The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain

by

Thomas Mann

Hans Castorp Character Analysis

Hans Castorp is the novel’s protagonist. He is a young and impressionable German engineer who comes to the Berghof to visit his sickly cousin Joachim. Hans initially intends only to stay for three weeks at the sanatorium, finding its ill residents and their monotonous daily life strange and disturbing. But Hans seems almost to fall under the spell of the otherworldly place, acclimating to its quirks and developing a fever just as he is set to depart, and he ends up extending his stay indefinitely. He leaves only when outside circumstances intervene and he must leave to fight in World War I. Unlike Joachim, who never loses sight of the obligations and responsibilities he has in the real world, Hans eagerly leaves the real world behind to immerse himself in the monotony and listlessness of life at the sanatorium. Outwardly, Hans appears invested in making productive use of his time, poring over anatomy and biology textbooks and engaging in lofty philosophical musings. But his inability to form any decisive, committed opinions of his own or to act on any of the ideals he does entertain, however fleeting they may be, renders his time at the Berghof ultimately meaningless. Ignoring his mentor Settembrini’s repeated pleas for Hans to return to the real world and become a productive member of society, Hans allows himself to be corrupted by the dangerous ideals of irrationality, decadence, and submission that characters like his love interest, Clavdia Chauchat, represent, and ultimately he wastes seven years of his life at the Berghof. Though Hans’s exact fate is left a mystery, the novel strongly implies that he dies fighting in the trenches in World War I.

Hans Castorp Quotes in The Magic Mountain

The The Magic Mountain quotes below are all either spoken by Hans Castorp or refer to Hans Castorp. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Time  Theme Icon
).
Part 1, Chapter 1: Arrival Quotes

Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2: Room 34 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, The Austrian Horseman
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3: In the Restaurant Quotes

“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.

Related Characters: Joachim Ziemssen (speaker), Hans Castorp
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 2: At the Tienappels’/Hans Castorp’s Moral State Quotes

For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat, Leo Naphta, Consul Tienappel
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 3: Teasing/Viaticum/Interrupted Moment Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: Joachim Ziemssen (speaker), Hans Castorp, Hermine Kleefeld
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 5: Clarity of Mind Quotes

“You said ‘actually.’ But ‘actually’ doesn’t apply,” Hans Castorp responded. He was sitting with one thigh hiked up on the railing; the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. “There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly, then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.” He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.

Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it’s passed—for you and me and everyone.”

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Joachim Ziemssen (speaker)
Related Symbols: Thermometers/Cigars
Page Number: 63-64
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 8: Herr Albin Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, Leo Naphta, Herr Albin
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 1: A Necessary Purchase Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Leo Naphta
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 6: Analysis Quotes

Any symptom of illness was a masked form of love in action, and illness was merely transformed love.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Dr. Krokowski
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 8: Table Talk Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat, Dr. Krokowski
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 10: The Thermometer Quotes

“Illness makes people even more physical, turns them into only a body.”

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Joachim Ziemssen, Dr. Behrens
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 1: Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Leo Naphta, Dr. Behrens
Page Number: 197
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 2: “My God, I See It!” Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Dr. Behrens
Related Symbols: X-Ray
Page Number: 215-216
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 3: Freedom Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Dr. Krokowski
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 8: Danse Macabre Quotes

“Just listen, and tell me if it isn’t the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.”

Related Characters: The Overblown Woman (Frau Zimmermann) (speaker), Hans Castorp
Page Number: 301
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 9: Walpurgis Night Quotes

“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. […]”

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Clavdia Chauchat
Page Number: 336
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 1: Changes Quotes

“Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?”

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat
Page Number: 394
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 2: Someone Else Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Joachim Ziemssen (speaker), Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat, Lodovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta, Dr. Behrens
Page Number: 379
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 3: The City of God and Evil Deliverance Quotes

His form is logic, but his nature is confusion.

