The Magic Mountain

“I really am surprised to learn that I’m a little ill, but I’ll just have to get used to being a patient here, to actually being one of you, instead of merely the visitor I’ve been until now,” says Hans to his cousin (182). Joachim doesn’t approve. “You come up here to visit me, and I introduce you to life up here, and now here you sit, and no one knows when you’ll be able to get away again and start your career,” Joachim protests (182).

Hans is bedridden with fever for several days afterward. He writes letters home and receives the few clothes and things he left behind. In the second week of his convalescence, Settembrini stops by Hans’s room and warns him against getting too absorbed in Behren’s diagnosis or in fetishizing medical paraphernalia like his new thermometer. Hans states that “the air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder” (195), which Settembrini dismisses as sentimental. Death, says the older man, is of a piece with life; considered separately, as is the custom at the sanatorium, death takes on an unhealthy and decadent power.

After three dream-like weeks, Director Behrens tells Hans that he is free to leave his bed, and Hans resumes his routine as before. He spends significant energy on interpreting Clavdia Chauchat’s body language from afar. He learns that she has been sitting regularly for Director Behren’s amateur painting sessions. Later, he is dumbfounded to find her waiting for an x-ray at the same time as his own appointment. After receiving and viewing his own results, he is profoundly moved by the process. He weighs the differences between the two portraits of Clavdia rendered by the director: the one rendered in paint, and the technical yet intimate one taken by the x-ray machine. 

As October arrives, Settembrini continues to advise Hans against getting too comfortable, especially with Russians such as Clavdia Chauchat. Hans admits to himself that he is in love with her. The ever-changing mountain weather affects Hans’s mood, as does a smile or a frown from the distant Clavdia. No longer interested in his engineering studies, he takes up human anatomy.

Hans and Joachim accept an impromptu invitation to visit Behrens and view his paintings. Hans sees the portrait of Clavdia Chauchat, and he Hans and Behrens admit that the painting, especially the face, is a “rather botched job,” and yet Hans points out one extraordinary quality of the portrait: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen skin so well painted. It’s as if you can see the pores” (254). 

Winter arrives and a dull Christmas passes. Hans begins to question the state of his own soul and the nature of life itself, which he measures with the limited tools of his engineering and anatomical studies. He finds himself less patient with Frau Stohr’s continuous gossip, and with Settembrini’s continual admonitions not to get too comfortable with the decadent attitude of the sanatorium. Settembrini announces that he has begun writing the literary section of a multi-volume encyclopedia detailing human suffering. 

At Hans’s urging, and with Behrens’s approval, the cousins take up the practice of visiting bedridden residents. Among others, they visit the flirtatious Frau Gerngross and Tous-les-Deux’s dying son. They spend time with the neurotic but good-natured Herr Ferge, who describes in horrific yet erotic detail a surgery that was performed on with his pleural lining. “Because when they explore your pleural lining, gentlemen, it’s as if you were being tickled in the most infamous, intense, inhuman way,” he recounts (305). The cousins spend time with the delicate young Karen Karstedt in a manner that resembles a courtship. With a sense of estrangement, the trio observe the physical exertions of healthy and well-heeled vacationers in the nearby village and attend a disappointing silent film. 

In the “Walpurgis Night” section of the book which concludes Part 5, the sanatorium readies itself for Mardi Gras. Hans has been a resident now for seven months. He has a falling out with Settembrini; he churlishly uses the extremely formal man’s first name against his wishes, and sarcastically apologizes for not having been a better student. On carnival night, the residents drink, wear costumes, and behave without inhibition. One couple dresses as a “silent sister” and accompanying scale, much to Settembrini’s horror. Student and teacher communicate using snippets of Goethe’s poetry, written and passed along by hand. The residents play an anarchic game in which they attempt to draw the form of a pig while blindfolded. 

Hans, in the spirit of the game and quite drunk, steels himself to ask Clavdia Chauchat if he can borrow her pencil—the most he has ever spoken to her. Settembrini, from a distance, calls Hans a madman. Amused, Clavdia produces a mechanical pencil, and the two begin to talk. The Russian and the German quickly adopt French as a lingua franca, though Hans’s French is imperfect. He asks for a dance, which she rebuffs. When pressed, she declares herself an immoralist, the opposite of a “good bourgeois” such as Hans. She declares that she will leave the sanatorium the next day, but that she will inevitably return. Hans, encouraged, works himself up to an impromptu declaration of love, but his declaration is a travesty, incorporating snippets of biological trivia with drunken nonsense. Clavdia bids him goodbye.