The Magic Mountain

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MANN'S MAGIC MOUNTAIN Notes including • Life and Background of the Author • Introduction to the Novel • List of Characters • Critical Commentaries • Character Analyses • Critical Essays • Essay Topics and Review Questions • Selected Bibliography by Herberth Czermak, M.A. Instructor, Amerika Institut, Vienna

LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 68501

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LIFE AND BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR Thomas Mann was born in 1875 into a highly respected merchant family in the medieval town of Lübeck on the North Sea. He was the second of five children of Senator Thomas Heinrich Mann and his musically talented wife. It was through his mother and the many musicians frequenting their house that Mann was exposed to music, especially that of Richard Wagner, at an early age. The cultured, conservative, and devoutly Protestant atmosphere of the Mann home became the subject of Buddenbrooks (1901), an epic of considerable complexity and clearly autobiographical elements. The book was Thomas Mann's first success and was hailed as a masterpiece. Illustrating the decline of a wealthy merchant family over several generations, Buddenbrooks employs the technique of portraying moral decay through physical deterioration. Essentially it is a defense of traditional values, but the novel already shows Mann's early tendency to view himself both as a representative and an unrelenting critic of the very environment that shaped him. While finishing Buddenbrooks, Mann began to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Under the influence of their estheticism, he began to lower the shield of protection which he had held around the traditional social and political order of his own upper middle-class milieu. Their writings enhanced his understanding of himself as a "lost bourgeois," and he became immediately fascinated by the polarity between artist and bourgeois, spirit and nature, death and life. From comments and complaints scribbled on manuscript margins, we know that under the spell of this dualism, Mann was subject to prolonged periods of doubt about his art. The two long short stories Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (1913) are the most renowned treatments of this theme. In 1905, Mann married Katja Pringsheim, the daughter of a mathematics professor at Munich. Katja was not only an excellent mother to their six children but also an indispensable help to her husband in dealing with his professional chores. This enabled Mann to fully devote himself to his work, much of which consisted of the time-consuming practice of gathering seemingly insignificant descriptions and minute observations of the world around him. Quite in keeping with the psychologically mature realism of the Russian writer Tolstoy, whose works he had come to admire, Mann refused to follow what he considered the exaggerated pathos and flights of fancy of the expressionists of his day. Especially Mann's refusal to use his art as a medium for liberal political thought led to a growing alienation between him and his brother Heinrich, a well-known novelist himself. At the beginning of World War I, when Thomas Mann justified Germany's expanding militarism by referring to it as "the right of ascending power," the break between the brothers became complete. It was only after the war, when Thomas began to change his views, most comprehensively laid down in his autobiographical Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918), that they became reconciled and remained full of respect for each other's work until Heinrich's death in 1950. To try to minimize or ignore Thomas Mann's ultraconservatism of that period, as has repeatedly been done by critics, is a poor way of paying tribute to his genius, sincere though it may be. It leads to a serious misjudgment of Mann's struggle to extricate himself from the lures of Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's insistence on the dualism between art and politics. Under the impact of Germany's defeat, as well as the humanistic gospel of Goethe, Mann fought hard to transcend this dualism. And, by the time his first major attempt toward synthesis, The Magic Mountain (1924), was published, he could claim to have sided with those who believe in political thought and engagement as an integral aspect of the humanities. His lecture The German Republic (1922) and the essay Goethe and Tolstoy (1923) were the most significant milestones toward this accomplishment.

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In the 1920s, Mann began to take very seriously his mission to concern himself with the issues of his time. He even went on political lecture tours, opposing the right-wing extremists already beginning to undermine the new, wobbly Weimar Republic. He pleaded for a democratic Germany's mediating role between East and West. Time and time again, he called upon the conservative and Socialist elements to settle their disputes and to unite against their common enemy, the rising tide of Nazism. In 1929, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Buddenbrooks. This drew the protest of many liberals who felt the committee in charge was politically insensitive and irresponsible or else it would have awarded the prize on the basis of The Magic Mountain, radiating Mann's emerging humanism more convincingly. A year later, Mario and the Magician was published, a fierce attack on fascism. In 1933, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wagner's death, Mann gave a brilliant lecture on the agony and greatness of Wagner, magnificently uncovering Schopenhauer's metaphysics of deliverance in his compositions and describing him as an ingenious representative of the German cult of irrationalism. If Mann had been repeatedly threatened for his "anti-nationalistic" attitudes so far, a campaign of slander set in on a national scale after this speech. A day after the fateful lecture and twelve days after Hitler's takeover, Mann crossed the border into Switzerland. The official Germany responded by depriving him of his citizenship and his honorary doctorate. He stayed in Switzerland until his emigration to the United States, where he eventually settled at Pacific Palisades, California, in 1938. Throughout his exile, Mann thought of himself as the representative of the true German spirit, in whose name he directed bitter attacks on the Nazi regime. At the same time, he did not conceal his disgust with the Western democracies which had done so little to aid the young Weimar Republic while there was time to discourage Hitler. Mann had been afraid of appeasement, and the Munich Agreement of 1938 was to prove him right. In Franklin D. Roosevelt's politics, Mann saw what he called the "social democracy which in the economic and political realms will have to replace the liberal kind." It supplied the spiritual basis for his anti-Nazism. Mutual appreciation tied the two men together, dating back to 1935, when, at Roosevelt's suggestion, Mann had been awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard. Mann publicly endorsed Roosevelt and went so far as to campaign for his fourth term. If, as has been pointed out, Mann retained certain reservations about some facets of traditional democracy, his anti-fascism was uncompromising. As his son Gob, a historian, put it years later, "His commitment was always half-hearted, weakened by selfcriticism; his no, however, was clear and strong." Joseph and His Brothers (1943), a tetralogy on the ascent of humanity from mythical beginnings to enlightened heights, was Mann's most famous creation during his exile. Doctor Faustus (1947), a semiallegorical representation and attempted explanation of the German tragedy during Nazi rule, was highly acclaimed. Like all of his novels, Doctor Faustus contains strong autobiographical elements; beyond this, however, it stands, in the author's own words, as the confession of what he never ceased to regard as his gravest sin: his early part in condoning and even propagating the forces of political reaction. After World War II, Mann was severely criticized in Germany because he had left his country in time of gravest need. If this sentiment is not justifiable, it certainly is understandable. More than anything else, his violent attacks on the Nazi regime--in the form of radio broadcasts from faraway America--created bad feelings. To this day, they have been used to prove Mann's essential "anti-German" attitude. On the occasion of a Goethe anniversary, he was even suspected of Communist sympathies because he had insisted on visiting both the Eastern and Western occupation zones. He never resettled in Germany. Certainly this new disenchantment with Germany was hard to bear. What hurt the U.S. citizen (since 1944) Thomas Mann even more, however, was the rise to political power of Senator Joe McCarthy.

