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Part 3, Chapter 8: Herr Albin
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 eventually drifts off, waking up a little past 3:00 p.m. Joachim drops by his room, and the two of them go downstairs for their afternoon snack. Hans asks if Joachim heard Herr Albin’s outburst. Joachim did, and now he complains about the man’s disruptiveness and how it’s setting everyone back in their healing. When Hans asks if Herr Albin would really shoot himself, Joachim nods—people kill themselves quite often here. Disturbed, Hans decides he might want to leave sooner than later. Joachim thinks Hans ought to give the place a bit more time.
Hans continues to do nothing but eat and sleep. Despite his initial reservations about the place, he’s getting used to and even growing to like the aimless idleness that characterizes daily life at the Berghof. Of course, Joachim’s disapproval of Herr Albin suggests that a person still must choose to adopt such a lifestyle—Joachim, with his soldier’s respect for honor and duty, has not allowed himself to surrender to dishonor and irresponsibility, however tempting it may be. Hans could follow Joachim’s lead, but he doesn’t appear to want to.
Themes
Hans and Joachim join the other residents in the dining hall for tea and snacks. Later, after another rest cure, they return for a fifth time, for supper. This meal is no less elaborate than the one that came before. Hans orders a beer but becomes too exhausted to finish it. In agony, he listens to insufferable Frau Stöhr blabber on about the many different fish sauces she can make.
Hans’s inability to finish his beer—a habit he’s indulged in since he was a young child—reflects the growing hold the Berghof has on him. Little by little—and perhaps without Hans even realizing it—he’s losing his connection to the real world and surrendering to the alternate way of life the Berghof offers.
Themes
After supper, most of the residents gather in the lobby and split off into various “social rooms” to hang out before bed. In one room, Hans spots a group gathered around Madame Chauchat. Seeing the rude woman fills Hans with disgust. Settembrini approaches Hans and asks how he’s feeling and how he spent his first day at the sanatorium. Hans tells him his day was like that of a typical resident, spent “in the ‘horizontal fashion,’” to use Settembrini’s term. He says he found the experience distracting but boring at the same time. He also describes the odd sensation he’s had of having “grown older and wiser” over the one day he’s been here.
The narration’s emphasis on Hans’s disgust at Madame Chauchat hints that she will figure as an important character in his story in one way or another. Meanwhile, Hans’s observation that he’s “grown older and wiser” is comical, given that he’s only been at the Berghof one day. In a sense, he self-satirizes his coming-of-age journey. (Though, of course, one must remember, as Joachim has said from the start, that time does pass in strange ways up here.) Hans’s remark also reinforces his present belief that experiencing illness and suffering can ennoble or enlighten a person.
Themes
Hans is about to excuse himself but pauses and asks Settembrini if at supper Frau Stöhr had really been bragging about all the fish sauces she can make, or if Hans imagined the exchange. Settembrini says he has no idea what Hans is talking about. He asks Hans if he’d like to leave this place first thing in the morning, since staying here obviously hasn’t been good for him. Hans, alarmed, says he’s only just gotten there and can’t possibly know how he likes it so early on. Settembrini approves of Hans’s logic—he loves good logic. And he’s seen lots of people experience successful “acclimatization.” He recalls one woman who grew to love it here so much that she refused to leave, even after she was fully healed, and tried to fake a fever in order to stay.
It's unclear whether Settembrini is just messing with Hans or if Hans really did imagine Frau Stöhr’s claims of fish sauce expertise. Either way, that Hans is uncertain enough to ask Settembrini shows the degree to which his mental state has declined since his arrival at the Berghof. This scene marks a pivotal moment in Hans’s story. Settembrini, seeing Hans’s confusion, makes it quite clear that Hans can—and perhaps should—leave the Berghof before his condition worsens. Yet Hans, seemingly against his best interest, chooses to stay at the Berghof anyway. From this point forward, Hans will repeatedly choose self-destruction over self-preservation.