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, Leo Naphta
Page Number: 399
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 4: An Outburst of Temper/Something Very Embarrassing Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Dr. Behrens (speaker), Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen
Page Number: 411
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 5: An Attack Repulsed Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Uncle James Tienappel
Page Number: 432
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 6: Operationes Spirituales Quotes

Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill.

Related Characters: Leo Naphta (speaker), Hans Castorp, Lodovico Settembrini
Page Number: 456
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 7: Snow Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Lodovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta
Page Number: 487
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 7, Chapter 10: The Great Petulance Quotes

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?

Related Characters: Hans Castorp
Page Number: 706
Explanation and Analysis:
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Hans Castorp Quotes in The Magic Mountain

The The Magic Mountain quotes below are all either spoken by Hans Castorp or refer to Hans Castorp. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Time  Theme Icon
).
Part 1, Chapter 1: Arrival Quotes

Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2: Room 34 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, The Austrian Horseman
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3: In the Restaurant Quotes

“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.

Related Characters: Joachim Ziemssen (speaker), Hans Castorp
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 2: At the Tienappels’/Hans Castorp’s Moral State Quotes

For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat, Leo Naphta, Consul Tienappel
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 3: Teasing/Viaticum/Interrupted Moment Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: Joachim Ziemssen (speaker), Hans Castorp, Hermine Kleefeld
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 5: Clarity of Mind Quotes

“You said ‘actually.’ But ‘actually’ doesn’t apply,” Hans Castorp responded. He was sitting with one thigh hiked up on the railing; the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. “There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly, then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.” He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.

Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it’s passed—for you and me and everyone.”

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Joachim Ziemssen (speaker)
Related Symbols: Thermometers/Cigars
Page Number: 63-64
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 8: Herr Albin Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, Leo Naphta, Herr Albin
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 1: A Necessary Purchase Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Leo Naphta
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 6: Analysis Quotes

Any symptom of illness was a masked form of love in action, and illness was merely transformed love.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Dr. Krokowski
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 8: Table Talk Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat, Dr. Krokowski
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 10: The Thermometer Quotes

“Illness makes people even more physical, turns them into only a body.”

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Joachim Ziemssen, Dr. Behrens
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 1: Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Leo Naphta, Dr. Behrens
Page Number: 197
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 2: “My God, I See It!” Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Dr. Behrens
Related Symbols: X-Ray
Page Number: 215-216
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 3: Freedom Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Dr. Krokowski
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 8: Danse Macabre Quotes

“Just listen, and tell me if it isn’t the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.”

Related Characters: The Overblown Woman (Frau Zimmermann) (speaker), Hans Castorp
Page Number: 301
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 9: Walpurgis Night Quotes

“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. […]”

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Clavdia Chauchat
Page Number: 336
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 1: Changes Quotes

“Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?”

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat
Page Number: 394
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 2: Someone Else Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Joachim Ziemssen (speaker), Hans Castorp, Clavdia Chauchat, Lodovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta, Dr. Behrens
Page Number: 379
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 3: The City of God and Evil Deliverance Quotes

His form is logic, but his nature is confusion.

Related Characters: Lodovico Settembrini (speaker), Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen, Leo Naphta
Page Number: 399
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 4: An Outburst of Temper/Something Very Embarrassing Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Dr. Behrens (speaker), Hans Castorp, Joachim Ziemssen
Page Number: 411
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 5: An Attack Repulsed Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp, Uncle James Tienappel
Page Number: 432
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 6: Operationes Spirituales Quotes

Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill.

Related Characters: Leo Naphta (speaker), Hans Castorp, Lodovico Settembrini
Page Number: 456
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 6, Chapter 7: Snow Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Hans Castorp (speaker), Lodovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta
Page Number: 487
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 7, Chapter 10: The Great Petulance Quotes

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?

Related Characters: Hans Castorp
Page Number: 706
Explanation and Analysis: