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Part 1, Chapter 1: Arrival
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
Hans and Joachim reach the sanatorium and step inside. The place is oddly empty, and Hans asks Joachim where all the guests are. “Taking their rest cure,” explains Joachim. He himself would be lying out on his balcony if he hadn’t requested to leave to pick up Hans from the station—it’s a rule.
Joachim introduces another alien aspect of life at the Berghof: the “rest cure,” a requirement for all patients struggling with chronic illnesses. Though presumably the practice has a medical purpose, it also gives readers (and Hans) additional insight into the passivity and idleness that characterizes patients’ existence at the Berghof. In other words, life here involves a lot of lying around and doing nothing—a far cry from the hustle and bustle of life “down below,” as it were.
Themes
Joachim leads Hans down a long white corridor until they reach Hans’s room, Number 34. Joachim’s room is to the right, and a loud Russian couple is in the room to the left. Hans and Joachim enter the room, which is white and furnished plainly and practically. A balcony at one end of the room offers a pleasant view of the valley. Hans thinks he’ll be happy here for a couple of weeks. Joachim casually remarks that an American woman died there two days ago, but he assures Hans that the room has been sanitized.
Once more, Joachim very casually offers a detail that would shock most people—Hans will be staying in a room where a woman died just two days before. The ease with which Joachim relates this fact further underscores the pervasiveness of death at the Berghof. To Joachim, sanitizing a room someone recently died in is no more significant than soaking up some spilled milk.
Themes
Suddenly Hans hears a horrid cough coming from down the hall. It’s a sound “devoid of any zest for life or love,” and it “sound[s] as if someone were stirring feebly in a terrible mush of decomposing organic material.” Hans is amazed—it’s unlike any cough he’s ever heard before. He remembers having the croup when he was younger, but that was nothing compared to this man’s cough. Joachim shrugs it off, as he hears things like this every day.
Hans’s horror at hearing this intense, gruesome cough—and the visceral detail with which the narration describes the cough ("a terrible mush of decomposing organic material”) reflects his present ambivalence toward death and illness. While death and illness might shock and horrify him, they also seem to captivate him, particularly compared to Joachim, who barely registers the sick man’s horrific cough.
Themes
