and helped him mature into an experienced and capable young man, but now there’s no chance of that happening. Hans, this passage reveals, is leaving the Berghof to fight in the war, and it’s highly likely he will die before he has had the chance to take full advantage of having been freed from his former state of disillusionment.
Themes
Now it’s dusk on a battlefield in some unspecified location in the flatlands. Missiles howl through the red, fiery air. It’s the final stretch of a battle that has been going on all day. The soldiers are mostly volunteers and young people. The meadow they march through is wet, muddy, and immensely difficult to traverse. The soldiers’ faces are all covered in mud. There are 3,000 soldiers—1,000 extra to guarantee that there will be 2,000 left to retake the nearby burning villages. Projectiles fly toward the soldiers, and many are hit. Others are shot at and killed. More and more soldiers are sent out from the surrounded wood to replace their fallen comrades.
The chaos and destruction of this scene underscore the harshness of the reality to which Hans has returned. At the Berghof, he mused about life and death, and he entertained the notion that suffering brings honor or dignity to the sufferer. But now, on the battlefields of the war-ravaged flatlands, Hans is forced to confront actual death and suffering, and the brutality of his present environment renders his earlier musings self-indulgent and superficial by comparison.
Themes
Hans Castorp is among these men. He looks like all the others, flushed and covered in mud. He sings a song to himself: “Upon its bark I’ve ca-arved there / So many words of love—.” Then Hans stops singing and throws himself to the ground to avoid being hit by an explosive shell. Hans watches as the shell—“this product of science gone berserk”—buries itself in the ground before him and explodes. He watches as two of his comrades are blown to pieces.
The song Hans sings here is the “Lindenbaum” song he sang to himself as he pined for Clavdia following her initial departure from the Berghof. That he sings it now underscores just how drastically life has changed for him since his aimless and carefree days at the Berghof. Back then, the worst of Hans’s problems was his lovesickness. He sang out of the foolish nostalgia for an irrational love. Now, he understands the song’s meaning all too clearly—and much too late.
Themes
The narrator confirms that Hans has only suffered a minor injury to his leg from the exploding shell. Hans gets up and limps away, continuing to sing love songs as he struggles onward. Finally, the narrator bids Hans—“life’s faithful problem child”—goodbye. “We” won’t know whether Hans lives or dies, the narrator admits, but his chances aren’t good. The narrator, addressing Hans directly now, recalls the days back at the Berghof when Hans would “play king,” and when, during these moments, Hans “saw the imitation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body.” But, the narrator asks Hans now, as Hans takes in the endless death and destruction that surrounds him, "will love someday rise up out of this, too?”
The narrator’s final question to Hans essentially asks whether Hans, at long last, has learned his lesson. Before, Hans tried in vain to find meaning, purpose, and nobility in death and suffering—an intellectual undertaking that would allow him to justify his unjustifiable and irrational choice to squander his youth away at the Berghof. In immersing himself in death, he thought, he might learn how to live. Now, it is all but guaranteed that Hans will suffer greatly and perhaps even die. Faced with the unflinchingly real possibility of death, the narrator’s rhetorical question to Hans asks whether he still believes that death has something to teach him.
Themes
