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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
On Hans’s third day at the sanatorium, the weather turns, and the sunny warmth is replaced with cold gloom. Joachim tells Hans it’ll snow soon. Hans can’t believe it—it’s only August. But sure enough, it starts to snow only moments later and continues all through the afternoon. The snow stops by the next day, but the temperature remains freezing. Joachim and Hans walk to town to get Hans more blankets for his room. Joachim explains that up here, all the seasons sort of blend into one another—you can expect snow all year round. He suggests that Hans get himself a fur-lined sleeping bag, too, but Hans wavers, not wanting to seem like a committed resident. In town, Hans and Joachim find Hans some camel-hair blankets like the ones Joachim has and arrange for them to be delivered to Hans’s room.
Historically, sanatoriums were built away from city centers, in places with weather conditions and fresh air that was thought to be good for patients’ health. But symbolically, the intense cold and unpredictability of weather conditions in the Alps also underscores the Berghof as a place outside the bounds of normal society. This scene also marks a major development in Hans’s character. Though before he’d been reluctant to adhere to too many of the sanatorium’s customs, now he gives in and buys camel-hair blankets like the ones that permanent residents like Joachim swaddle themselves in. Gradually, and perhaps despite his better judgment, Hans acclimates to the Berghof. As he does so, he warms—literally and figuratively—to its atmosphere of death, decay, and self-destruction.
Themes
Back at the sanatorium, Hans and Joachim encounter Settembrini. The three men take a walk together, and Settembrini grouses about the irrationality of the staff shutting off the heat. Then he starts talking about his late father, who loved the warm and would keep his study at exactly 77 degrees during winters. He rattles on about his father’s intellectual interests and pursuits, rocking back and forth as he speaks. Then Settembrini starts complaining about Krokowski again, and about another resident, Magnus, who thinks literature is merely “beautiful characters” and therefore useless in real life.
This scene further establishes Settembrini’s character as representative of Enlightenment ideals: he is highly rational and values literature and other intellectual pursuits. Settembrini considers himself an outlier among the Berghof’s general population. To his mind, the average Berghof resident is more like Magnus, who sees literature as little more than “beautiful characters.”
Themes
Suddenly Hans joins in, noting the lack of good company at the sanatorium. Thinking of Frau Stöhr, Hans muses that one tends to think of sickness making people “venerable,” while stupid people are “healthy and vulgar,” so it’s confusing to know how to respond when someone is both. Hans becomes turned around in his thoughts and trails off, which seems to make Settembrini and Joachim embarrassed for him.
Hans’s embarrassing philosophical rant is played for comedy, but it also reveals two key details about his character. First, that he trails off suggests that intellectual pontification is not something he normally does. Given this, then, the fact that he acts on this uncharacteristic impulse to philosophize indicates that his time at the Berghof is changing him, making him more prone to self-indulgent musings.
Themes
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After a pause, Settembrini praises Hans for his philosophical insight—he’s surprised an engineer like Hans could be so thoughtful. But then he says he disagrees with everything Hans has just said and feels obligated to set him straight. There is nothing “venerable” or “elegant” about sickness—such a view belongs to older, superstitious days when religion would consider sickness “a passport to heaven.” But “reason,” argues Settembrini, has proven such a view false. All that is truly honorable, argues Settembrini, is honest work. Inwardly, Hans marvels at the intellectual sermon he’s provoked. He also wonders about Settembrini’s seeming obsession with work.
Settembrini asserts his humanist sensibilities in this scene when he argues that humankind realizes its full potential on earth. This position contradicts older, religion-derived views that claimed humans couldn’t realize their full potential until they died and (if they’d been good and god-fearing) went to heaven, where they’d be liberated from their sinful, material bodies.
Themes
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Settembrini continues his rant. Frau Stöhr is stupid, he contends, and it’s a pity that she’s also quite sick. The real tragedy, though, is when the universe places an intellectual, “life-affirming mind” in a sickly body. He starts to recite, in Italian, the lyrics of a poet who was hunchbacked and sickly, Leopardi. He concludes, “A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul,” noting that it’s just as sad for an able-bodied person to live purely for the body—for physical delights. Joachim cuts in to say that Hans said something along these lines recently. Settembrini nods at this and declares it the teacher’s duty to point promising minds like Hans’s in the right direction.
Settembrini’s view, like the older religious ones he just criticized, acknowledges the limits of the human body: it is a shame when an otherwise capable person becomes sick and therefore unable to use their “life-affirming mind” to its full potential. But that’s about as meaningful as sickness gets: it’s a shame that it happens, but it doesn’t imbue the sick person with a higher purpose or a special wisdom. It is also significant that Settembrini indirectly refers to himself as teacher and to Hans as mentor, introducing a relationship that will inform their interactions for the remainder of the novel.
Themes
Hans and Joachim part ways with Settembrini once they reach the sanatorium lobby. Once alone, Hans exclaims at how easy it is to set Settembrini off on a rant. Nonetheless, he enjoys hearing him talk. Hans thinks that’s what’s most important to Settembrini—not the content of his lectures, but the way his words sound. Hans hasn’t met a literary man before and is struck by Settembrini’s intellectualism. Joachim adds that Settembrini has quite a lot of pride, which is honorable. Finally, Hans and Joachim part ways to rest and prepare for dinner.
That Hans appreciates the performance rather than the content of Settembrini’s lectures indicates his reluctance to take to heart the wisdom Settembrini is trying to impart on him. Young and naïve, Hans obstinately rejects an older and more experienced (if perhaps somewhat patronizing) mentor’s efforts to set him on the right path.
Themes