Themes
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Hans and Joachim head to Joachim’s room after the social hour ends. Hans watches Joachim wrap himself in blankets so he can stay warm while he lies out on the balcony during his rest cure. He marvels at Joachim’s skill at swaddling himself in the blankets. Joachim says it just takes practice, and Hans will learn it too. Hans declines. He won’t lie out on the balcony overnight, as that would be too close to something a resident would do. Then, feeling suddenly rather chilled, Hans bids Joachim goodnight and heads back to his own room.
Hans continues to waver between wanting to be a visitor of the Berghof and wanting to fully immerse himself in its “culture,” so to speak. Though in the previous scene he claimed to Settembrini that he needed more time and experience to know whether he truly liked the sanatorium, now he actively declines an opportunity to test this notion, refusing to swaddle himself in warm blankets like a real resident. This ambiguity will become one of Hans’s defining characteristics as he acquaints himself with new ideas and worldviews and yet fails to commit to or act on any one of them.
Themes
Hans goes through the motions of getting ready for bed. He thought he would fall right asleep, but now he finds that his heart is pounding too loudly for him to sleep. He gets out of bed and takes a lamp outside to the balcony and lies there on his back. He thinks about Joachim’s unhappy expression when he mentioned Marusya, particularly her physical features, and realizes Joachim must have a crush on her. Next door, the rude Russian couple keep Hans awake with their sexual activities. Eventually he does fall asleep, but he has dreams that are even more disturbing than the night before. In tonight’s dream, Behrens approaches Hans and commands that Hans do “a few spiffing years of service with us up here.”
Hans’s beating heart, anxious thoughts, and troubled dreams reflect his conflicted feelings about the Berghof. Though his beating heart indicates that his body is trying to resist the hold the place has on him, his dream about Behrens commanding him to do “a few spiffing years of service” indicates that Hans is on the verge of giving in to the sanatorium’s allure. Hans’s revelation about Joachim’s crush on Marusya reveals Hans’s naivety—most readers could have surmised that this was the nature of Joachim’s discomfort. It also adds complexity to Joachim’s character—despite his soldier’s respect for duty and pragmatism, he, too, is vulnerable to irrational human emotions.
Themes
Then the dream moves on, and Hans is in a schoolyard. He’s about to ask Madame Chauchat to borrow a pencil when he realizes who she reminds him of. He wakes up, determined to remember this revelation in the morning. Then he drifts back to sleep and dreams of Dr. Krokowski waiting to ambush him to “subject[] his psyche to dissection.” Hans, terrified, flees from the doctor. He wakes up in a cold sweat. In his final dream, he tries to knock over Settembrini but finds he cannot. At that point, Hans has a breakthrough about the meaning of time: it’s just “a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating.” He vows to pass along this knowledge to Joachim in the morning.
Hans’s dream is rich with symbolism. The detail of Hans realizing he knows who Madame Chauchat reminds him of—yet falling just short of revealing to readers who that person is—builds intrigue. Meanwhile, his efforts and ultimate failure to knock over Settembrini suggests Hans’s ambivalence toward this older man who seems to have appointed himself Hans’s mentor: though Hans wants someone to guide him, he also resists being told what to do.
Themes
As the night goes on, Hans dreams some more. He has one dream twice. In it, he’s sitting in the dining hall when Madame Chauchat arrives, wearing a white sweater, one hand in her pocket and the other behind her head. She holds out her palm, oddly, for Hans to kiss. He does so, noting her gross, ungroomed nails. In that moment, he feels the same pleasant sensation of being free from honor that he felt when he listened to Herr Albin earlier that day.
In this highly symbolic dream, Hans links Madame Chauchat’s ill-mannered traits with the freedom he observed in Herr Albin’s poor behavior earlier that day—and by extension, the sickness that Herr Albin claims justifies that poor behavior. Thus, this dream perhaps suggests that Hans will continue to be drawn toward the freedom that Madame Chauchat represents, even though that freedom is predicated on the inherently self-destructive forces of illness, death, and decay.
Themes
