The Magic Mountain

Leaving on the day of Lent, Clavdia gives Hans the only token worthy of his ham-fisted declaration of love; a pocket-sized x-ray reproduction of her chest cavity. Ignoring her apparent indifference, he worries about when she’ll be back.

After a cool period, Hans begins to speak to Settembrini again. The older man announces his plans to leave the sanatorium and take a small apartment rented by the tailor Lukaček, in the nearby village of Dorf. Settembrini declares his intention to finish his part of the encyclopedia there.

People come and go from the sanatorium as the spring season arrives. Snowdrops blossom and are mistaken for snow. Through Settembrini, Hans and Joachim meet Leo Naphtha, who rents a large and richly appointed apartment in the tailor’s building. A scholar, Jesuit, and revolutionary, Naphta is Settembrini’s intellectual opposite. The two begin the first of many intellectual skirmishes in which they talk about Aristotle and the absolute (a concept which Naphta finds too bourgeois) and about workers and rebellion (which Settembrini finds anarchistic). “Antithesis, dualism—that is the motivating, passionate, dialectical, spiritual principle,” says Naphta (368). As this engagement with ideas progresses, Joachim becomes more removed and declares his impatience with Hans’s tendency towards grand ideas.

Summer arrives. Hans has acclimatized himself to the sanatorium, and finds his health improving. He often likes to hike to a certain secluded spot and perform an imaginative act he calls “playing king,” allowing his imagination and memory full reign over his senses. He and Joachim visit Naphta’s luxurious apartment on their own and discuss a grotesque painted wooden pieta from the 14th century. “You’ll not find the crucifixion glossed over and prettified here,” Naphta proudly declares, and he praises the Middle Ages for its lack of individualism (386).

Settembrini comes into Naphta’s apartment in an apparent bid for the cousins’ attention, and the two scholars skirmish again, with Settembrini taking the side of classical reason and Naphta, in his dialectical way, making a case for ugliness and absurdity. Naphta declares the modern state a source of slavery. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror,” declares Naphta (393). After their meeting, Settembrini warns the cousins against taking Naphta too seriously. “Opinions cannot live unless they have the chance to do battle—and I am firm in mine. But could you claim the same for yourselves…?” warns Settembrini (400).

Joachim declares his intention to leave the sanatorium in September despite Behren’s strict warning not to go. Within a week, he leaves, imploring Hans to follow soon after. Hans adjusts to life without Joachim and begins to spend more time with Herr Ferge (of the “pleural shock”), and with a self-pitying and depressed man named Ferdinand Wehsal, who shares Hans’s affection for the departed Clavdia Chauchat. Hans’s uncle, James Tienappel, comes to visit with the clear intention of bringing Hans home with him, yet he finds himself oddly disarmed by the place and leaves suddenly without saying goodbye.

Settembrini and Naphta continue their ongoing skirmishes. Naphta makes a case for violence, madness, and illness as definitively human qualities, not to be denied by the self-deceiving corrective of Settembrini’s progressivism. Settembrini, appalled, makes the claim that he had “brought many a madman back to reality, at least temporarily, by confronting his fiddle-faddle with a pose of unrelenting reason” (444). Hans seems increasingly drawn to Naphta’s way of thinking.

Winter arrives again, in a subchapter entitled “Snow.” The season is especially snowy, covering the mountain, sanatorium, and nearby villages in surreal and mystifying heaps. Hans takes up skiing, delighting in the sensation of physicality and movement: “He reveled in the skill he had acquired, which opened up inaccessible worlds and almost obliterated barriers” (466). In the silence of the mountain, Hans tests himself by climbing ever higher, despite a distant, friendly warning by Settembrini. His senses are overwhelmed by the journey, and he becomes lost in a whirling snowstorm. Freezing, afraid for his life, Hans has visions, and considers Settembrini and Naphta in a new context. Both men are windbags, he concludes, thinking: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts” (487). Soon the weather breaks, and Hans finds his way home. In the comfort of the sanatorium, Hans’s vision and ideas from the afternoon begin to fade.

In the flatlands, Joachim excels and is promoted to lieutenant. Nevertheless, by July, he is readmitted to the sanatorium. The cousins resume their visits to Settembrini and Naphta. Hans’s vision from the winter now forgotten, he eagerly listens to Naphta’s conflations of Marxist ideology and Jesuit religion, and to Settembrini’s vigorous rebuttals, informed by his commitment to the secret tenants of Freemasonry. Joachim’s condition deteriorates over the next few months, and Hans is shocked to find that Joachim has taken up a romantic relationship with Marusya, the woman he has resisted in the past. By November, Joachim is dead. His mother retrieves the body and brings it down from the mountain to be buried. Hans is horrified to find that a slight smile has edged across his dead cousin’s face.