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Mann, who for more than two decades now, had committed himself, ever more enthusiastically, to the ideals of American democracy, was forced by the senator's Committee on Un-American Activities to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress. Mann was now a man of seventy-eight, and, disillusioned with America, he returned to Switzerland. As he put it, "America's liberty is suffering under its defense, and some fear it's about to fall apart." Two years later, in 1955, he died in Zürich. Together with Franz Kafka, whose work he admired, Thomas Mann is today considered the most influential novelist the German-speaking world has brought forth in the twentieth century.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL This novel, published in 1924 after twelve years of intermittent labor, is the story of the self-development of a "simple, young man." Its hero is the hero of a bildungsroman. The characteristic of such a novel is that it focuses not so much on the hero himself but on the course of his education. Even if read only on this level, the novel soon makes it clear that Mann did not intend for his readers to take the hero's "simplicity" at face value. Almost nobody is really simple or remains so for long if intelligently observed. The simplifications of reality as Hans Castorp encounters them throughout the book are the object of Mann's irony. Reality as it reveals itself to us is antithetical, and he who wants to begin to comprehend it must risk running the gamut from facet to facet of its nature. The Magic Mountain is also a novel about disease, not merely of individuals, but also of a whole age. Where disease appears as the prerequisite of spiritual growth, Mann plays his favorite theme of the polarity between spirit and life; the transcendence of this polarity in the name of humanism is central to the novel. Where disease stands as the symptom of the moral deterioration of the capitalist and bourgeois order, Mann is the modern writer who must concern himself with the issues of his time. To attempt "to see the real in the spiritual and the spiritual in the real" was a fundamental maxim of his. On a still higher level, The Magic Mountain poses questions about the nature of time. Time is both the medium and the subject of the novel. In fact, as the narrator points out, ". . . in bringing up the question as to whether time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view in the present work." Since the book is essentially concerned with Hans Castorp's wide range of experience, time is conceived solely as a correlative of his experience. What makes The Magic Mountain so difficult to read is Mann's insistence that the reader become part of it. This is already implied in the Foreword, where the question is posed "whether a narrative can ever seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it takes up." The reader's role is that of responding to the many associations and allusions, some subtly implied and others explicitly stated, which Mann employs to achieve coherence. By participating in the hero's real and imagined experiences, the reader becomes the true center of the novel. In him the world of the magic mountain, already filtered through Hans Castorp's vision, blends with his own recollections and dreams to yield a new experience.

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LIST OF CHARACTERS The listing is complete except for a number of patients whose appearance is not significant enough to warrant separate mention.

Albin A young man who, convinced of his hopeless condition, threatens to commit suicide publicly.

Hofrat Behrens The head doctor of the sanatorium.

Ellen Brand The young Danish girl, whose talents as a medium are ruthlessly exploited by Dr. Krokowski in his seances.

Hans Castorp The hero in search of self-education.

Clavdia Chauchat The typically "eastern" temptress of Hans Castorp.

Fräulein Engelhart A promiscuous old spinster whom Castorp uses to obtain information about Clavdia.

Ferge A self-debasing Russian, who participates in several discussions between Settembrini and Naphta; a prototype of the "eastern" man.

Pribislav Hippe Castorp's schoolmate of long ago to whom he felt strongly attracted. Asiatic features, similar to those of Clavdia, distinguish him. They are the reason that the two become drawn together through the major leitmotif (a short musical phrase representing and recurring with a given character, situation, or emotion) of the borrowed pencil. Hippe is German for a type of sickle. According to Revelation XIV, 17-19, an angel of perdition tends to harvest among men with a sickle; therefore, the scythe has been used as the symbol of death. Like Clavdia Chauchat, Hippe exerts a fatally erotic influence on Castorp.

Barbara Hujus A little Catholic girl whose fear of death is heightened by the arrival of the priest administering extreme unction to her.

Karen Karstedt A little, hopelessly ill girl whom Castorp, obsessed with consoling the "poor sick," accidentally leads to her grave.

Hermine Kleefeld A particularly gossipy patient who gathers like-minded characters around her.

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Dr. Krokowski Behrens' assistant doctor, who, like his superior, represents evil.

Marusja The attractive but simple girl whom Joachim admires; she serves to illustrate his overly bourgeois behavior.

Adriatica Mylendonk Homely and aggressive, she is Behrens' directress.

Leo Naphta Settembrini's adversary of Jewish-Polish descent and Jesuit schooling.

Mynheer Peeperkorn A wealthy plantation owner who becomes Clavdia's lover.

Ludovico Settembrini An intellectual, rationalist Italian man of letters, representing "Western" tradition.

Frau Stöhr An extremely insensitive and uneducated woman, who becomes the embodiment of these qualities. With numerous other patients, she represents the atmosphere of make-believe prevalent at the Berghof.

James Tienappel Castorp's uncle, a respected consul. He comes to the sanatorium to take home his nephew but flees when he finds out he enjoys its permissive atmosphere.

Tous-les-Deux A grief-stricken Mexican lady, who is about to lose her second son at the sanatorium; hence her nickname. The unspeakable sadness she radiates appeals to Castorp.

Wehsal An extremely submissive character who falls in love with Clavdia and seeks Castorp's company for this reason. His name means "sorrow" in German.

Joachim Ziemssen Castorp's diseased cousin with whom he once lived at Tienappel's.

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CRITICAL COMMENTARIES CHAPTER 1 The first two sentences of the novel's foreword deserve special attention, for they contain the hero's characterization as "simple-minded." As the story progresses, we become increasingly aware that Hans Castorp is by no means a "simple-minded" young man in the derogatory sense of the term. Mann merely mentions Castorp's simplicity to emphasize his faculty of meeting the countless influences to which he is exposed and to resist the many temptations to commit himself permanently to any view or cause. This is, of course, the major theme of the novel: the lengthy, cumbersome, and perilous road of Hans Castorp's self-education. The opening sentences also contain the novel's other major theme: the complexity and mystery of time. Throughout this book are countless, recurring variations on the theme of time. As a newcomer, Hans Castorp is exposed, first of all, to the thin air of the Berghof and the bizarre silhouettes of dense forests and snowcapped peaks surrounding it. Mann uses nature here to evoke new, unfamiliar feelings in Hans, feelings of vagueness and timelessness--feelings which will he intensified later on as he ventures higher into the regions of eternal snow and ice. Besides using nature to introduce the newcomer to the sanatorium, Mann also uses Joachim Ziemssen, Castorp's cousin. Unknowingly Joachim has taken on some of the characteristics of the mode of life at the Berghof. And, one thing in particular which confuses Hans about Joachim is the latter's concept of time. It strikes Hans that Joachim's sense of time is very haphazard. In fact, their conversation soon dwells on the nature of time, so treasured in the "world below" and so meaningless "up here" where there is little to demand its observance except the routine of taking one's temperature. These reflections on time now focus on the static quality of duration; soon, however, Mann will be concerned with the linear and circular aspects of time in the course of Castorp's growing self-awareness. Hans Castorp is both appalled and intrigued by Joachim's use of the collective "we" and his reference to life at the sanatorium as "life up here." Mann's objective in having Joachim express this sharp differentiation between the world "above" and that "below" is twofold: On a philosophical level, it underlines the deep gap between the artistic-intellectual realm and the "normal" realm of average people. Here we have the author's early romantic concept of the dichotomy between art on the one hand and life on the other. On a political level, the sharp differentiation of "above" and "below" points to the fact that the Berghof is a sanctuary of disease and death. It stands as the symbol of the sick, chauvinistic European society before World War I; its isolation from the "normal" world is symptomatic of the advanced stage of its disease. In terms of technique, the continued use of "up here" as opposed to "down there" is interesting as an example of Mann's basic irony, which the reader should bear in mind regardless of how involved the political and philosophical battles will become as the story moves on. Irony is, of course, based on the insight that something is not necessarily and exclusively so, and that sometimes, or at the same time, it is very different. In other words, "up here" where the idle, sick, and decadent predominate, Hans Castorp, though sick himself, will be physically cured and morally uplifted in the end. "Down there" where "normal" people are supposedly healthy, carefree, and thoroughly bourgeois, disease and war abound. Joachim, Hans' cousin, speaks in terms of "up here" and "down below," and, in matters of disease and death, he has acquired a nonchalance which is typical of the whole atmosphere. Here Mann lashes out at the decadence of society which, while taking death for granted, nevertheless does everything in its power to conceal it as shocking or thought-provoking. To Mann, life and death are two aspects of one

