The Magic Mountain

When Hans doubts his senses, Joachim is the person who helps to stabilize him. They share family, educational background, and economic status. They also share a certain wry dismissiveness of the worst excesses of bourgeois culture, such as Frau Stohr’s pretentious mismanagement of language or the poorly behaved residents of the “Bad Russian” table. Nevertheless, by the end of Joachim’s life, their differences have driven them apart. This separation is predicted by Behrens when he notes Joachim’s “talent” for illness. His role as a soldier disqualifies him from the prevarications of the bourgeois mindset. Joachim’s death is a tragedy for Hans.

Throughout The Magic Mountain, women are portrayed as seductive and insipid. When the married Uncle Tienappel visits, he is lured into the comfort and routine of the sanatorium by a woman, which sends him fleeing. Joachim resists Marusya throughout the story, and it is suggested that it is a kind of tragic surrender when Hans finds his cousin on the verge of death “uttering soft, disjointed phrases” in Marusya’s lap (523). The gentle smile on his face at that moment mirrors the smile on his corpse that Hans finds so horrifying just a few pages later. In both cases, the seduction of men by women is equated to the seduction of the residents by the International Sanatorium Berghof.

Clavdia Chauchat complicates this depiction. To her, the sanatorium represents a freedom that she can’t find in the flatlands, yet she has the most grounded relationship to the world beyond the sanatorium and is able to come and go from the institution as her will (and her diagnoses) dictates. She is every bit the bourgeois that Hans is, but her ideas are more self-assured, and her independence is more established.

Settembrini (introduced mysteriously as “Satana” by the narrator) resists the sanatorium for different reasons than Joachim. His objection is cultural, and his critique reaches far outside the boundaries of the sanatorium grounds. It is easy to confuse his voice with the author’s. After all, he ascribes to himself a love of literature, and, despite being arrogant, Settembrini is also sympathetic to Hans’s struggle.

Settembrini does not have all the answers. Some of his faults are revealed immediately. His sly malice is a false front for his contempt for the human valuation for things that are not medicinally worthy, going so far as to say, “my distaste for music is political” and that it evokes “a dreamy, empty clarity that demands nothing of us” (111). As his character and history are revealed through conversations with Naphta, so are his deepest faults. He represents a modern idea of democratic thinking, yet he distrusts the masses. He holds such a high regard for reason that he (unreasonably) insists that he can cure the sick simply through application of wit. “In short, there were inconsistencies, here,” concludes the narrator. “Herr Settembrini was a humanitarian, and yet at the same time and bound up with it, he was, as he half admitted, a man of war (700). 

Leo Naphta is a foil to Settembrini and complicates Hans’s education. “The Absolute, the holy terror these times require, can only arise out of the most radical skepticism, out of moral chaos,” he says (688). Naphta is loosely modeled after the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, whom Thomas Mann knew, though Naphta makes few statements in support of class consciousness. His ideas grow more and more radical and unmoored as the novel progresses, shading into nihilism. He goads Settembrini in greater flights of unreason and is goaded in turn into praising of violence and terrorism. The characters’ intellectual ambitions mirror the ideologies swirling around the World War I, in which the provocations of nationalists combined with a statisticians’ desire to fight a war by timetable using an exploited working class. It is possible to read Naphta’s final self-annihilation as Mann’s read on the fate of both radical and reactionary movements which culminate in a call to violence.

Nevertheless, just as we should not frame Settembrini as a hero, neither is Naphta a villain. He acutely points out the contradictions in Settembrini’s liberal order and demonstrates that humankind cannot eat on reason alone.