The Magic Mountain takes place at the Berghof, a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. As such, the novel is rife with vivid descriptions and philosophical considerations of illness, suffering, and death. Protagonist Hans Castorp arrives at the Berghof no stranger to death, having been orphaned at a young age. Hans, therefore, starts out with both a familiarity with and an acceptance of death. While Hans acknowledges that there is value in the rituals people carry out after a person has died, he also accepts the frank, visceral reality of death, which makes unavoidably clear the novel’s unsettling emphasis on the idea that, in the end, humans are little more than rotting meat.
Hans’s attitude toward death develops over the course of his stay at the Berghof. Upon realizing the lengths to which sanatorium staff go to hide the reality of death from its residents, removing corpses from the facility during mealtimes or in the middle of the night, he begins to deem it an insult to life itself to deal with death in such a clinical, detached manner. Meanwhile, Dr. Krokowski, one of the sanatorium’s two main doctors, gives weekly lectures in which he theorizes that illness is the physical manifestation of repressed emotions. For both Hans and Krokowski, then, death and illness become meaningful and even noble parts of the human experience. In Krokowski’s view, illness can give insight into a person’s inner life. In Hans’s view, suffering through illness or dying become noble and intrinsically meaningful tasks rather than tragic and senseless impediments to life.
Settembrini, on the other hand, despises such attitudes, which he argues devalue and dishonor human life. From Settembrini’s perspective, there is nothing inherently meaningful or noble about illness or death. Rather, he sees these realities as impediments to a well-lived life—and unfortunate evidence of the myriad ways the physical human body stands in the way of the rational soul’s ability to realize its full potential. In its ambiguous portrayal of death and illness, then, The Magic Mountain examines the anxiety, confusion, and terror with which humans confront and try to make sense of the frailty of the body and the inevitability of death. While the novel acknowledges that attaching meaning and honor to death and illness can help humans cope with their mortality, it also suggests that such efforts are in vain and that death is as tragically meaningless as it is inevitable.
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Death and Illness Quotes in The Magic Mountain
It was a cough, apparently—a man’s cough, but a cough unlike any that Hans Castorp had ever heard; indeed, compared to it, all other coughs with which he was familiar had been splendid, healthy expressions of life—a cough devoid of any zest for life or love, which didn’t come in spasms, but sounded as if someone were stirring feebly in a terrible mush of decomposing organic material.
“Quickly and slowly, just as you like,” Joachim replied. “What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t really pass at all, there is no time as such, and this is no life—no, that it’s not,” he said, shaking his head and reaching again for his glass.
Joachim searched for an answer. “My God,” he said, “they’re so free. I mean, they’re young and time plays no role in their lives, and they may very well die. Why should they go around with long faces? I sometimes think that illness and death aren’t really serious matters, that it’s all more like loafing around, and that, strictly speaking, things are serious only down below in real life. I think maybe you’ll come to understand that in due time, after you’ve been up here with us a little longer.”
On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagining how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace—and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.
Illness is, rather, a debasement—indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration—imprint that on your minds!—an aberration and the beginning of all intellectual aberrations.
Any symptom of illness was a masked form of love in action, and illness was merely transformed love.
One could no longer say that it thudded on its own accord, for no reason, and without any connection to his soul. There was a connection now, or at least it would not have been difficult to establish one—a justifiable emotion could easily be assigned to his body’s overwrought activity. Hans Castorp needed only to think of Frau Chauchat—and he did think of her—and his heart had a suitable emotion to make it pound.
“Illness makes people even more physical, turns them into only a body.”
“The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. […] Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind.”
And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness […] he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die.
“Analysis is good as a tool of enlightenment and civilization—to the extent that it shakes stupid preconceptions, quashes natural biases, and undermines authority. Good, in other words, to the extent that it liberates, refines, and humanizes—it makes slaves ripe for freedom. It is bad, very bad, to the extent that it prevents action, damages life at its roots, and is incapable of shaping it. Analysis can be very unappetizing, as unappetizing as death, to which it may very well be linked—a relative of the grave and its foul anatomy.”
“Just listen, and tell me if it isn’t the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.”
“Oh, love is nothing if not foolish, something mad and forbidden, an adventure in evil. Otherwise it is merely a pleasant banality, good for singing calm little songs down on the plains. […]”
“Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?”
“Oh, you and your learning! You’re always learning up here—about biology and botany and slippery turning points. And you started in on ‘time’ your first day here. When what we’re here to do is to get healthier, not more clever—healthier, until we’re truly healthy, so they can finally let us go free and send us back to the flatlands cured.”
His form is logic, but his nature is confusion.
“Yes, you’re cured. The spot at the upper left isn’t worth talking about. Your temperature has nothing to do with it. I can’t tell you what causes that. I assume it’s of no further importance. As far as I’m concerned, you may leave.”
And that was the end of the attempt by the flatlands to reclaim Hans Castorp. The young man admitted quite openly to himself that such total failure, which he had seen coming, was of decisive importance for his relationship to the people down there. For the flatlands it meant a final shrug, the abandonment of any claim; for him, however, it meant freedom finally won, and by now his heart no longer fluttered at the thought.
Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill.
Death is a great power. You take off your hat and tiptoe past his presence, rocking your way forward. […] Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love—there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death—it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. […] Oh, what a clear dream I’ve dreamed, how well I’ve ‘played king’! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.
But honor was the death of him, or—if you turn it the other way around—death did him the honor.
There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