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perennially recurring process, a process which will figure prominently later on during the discussion between Settembrini and Naphta. Dr. Krokowski is the first major figure of the mountain world whom Hans meets. He is characterized as the perfect personification of the Berghof, where the sympathy of those in charge is not with life but with disease and death. He has so morally deteriorated that he does not even believe that a person can be completely healthy. He laughs at Hans, who insists he came to pay a three-week visit and not for treatment. Krokowski stands as the apostle of doom in a world where physical, mental, and moral decay go hand in hand. As are many other scenes, the dialogue between Castorp and Dr. Krokowski is autobiographical in origin. During his three-week visit to a sanatorium, Thomas Mann actually contracted a serious cough and was advised by the assistant of the institution to join his wife in her rest cure. Certainly sensitive and possibly even susceptible to the lures of life at a tuberculosis sanatorium, he declined. "I preferred to compose The Magic Mountain instead," he declared, "for had I agreed to stay there, I may still be up there now." It is not by accident that the political dimension of this novel, which will assume a central position in Hans Castorp's educational process, is introduced through an Austrian aristocrat. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy is regarded as the chief bulwark against democracy by Settembrini, perhaps Castorp's most influential mentor. The aristocrat's deep-seated cough, indicative of the advanced stage of his disease, irritates Hans considerably. The war at the end will irritate him even more because he will be forced to take up arms. Ironically, he will be killed in it--in a war which was caused, to a substantial degree, by the reactionary forces of the once glorious and now quickly deteriorating Hapsburg empire, of which the aristocrat is a symbol. Throughout this chapter, Mann already employs the technique of the leitmotif (a short musical phrase representing and recurring with a given character, situation, or emotion). He uses it to point to similarities and changes in the conduct of the characters or to tie together elements of dreams and visions with others experienced in real life. Joachim, for instance, keeps shrugging his shoulders in a manner he never used to in the "world below," and Castorp unpacks the same brand of cigars that he used to enjoy at his great uncle's and that he will still smoke when the sanatorium will have taken to playing "seventeen-and-four" in Chapter 7. The face cream Hans applies on his sunburned cheeks reappears in his first dream at the Berghof. The image of Joachim also appears in Hans' dream; Joachim's face is as translucently pale as that of Dr. Krokowski. In Castorp's dream, Joachim and the Austrian aristocrat ride down the mountain side together on a bobsled. In this fashion, the other sanatorium carries its dead down the mountain. Thus, by means of the leitmotif, we get a forewarning of Joachim's death in the future. It is easy to spin the theme of their joint ride down the mountain a little further, charging it with political implication. They head toward death together: Joachim, the German soldier, willing to live and die for a cause, and the Austrian aristocrat, symbol of the crumbling monarchy. Yet we should always bear in mind that Joachim is not decadent and that Mann never condemns him. He is merely less complex than Castorp, and when the latter or Clavdia Chauchat teases him about his bourgeois values, they do so with a considerable amount of envy. Joachim, in fact, is the only character in the entire novel who does not tempt our hero. And he is the only one who is not tempted by the various educators. Here, as throughout the story, dreams and visions yield strangely fused images by drawing on Castorp's past experiences and presenting them in new contexts.

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CHAPTER 2 This chapter is a flashback into Hans Castorp's (and Thomas Mann's) childhood and adolescence, using the approach employed in Buddenbrooks of trying to explain a man's thoughts and actions in terms of those of his ancestors. More than all other chapters of the novel, this one brings to mind Mann's observation that it is difficult and not at all desirable to talk about The Magic Mountain without being aware of its indebtedness to Buddenbrooks. The present chapter may not be as intellectually brilliant as subsequent ones, but when it comes to humor, wisdom, and perceptive observations on the species of the bourgeois, it certainly measures up to Mann's first success. The autobiographical elements of this chapter are as numerous as they are obvious. The characterization of Hans' grandfather, Senator Castorp, as a man holding family traditions and old institutions in far higher esteem than the insane expansion of harbor facilities and the godless sophistication of modern big cities corresponds to the picture we have of the author's father, Senator Thomas Heinrich Mann of Lübeck. Hans decides to take up shipbuilding as a career, but from the outset he does not really care for his work. He merely respects it. Here is a parallel to Mann's early experience as an employee in an insurance agency. Just as Mann quit the insurance business to lead the "useless" life of an artist, so Hans never gets beyond taking his textbook Ocean Steamships up to the Berghof, where he forgets about it. Hans abandons his studies because he thinks his "love of idle hours" will not permit him to work hard. Mann, wondering what a working mood really is, answered his own question in the form of a little essay in which he asserts that "the mood to work--that's having slept well, good books, fresh air, few people, and peace." As the narrator points out, however, there is also a deeper reason for Hans Castorp's dissatisfaction with his envisioned profession, and it is not exaggerating to see as his credo throughout the novel: "A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. . . . It is quite conceivable that he may be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being." As the most perfect proof of this insight, Castorp will continue his ambivalence and indecision even after catching a glimpse of truth in the snow dream. Thus this chapter becomes the true starting point of the educational journey of Hans. The close relationship between him and his grandfather, meticulously dealt with and culminating in the treatment of the family christening basin, reflects the tradition of conservative values in which Hans (and Thomas Mann) was reared. The detailed description of Hans' life with Joachim at the home of Consul Tienappel also reflects the conservative tradition; the atmosphere radiates gentility. Since Hans has embarked upon a journey of self-education and, eventually, meaningfulness, these descriptions serve to point to his indebtedness to the "normal world below," which he never really abandons. Hans, not at all "simple," can empathize with Joachim, his clear-cut opposite in so many ways. And Mann, despite his often-revised views and later engagement for the liberal cause, never ceased to think of himself as rooted in his conservative upbringing. Castorp's reminiscences extend to his early and repeated experiences with death. Having lost his father, mother, and now his grandfather, he has had ample opportunity to find out that there is more to death than the mournfulness and solemnity of funerals There is also a physical aspect to it, almost ordinary and common in its raw materiality Dead bodies, he reasons, cannot be truly a sad affair because sadness only prevails where life is concerned. These reflections are on Castorp's mind as he stands by his dead grandfather, who appears to be a life size wax doll to him, nothing but lifeless material. Here Mann's favorite theme of the polarity of life and death comes in. The noble and ignoble aspects of death which

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little Hans experiences are the basis of the novel's progression by opposites and contrasts. Throughout the book, the discussion of these ennobling and dehumanizing aspects of disease and death will be continued. Castorp himself is aware of these dual aspects which predestine him for his intense sensual, intellectual, and moral adventures. Of the many motifs Mann employs, that of the recurring number seven stands out. Before Hans' time, seven generations were initiated into Christian life by being sprinkled with water from the family basin, and seven years have elapsed since his own christening. Seven continues to play an important role until the end of the novel: the patients of the sanatorium are seated around seven tables, which is significant because of the function of food as the "time killer" in the boredom of the Berghof; the name of Castorp's great educator will be Settembrini, sette meaning seven in Italian; after seven weeks, Castorp ponders how quickly time has elapsed for him, and at the night of the carnival he will tell Clavdia Chauchat that sept mois under her eyes have made him fall in love with her; when the thunderbolt of the war awakens Hans from his seven-year spell on the Magic Mountain, the narrator refers to him as a Seven-Sleeper. (A literal translation of the German Siebenschlafer refers to a rodent known for its long hibernation period of seven months.) Plunged into the war, Hans will have to march for seven hours to reach the battle scene. Finally, the novel is divided into seven chapters.

CHAPTER 3 This chapter serves two main functions: that of introducing Hans Castorp to real life at the Berghof and its director, Hofrat Behrens, as well as to the two characters who will vie for his attention from now on-Settembrini and Clavdia Chauchat. Second, the chapter opens the discussion on the nature of time, the novel's other major theme. The peculiar impressions Hans Castorp collects characterize the atmosphere of physical and moral decay prevailing at the sanatorium. When Joachim introduces his cousin to several patients at their first breakfast together, the array of characters they meet affords them a glimpse of all the misery and falseness that they will live with throughout their stay. Quaint little habits, distinct accents, gross flaws, and most unusual looks identify each of those assembled as the representative of his specific profession or corner of the continent. All of them are sick members of society. The fact that they are all extremely wealthy is by no means a coincidence and adds to the vital social and political implications of the book. Most memorable among the minor characters Castorp meets here is perhaps Frau Stöhr, whose unbelievable stupidity and coarseness puts her on the lowest rank of the social ladder at the Berghof. It is important to note that, sterile, sick, and half-dead though the patients here may be, socializing and the sham accompanying it does interest them as if they needed it to simulate ordinary life "below." Like so many other patients, Frau Stöhr is forever anxious to cover up her total lack of intelligence and education by carrying on high-brow conversations and acting sophisticated. Her overly cultured ways, which cannot hide her countless gaucheries, are symptomatic of her society's essential barbarism. Here Mann proves himself a perfect caricaturist, employing recurring leitmotifs and picking picturesque, appropriate names. The consistently stupid expression of Frau Stöhr's face, for instance, is described in terms of her "rodentlike teeth." As the story goes on, this set of teeth becomes Frau Stöhr. Also, her name means "sturgeon" in German and, spelled slightly differently, "stubborn," which provides ample leeway for the (Germanspeaking) reader's punning imagination. To top it all off, Frau Stöhr keeps boasting of the twenty-eight different fish sauces she can fix. Thus, she is a perfect example of a patient whose insensitivity and total lack of potential keep her disease from working in her favor. In sensitive people like Castorp, a rise in the fever curve signifies growing awareness, a sharpening of intelligence. In the case of Frau Stöhr, on the other hand, all there is for tuberculosis to bring out is the purely physical aspect of disease. She remains gross and stupid until the

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end. The same will be true of Clavdia Chauchat, although her deficiency is not one of intelligence. She will remain sensual and passive throughout the book. There are other, more shocking instances of the sham facade of the sanatorium world, such as the threats of Herr Albin, a hopeless case, to commit suicide. Playing with his gun, the young man meets nothing but angry protests from his fellow patients, who are extremely eager to avoid any thought of death. When they insist he will be cured if he only stopped toying with his weapon, it is their cowardice they show and not their sympathy for him. The more they pretend to console him, the more he feels challenged to uncover their unwillingness to face reality. More than that, Albin says that he is content with his fate because now certain of his impending death, he can resign himself to idleness such as he did in school when the teacher would not call upon him any more because his failure was a fact. Herr Albin's mention of his high school days triggers a faint, first picture of Castorp's own school days; he is startled by a "wild wave of sweetness which swept over him." The remembering of his school days, of his school friend Hippe, and the foreshadowing of the exchange of the pencil with Clavdia has begun. This is one of the book's major motifs. Joachim casually tells his cousin that many patients die without anybody knowing anything about it because such "unpleasant" events are handled with utmost discreetness. Physical illness, in other words, is treated exactly like the moral sickness of exaggerated class-consciousness; it is ignored. The doctors of the sanatorium (the ruling politicians of the "world below") are anxious to conceal death (moral bankruptcy) from the public. As a result, the climate of pretense at the Berghof (in prewar Europe) stands in eerie contrast to death, which rules supreme. The theme of the ennobling and dehumanizing aspects of death, touched upon previously in connection with Frau Stöhr, figures prominently in Castorp's reaction to Behrens' brutal treatment of dying patients. Hans Castorp insists that a dying human being should be treated with respect because he is always more venerable than "a chap going about, laughing and earning his living, and eating three meals a day." The sensitivity he showed long ago at his grandfather's deathbed is still there, though he seems to have become less certain that "sadness can only prevail where life is concerned." He has begun to view life and death as two aspects of one and the same thing. In connection with his heart palpitations, Castorp's preoccupation with this subject comes out again. Later, Mann will transfer its discussion to the level of purely philosophical discourses between Settembrini and Naphta, but for the time being Hans worries about his palpitations and remarks to Joachim, "it is disturbing and unpleasant to have the body act as though it had no connection with the soul." The dichotomy between body and soul, life and death, is beginning to strike him as something to give more thought to, something he will transcend as his self-awareness grows. Joachim introduces his cousin to Settembrini, an Italian gentleman of fine features and great learning. The apostle of reason, progress, and humanism, he is one of Hans' chief mentors throughout the novel. Revealing himself as a man of letters, he goes about reciting Italian poetry and telling the cousins of his translations of liberal thinkers. One of these men he translated had composed a hymn to Satan himself-Satan in the form of unbridled revolution. The Italian baffles Castorp by comparing his visit to the Berghof with Odysseus' venture into the realm of shadows. To Hans' objection that he has come up several thousand feet, Settembrini cynically replies that Hans has been a victim of an illusion. Settembrini's admiration for Renaissance poetry and figures of Greek mythology shows how much he lives in the liberal Greco-Roman tradition. It also reflects Mann's sympathy with this view, which he considered the most powerful reservoir of democratic thought. Yet the lines of the Italian song, a fervent glorification of revolution, point to the one shortcoming in Settembrini which renders his views deficient and unacceptable as such to our hero. Like so many front-line liberals, Settembrini cannot extricate

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himself from the paradox of having to be dogmatic about his liberalism. He is rather willing to wage war against Austria, Russia, and the church. But his fanaticism also has a pedantic side to it; insisting to Castorp that smoking has been despised by the most brilliant thinkers in history because it befogs the mind, he declares it a vice. Hans Castorp, the avid consumer of Maria Mancini cigars, does not appreciate this at all, and we may rest assured that Thomas Mann, a connoisseur of cigars himself, intended this to be a bit of criticism of Settembrini. This will be extremely important later on because it will supply Naphta, Settembrini's reactionary adversary, with arguments he could barely have found himself. Mann himself never advocated liberalism to the point of condoning revolution, and, in his attempts to help democratize Germany, he never ceased to be extremely critical of those who would transplant Western-style democracy on German society without modifying it to suit a different mentality. It would be Germany's role to mediate between East and West, according to Mann, but never to copy a political system. This mediating role, by the way, is one aspect of Castorp's dream of the rising moon in the east and the setting sun in the west (Chapter 4). No sooner has Settembrini, whose exterior is described as forcing Castorp to "mental alertness and clarity," entered into our hero's life than he begins to use his keen powers of observation in Hans' favor. He inquires about the "term" Hans has been sentenced to by "Minos and Rhadamanthus"; he lashes out most cynically at Behrens' greediness (underlined by his standard expression sine pecunia and his invention of a separate summer season for the Berghof); and he condemns the director's conniving generosity toward a debauched prince who showed his gratitude by conferring the title of "Hofrat" on him. The Hofrat's sensuality will become obvious later on, especially in connection with his hobby, oil painting. Spotting Dr. Krokowski, Settembrini mentions the appropriateness of his black attire to Hans and is shocked that the latter has not yet sized him up. Exhorting him to use his eyes and reasoning power to arrive at lucid conclusions, the Italian lapses into another praise of humanism and the related art of pedagogy. Settembrini represents that force which never hesitates to express direct honesty. He answers Castorp's charge that he is too sarcastic in his efforts to eradicate wrong by telling him that malice is the "animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment." In this context, it is interesting to note that the Italian liberal very much resembles Mann's brother Heinrich, with whose highly didactic notions about art (especially political literature) he never agreed. Settembrini was the name of a historical figure in Italy's fight for unification, though the author never said he used it in his novel for this reason. Whether Mann chose Settembrini's name deliberately or not, the long battle between the Austrian empire and the individual Italian states over unification and independence (of which World War I was merely the final, most violent outbreak) is a major theme on the novel's political level. Settembrini's aggressive exposure of the relationship of Behrens (whose spurious title Hofrat means "Imperial Counselor" and was once a meaningful award for distinguished services rendered, but is used here as a symbol of the declining monarchy's title-consciousness) with a debauched member of nobility certainly fits this pattern of his passionate anti-monarchistic feelings. When Castorp finds the patient who keeps irritating him by slamming doors in the dining hall, he is surprised at her attractiveness and, above all, by her slanted eyes, protruding cheek bones, and the delicate, girlish hand that pats her hair: "A vague memory of something, of somebody, stirred him slightly and fleetingly as he looked." Clavdia Chauchat's Asiatic features captivate him. Little does Hans know that from now on his life is going to be increasingly influenced by her presence. The fact that she is Russian and returns to the Caucasus every once in a while to visit her husband accounts for her sloppy behavior, an indication of her pronounced passivity, sensuality, and irrationality in Mann's "system" of

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ethnic characteristics. The strange fascination Clavdia Chauchat exerts on Castorp leads to the latter's mounting confusion. Her effect on him is such that at one point he cannot even muster up enough strength to look at the blood he coughed up--a clear symbol of the decay she spreads. Clavdia is like a scintillating and pungent carnivorous plant, enticing her prey by dulling its senses rather than by striking out herself. She is not even aware of her devastating influence on Castorp, this fact underlines her passivity. The implications of her sensual and irrational character are eminently political, as are the Russian couple who keeps offending Castorp by promiscuously giggling and panting in the room next to his. Feeling and irrationality (in the form of passivity and tyranny) are "Eastern" characteristics; submissiveness and hierarchial order their political expression. Mann simplifies, of course, but he nevertheless has a point, as the political history of eastern and central Europe has shown for hundreds of years. Whether ruled by tsarist or communistic tyranny, whether ruled by Prussian power politics or Nazi imperialism, eastern and central European (Slavic) peoples have never had a democratic tradition to speak of, at least not before the end of the twentieth century. (Hungarians have, but they are not Slavs). It is not by accident that the obscene sounds of the Russian couple are accompanied by the hackneyed tunes of operetta music--symbols of imperial Austria. This theme of "Eastern" and "Western" traits will crop up again in connection with the far touchier discussion of whether "intellectual literature" may be pitted against "emotional music." Immediately after Castorp meets Settembrini and Clavdia Chauchat, the two become embattled over him. Asked about his age by Settembrini, Castorp has to think twice before answering him correctly. Then, when he talks gibberish (his temperature is consistently rising), the Italian advises him to return to the "world below." This marks Settembrini's first intervention in Hans' support. His second one comes that night in Hans' dream when Hofrat Behrens advises him to while away his time in pursuit of pleasure. Settembrini, in this dream, admonishes Hans to resist the diabolic forces of Behrens, but Hans refuses to pay any attention to his clear-headed advice. Yet the Italian realizes Hans' condition and keeps up his warnings. In this same dream, Castorp finds himself back in the school court of his high school, where he borrows a pencil from Clavdia Chauchat. Toward dawn, he dreams of her again, this time of the open, delicate hand, which she offers him to kiss. This hand was the very first thing he noticed about her, and now it triggers the same "wild wave of sweetness" in him he experienced when he put himself in Herr Albin's position earlier that day. The connection is evident: Herr Albin was bound to die and played with the idea of committing suicide; Castorp is moving toward his own death through Clavdia. The emergence of Clavdia Chauchat in the school court is the most thoroughly developed leitmotif in the novel, pulling together episodes both real and imagined over long spans of time. The leitmotif strongly suggests Mann's familiarity with Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams. In fact, Mann studied them while writing The Magic Mountain. He was also familiar with Freud's psychoanalytical experiments. Therefore it may not be too farfetched to see in Settembrini, the great admonisher toward self-control and responsibility, an embodiment of the hero's superego; Clavdia Chauchat, the temptress toward sensuality, may then be seen as Hans' id. We have made the point that Mann conceived of virtually all of the novel's characters in terms of opposites; in fact, most of them are defined in terms of their opposites. Settembrini and Clavdia Chauchat form such a set of opposites, Settembrini and Naphta later on; and Castorp with Joachim also. If the relationship between the cousins was well characterized in Chapter 1, there are new insights here with regard to Behrens. He prefers the more pliable and susceptible character of Hans to that of Joachim, which makes him think Hans would be a better patient than his cousin. Joachim's overly reserved treatment of his girlfriend Marusja, on the other hand, is an interesting parallel to Hans' budding love for Clavdia Chauchat.

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As stated at the outset of this chapter, The Magic Mountain is also a novel about the mystery of time. Chapter 3 introduces the subject explicitly in the form of a conversation between the cousins. It develops out of Castorp's annoyance over the tedious procedure of having to take his temperature four times a day. Yet his annoyance is only seemingly insignificant, for it soon turns out that boredom plays a very real role in any discussion about time. Time, after all, is the correlative of experience. As is to be expected from Joachim's uncomplicated nature, he is quite willing to let the various timemeasuring devices determine what time is. Castorp, however, is more sophisticated and argues that time is as long or as short as one experiences it. When Joachim, getting tired of "mental gymnastics," contends that "a minute lasts as long as it takes the second hand of my watch to complete a circuit," Hans is still not satisfied. Considering Joachim's words, he concludes that we measure time by space. It does not mean much to say it takes twenty hours from Hamburg to Davos, for on foot it takes infinitely longer, and in the mind not even a second. This notion of time as a function of space will be developed further when Hans tries to find some relationship between time and the circles he makes wandering around in the snowstorm. Time is not merely a major theme of the novel; it is also its medium. All of Chapter 3 deals only with events during Castorp's first day at the Berghof. It begins exactly where Chapter 1 ended--with Hans getting up in the morning. The point is clear: Once a newcomer has lived through one day at the sanatorium, the best he can hope for as far as novelty is concerned are new ways of fighting boredom and confusion. A day is like a month is like a year at the Berghof, and all of it is like a spell of uncertain duration. The static quality of time stands out. As Castorp puts it on his first afternoon up there: "Good Lord, is it still only the first day? It seems to me I've been up here a long time--ages." From now on, single chapters of the book will not treat a day, but weeks, months, and even years of Hans Castorp's life. No wonder, for as Hans reflects at one point, "A path is always longer the first time we traverse it."

CHAPTER 4 Settembrini reproaches Hans Castorp for accepting the old-fashioned view that disease is always something noble even when it affects stupid people. But Castorp claims that whenever disease or death is present in any form, he develops his faculties to the utmost. Even coffins and funerals have a peculiar appeal to him. "Cultural backsliding" is the term that Settembrini uses to describe Castorp's notions. Settembrini respects the body only as long as it presents no obstacle against the attainment of freedom; as a consequence, he regards the sick body with contempt. Important to note is the surprise Settembrini expresses upon hearing that Hans Castorp has bought a blanket. The blanket is the symbol of the rest-cure at the sanatorium, and the rest-cure the symbol of temptation toward the dangerous spells of timelessness. The Italian chooses the words placet experiri (Latin for he likes to experiment) to express his surprise over Castorp's decision to resign himself to life at the Berghof. The point is obvious: Settembrini's keen mind sees the temptations of illness, whereas our hero, pursuing a system of trial and error, is still largely unaware of them. He is the seeker, the hero of the bildungsroman, forever venturing on new paths and vacillating back and forth between what he is and what he is led to believe he should be. With the rest-cures comes plenty of leisure time, and with the leisure time come all those countless dreams, visions, and states of semi-consciousness which lend a mystical quality to this basically highly intellectual story. No wonder that Castorp lapses into another reflection on the nature of time. When Settembrini joins the cousins on the occasion of a Sunday morning terrace concert, they all become

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involved in a lengthy discussion on music. Joachim stresses its relationship to time, and the Italian adds a new dimension to the conversation by tying music up with politics. Confessing his preference for intellectual pursuits, especially literature, over music, Settembrini even declares music to be politically suspect because it invites the mind to remain passive and to lose itself in reverie. Joachim's reply affords us a rare glimpse into his uncomplicated mind. He defends what he calls the "moral value" of music by arguing that it has a way of dividing time into measures and other units. This alone makes it possible for him to enjoy time, which would otherwise remain one dull continuum. Settembrini agrees with him insofar as music may defeat boredom. Joachim is of course simpler than Settembrini, and this is why he longs for the conveniently arranged daily routine of the "world below." Settembrini then brings up the essentially emotional quality of music. His view reflects Mann's lifelong notion of the self-destructive element in the esthetic soul. This soul has a tendency to affirm life only to the degree it can provide the individual with purely subjective, esthetic experience. Opposed to any moral view of life (Settembrini is, of course, a moralist), the esthetic soul conceives of the total immersion of the individual in contemplation as life's sole justification. It denies an individual's responsibility to society and therefore tends to be politically reactionary. That it can under certain circumstances be dangerous for segments of a whole nation to be transported into musical-emotional passion was proven, for instance, in Nazi Germany. The Nazis enthusiastically extolled the operas of Richard Wagner with their ancient Germanic sagas and highly emotional music. The enormous appeal of this combination, unfortunately, distorted Wagner's intention. We have seen Settembrini's enthusiasm for literature, preferably that of classical and Renaissance poets, and Hans Castorp's reluctance to share this enthusiasm. But, toward the end of his stay in the mountains, Hans will sing and listen to music, highly romantic music. This corresponds to Mann's belief that the preference of music over literature is a German characteristic (and a Slavic one), while "Western" civilization is essentially founded on literary (intellectual) values. Even if he is grossly oversimplifying (Italians, after all, have created opera, though one can argue opera is not a purely musical genre), Mann has a point: The musical tradition in central and eastern Europe is a long one, and there simply is nobody of the stature of a Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart outside the German world. By the same token, it is easy to show that German literature never produced a Dante or Shakespeare and cannot compare, either in terms of tradition or quality, with that of the French--barring, perhaps, Goethe. The real problems, however, come in when Mann (or Settembrini, Mann's rational aspect) tries to explain these differences by assigning a basically emotional (irrational) quality to music and an intellectual one to literature. Where does this leave Milton, much of the seventeenth century, most of the nineteenth century, or writers like D. H. Lawrence, to name but a few? And where shall we put Bach's fugues, Mozart, and the highly mathematical music based on Schönberg's twelve-tone scale? Mann was treading on thin ice here, and he must have known it. More than once did he stress the complex, musical structure of The Magic Mountain, and the hero of his last novel, Dr. Faustus, is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, an intellectual par excellence. One could more easily dismiss these interesting but deficient attempts at classifying people and peoples by national traits if Mann had not attached implicit value judgments to them. And this he clearly did. Hans Castorp rejects many of Settembrini's ideas in an effort to find his own way to a "humane" life, but he is more inclined to side with the Italian's views than with those of Clavdia Chauchat or, later on, Naphta. The autobiographical element and political import are significant: Mann was farsighted enough to question the merit of Western democracy when transplanted to Germany, yet there can be no doubt that the older he became, the more he agreed with its ideals. He despised tyranny, whether in Germany or the former Soviet Union. Though these political implications of Mann's belief in national-ethnic characterization are not the essence of the dream Castorp has on a bench not far from the Berghof, they dramatize it considerably. In

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this dream, our hero finds himself back in high school, where his thoughts center around Pribislav Hippe, his one-time schoolmate. Pribislav is of Slavic descent, has greenish eyes and protruding cheek bones. Hans Castorp used to be fascinated by his appearance though they had met only once--when he borrowed a pencil from Hippe. The parallel to Clavdia Chauchat is obvious. Snapping out of his dream, Castorp realizes the long span of time his mind has traveled and, still fighting spells of dizziness, runs to attend a lecture by another Slav, Dr. Krokowski. Our hero's stubborn nosebleed is a symptom of his deteriorating condition, as is his spinning head. Yet Hans deliberately rushes to suck in the poisonous analyses of love presented by the Polish doctor. Each in a different way and each to a different degree, these three "Eastern" people play a vital role in Castorp's worsening condition. As indicated above, Hans' dream is remarkable for another reason, namely the complex world of dreams with its total suspension of the sequence of time. In a previous dream, Hans Castorp found himself borrowing a pencil; he will do so in reality in the carnival scene. Now that Hippe has been recalled, Hans is aware of the connection between the school friend and Clavdia Chauchat. In no other leitmotif does the inseparability of man's conscious and unconscious levels of experience appear so strikingly. Mann employs the leitmotif to enhance the vividness of his characterizations and also to emphasize the similarities of recurring situations. Does this blending of dreams and conscious experiences mean that had it not been for his fascination with Hippe long ago, he would never have felt attracted to Clavdia Chauchat? Or the other way round, perhaps, that she, in some inexplicable way, has existed in his mind even before he met Hippe? Expressed in terms of psychoanalysis, has his repressed homoerotic attraction to Hippe emerged as his desire for Clavdia? The answers remain ambiguous. At any rate, Hans Castorp attentively listens to Dr. Krokowski's analyses in an effort to get rid of his mounting sense of confusion. The subject of the lecture is the inevitability of conflicts between love and chastity. He contends that, although in the minds of most people the ideal of chastity defeats the sex drive, this drive is too strong to let itself be repressed. Repressed physical love is the basis of disease. Dr. Krokowski's arguments and his "ruthlessly scientific" ways make him the irresponsible representative of the type of psychoanalyst who naively believes in the possibility of solving people's innermost problems through rational investigation. He speaks of the "redeeming power of the analytic," and he looks "like Christ with his arms outstretched and his head on one side." Nevertheless, his ambiguous treatment of love and his mounting interest in magic make him the apostle, not of love, but of sterility. Appropriately enough, his office is located in the basement and is shadowed by "profound twilight." In this atmosphere of pseudo-scientific sensuality, Clavdia Chauchat's presence triggers another dream within Castorp, one full of longing for her. Indeed, Hans' love for her is disease-forming, but his dreams are but symbols of his physical and moral condition. Whenever his mind is not clouded by Clavdia Chauchat's image, Castorp tends to doubt Hofrat Behrens' ability and interest in the cure of his patients. Behrens was seriously ill himself; therefore, can a former patient, one who has perhaps not wholly recovered, really do anything for him and for everybody else up here? Castorp is aware his own health is dwindling, but he is already too sick, both physically and morally, to want to do anything about it. More and more, Madame Chauchat becomes the center of his life. When she is around, they find ever-new ways of flirting and arousing each other's sensuality, and when she is away on her occasional visits to her husband, he daydreams about her. Hans Castorp is quickly becoming part and parcel of the horrible ennui of this sanatorium existence. At the same time, his ties to Joachim are growing weaker. The slight trembling of his head at the very sight of Madame Chauchat is another outward sign of his violent emotional involvement. One of numerous leitmotifs of the novel, Castorp's trembling also serves to point to the significance of inherited tradition: Hans' father and grandfather suffered from inflammation of the lungs. Thus being by nature

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"life's delicate child," Hans' disease affords him an ever more lucid understanding of himself. It teaches him that the body and the soul cannot be two separate realms, each following its own laws. This is important to remember, for the ultimate transcendence of this dualism is the professed goal of our hero's painful journey toward self-awareness and humanism. The idea that man is to an astounding degree molded by tradition is one of Mann's favorite themes, and it is dealt with once more in this chapter. Settembrini tells Castorp about his (Settembrini's) grandfather, who devoted his life to the noble cause of the Italian revolution. Hans replies by mentioning that his own grandfather was dedicated to the cause of the traditionalists of that time, who ruled over the very areas where Settembrini's ancestors had lived. Together they discover the uniqueness of their grandfathers, who practically fought each other, each convinced of the justice of his cause. The trance Hans Castorp experiences while listening to the story of opposing causes has political relevance. He remembers himself on a lake in his native Germany, crossing over in a boat: The pale moon rising in the east and the glowing sun setting in the west leave him in a strange mood of twilight. The colorful and confusing twilight stands for the impending political holocaust threatening Germany. As we have said previously, this picture may also be interpreted to illustrate Mann's favorite political idea--that of Germany as a saving mediating force between East and West. In any case, once again a dream points into the future by means of an image of the past. Settembrini continues to present himself in the light of the rationalist who believes in the final victory of democracy; he agrees with his grandfather's comparison of the French revolutionary days with the six days of creation. He explains that he became a man of letters because there is a close relationship between humanistic thought and action on the one hand and speech and writing on the other. The idea of the intellectual superiority of literature is advanced again. Yet Hans Castorp is not impressed, and he even pounds his fist on the table at so much arrogance from the Italian. After all, Settembrini, as much as anyone else, is what he is largely because of his ancestors. This is Thomas Mann speaking, the apostle of tradition at his best.

CHAPTER 5 If we stop to take a look at the course Hans Castorp's life has taken so far, we will see that it has zigzagged between the two poles of Settembrini and Clavdia Chauchat. Torn between their extreme positions, Castorp has either reverted to the values he cherished at the outset or has resorted to Joachim's simpler views--which amounts to almost the same thing. Yet our hero has also shown more and more unmistakable signs of a tendency to eschew Settembrini's cautioning influence and to succumb to the spell of Madame Chauchat. Hans has now reached the point where he is drawn to her ever more violently, the violence reinforcing the pace at which this happens and vice versa. The Italian's warning that "Lilith"--the name he gives Clavdia Chauchat during the carnival night--was a Hebrew night demon devouring men does not help, nor does his attempt to keep Castorp from Clavdia's lures by switching on the light. On the contrary, Hans tells his mentor to leave him alone and confides to her that words, thought, and light are pitifully "republican" notions. Eventually, Hans Castorp's sensuality reaches a point where it turns into self-debasement. Thus, Chapter 5 contains the juncture at which Castorp's course of life merges with that of Madame Chauchat. From here on, the two will move apart again, he to new intellectual and moral insights and she to another sensual adventure. It is not by accident that in the twovolume edition, Mann let the first volume end here. Mann has been criticized for having created relatively lifeless, almost stylized characters, and this objection has its point. With the exception of Castorp, the seeker of his identity and ideal, most central figures tend to reiterate certain ready-made ideas on how to master life. There is no character development or change in outlook in any of them. While this static quality may become rather boring to

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the reader when it dominates a scene (such as the major dialogues between Settembrini and Naphta, whose dialectic technique and content one could almost copy from an encyclopedia), it is also true that this quality emphasizes the aspect of time which Castorp keeps calling the "dimensionless present." Besides, carriers of fixed ideas facilitate the success of their respective educational function. This, needless to add, is extremely important in a bildungsroman. This static quality is most obvious in Settembrini, whom Hans calls "a mere representative without name." Innumerable times Settembrini assures Hans that anybody living "up here" is doomed and that he should leave. His intricate monologue on the unity of life and death is the clearest manifestation of his monism yet. There is no new or even different angle to his arguments, and if anything at all strikes Castorp or the reader as different, it is his growing haughtiness. Our "delicate child of life," on the other hand, is susceptible to the diverse influences and assaults upon him. Joachim, Settembrini, Clavdia, and Naphta are not only outside forces acting on him; they are also components of his own personality, pulling him in several directions and thereby enabling him to learn. He is Castor and a bit of Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini, as his name suggests. (If nothing proves that Mann consciously derived Castorp's name this way, the twin-star image is nevertheless highly appropriate.) Hans continuously undergoes changes, and he always moves. His new, defiant reaction has never been so evident as when Settembrini condemns the perversely lavish concept of time of "those Parthians and Scythians" (Slavs). To convince Hans of his view, Settembrini divulges his membership in an organization propagating the self-perfection of man on the basis of "objective" data. He continues that the organization has asked him to compile a volume on the therapeutical values of world literature to be printed in an encyclopedia entitled The Sociology of Suffering. He even invites Hans to join, but Hans declines. And, indeed, how can the fanatical Settembrini, risking anything as long as his cause is advanced, be so dedicated to "international" organizations and "world" literature? How can he refuse to acknowledge the reality of disease when his own disease keeps him from traveling to a professional meeting? Mann picks sociology as his target here, pointing to its unfortunately widespread mania of treating social phenomena as though they obeyed the laws of the natural sciences. The mere title of Settembrini's encyclopedia is symptomatic of the cast of mind which confuses quantity with quality. In short, Castorp is infuriated, and he means to let his teacher know. He points up the grave inconsistencies in Settembrini's philosophy-which would not be so bad if Settembrini did not always pride himself on his "rational" and "intellectual" powers. Above all, Hans begins to supply his own correctives to Settembrini's thoughts, which he has accepted or at least listened to without contradicting so far. The upshot is that Hans is undergoing a decisive phase in his education. It is important to remember, though, that our hero's refusal to go on swallowing his educator's suggestions hook, line, and sinker is not merely the result of his rapidly growing infatuation with Clavdia Chauchat: His conviction that all these arrogant claims advanced by Settembrini are false is real and justified. It is for the first explicit indication we have that Castorp has come to see his road as leading somewhere between these extreme positions he encounters. Very much the same static quality marks Behrens' behavior. His leading role on the magic mountain is becoming more apparent now, thus justifying everything that Settembrini has observed and that Castorp has surmised about him. Especially Behrens' sensuality is disclosed, both through his hobby, oil painting, and his addiction to the body, which has nothing to do with medical concerns. Interestingly enough, it is again Castorp who begins to react differently. His desire for Clavdia Chauchat makes it extremely hard for him to bear the mere thought that Behrens should have enjoyed her nearness to this degree while he painted her. Waiting in line to have his X-ray taken, he meets her as she comes swirling into Behrens' waiting room, and the thought that the doctor should be able to look into her, as well as at her, sets Hans wild. Taking advantage of an accidental encounter with the doctor, Castorp invites himself to Behrens' house because he wants to see the painting. Appropriately, the desires of both men are naked to each other

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and they meet in front of the nude painting of Clavdia. Castorp tells his host that he (Hans) should have become a doctor because he loves the human body. Asking Behrens to tell him something about the functions of the skin and the glands, he eagerly listens to the doctor explaining the intricate processes to him during which physical or psychological stimuli arouse certain external changes. Behrens winds up his lecture stating that both life and death are but two forms of oxidation. "Living consists in dying," he says, revealing his utter disinterest in life by denying its uniqueness. This exaggerated delight in particularly the skin and glands is symptomatic of a pathological condition which craves the body, especially the sick body. This is what Behrens and Castorp have in common. In the latter, this desire is so strong that it drives him to rave about it to Clavdia, which gives him some sort of surrogate satisfaction. Eventually Castorp responds to Behrens as he does to Settembrini. Just as he now contradicts his Italian mentor, he also uncovers Behrens' vices. He takes the initiative: He has convinced himself of Behrens' carnality, so he pries at the doctor to hear more about the science of the body. In terms of the educational process Hans is undergoing, this scene is significant because it shows his growing self-awareness. The particular stretch of road he is traveling now leads him straight to his downfall, but it is only by crossing through darkness that he can emerge wiser. There can be no cure without the danger of death, no purification without fire, and no mercy without previous sin. This is Mann speaking, the great admirer and expert on medieval philosophy. Behrens presides during Walpurgis Night, pouring punch and conducting diabolic games in reddish semidarkness. According to legend, witches met the devil during Walpurgis Night (April 30-May 1) for a night of revelry on the Brocken Mountain. (Mann took much of this scene from Goethe's Faust). The symbolism of Behrens' drooping posture dominating the magic mountain revelry is obvious. Mann resorts to an old literary tradition, namely that of seeing the world of clowns and jesters as the only real one. Castorp experiences this night as he might experience a dream. Dreams, too, have stood for windows into a higher reality throughout literature--not only here but in other Mann stories (Death in Venice). Thus Mann uses two specific means here of stressing the scene's character of revelation. That disease is the catalyst of any comprehension of reality goes without special mention; it is one of the major themes of the novel. The Walpurgis Night scene is central not only because it contains the climax of Castorp's irrationality but also because it elevates the novel's main leitmotif of the borrowed pencil from the world of vague reminiscences into that of the very real party game conducted by Behrens for his guests. Castorp experiences the entire evening "like a dream," but he wants to participate in the pig-drawing contest, so he approaches Clavdia Chauchat for a pencil. Confronted with her, he turns pale, realizing the parallel between this situation and the others he has lived through in dreams (and, in reality, during his school days). Clavdia lends him the pencil, using the very words Pribislav Hippe once used when he lent Hans a pencil for a drawing lesson at school. Essential questions are posed: Is Castorp experiencing the same thing over and over again, though under slightly different circumstances and in varying degrees of consciousness? Has he known Clavdia before, and if so, in this world or in another? Where do dreams end and where does reality begin--if, indeed, they may be pitted against each other as though they were mutually exclusive? Psychologically speaking, this scene is a masterpiece, as is also proven by Mann's insistence on having his hero address Clavdia in French. He carries on a rather intimate conversation with her and eventually confesses his love to her, all en français. The reason is that he, like all of us, finds it easier to express something delicate or embarrassing in a language whose subtle nuances he cannot tell apart and for which he is therefore not responsible. The author picked French simply because at that time, French was the important language of international communication; in this connection, we remember that Castorp practiced it with Tous-les-Deux, the Mexican lady, long ago.

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We have made the point that while Settembrini and Clavdia Chauchat (later on Naphta and Mynheer Peeperkorn) are relatively static characters because they are vehicles of different ideas, Castorp is the one character who, being confronted with opposing views, keeps moving by steering an in-between course. The thin mountain air merely brings out his disease, which in sensitive people like him becomes a yardstick of his growing self-awareness and, thus, his education. This is what Castorp means when he confides to his cousin that "down below," all the intriguing discussions with Settembrini, for instance, would not have meant anything to him. Now one must consider some of the indications that Hans' condition has grown worse. First, Hans' fever curve has steadily gone up, typically enough and most conspicuously, whenever he either dreams of Clavdia or when he sees her. In fact, Hans has reached the point where he wants to be sick and triumphantly writes home that his rising temperature necessitates his prolonged stay at the sanatorium. If so far he has been largely unaware of the perils endangering him, he is now defending himself against Settembrini's warnings--in spite of the fact that he understands the Italian's concerns. Nothing does he dread more than the removal of the protective veil of his clouded senses, which affords him the destructive nearness of Clavdia Chauchat. As a result, Hans not only foregoes his own judgment but also begins to let himself go. Neglecting his posture at the table (where much of life at the Berghof goes on) and slamming doors behind him, he takes on the contempt of form and composure so characteristic of Clavdia. Illustrating moral deterioration through the dissolution of form, Mann makes the point that content and form are but two aspects of one and the same thing. This issue, already dealt with on an intellectual level in the discussion between Castorp and Behrens, is of course only a variation on the underlying theme of the dualistic view of life which Castorp seeks to overcome. The quickly changing weather, which is employed throughout the novel as an indication of the different values governing the Berghof world, upsets our hero less and less. His response to the surface heat of an Indian summer concealing the coming winter frost sheds light on his diseased condition--one of "mingled frost and fire." Oblivious to the fact that it is October, he overcomes his confusion about the strong sun rather quickly and, more and more susceptible to sensual stimulation, thoroughly enjoys the heat. Now Hans is sick enough to accept the suspension of the natural sequence of time as "normal." Few things indicate the true condition of life on the magic mountain (in prewar Europe)--thus, why should the weather follow the calendar? The scene in which Castorp and his cousin look at each other's skeletons in front of the X-ray screen also points to our hero's mounting confusion and awareness of his disease. Looking at his bones, he is startled by the memory of an old aunt of his who had the strange talent of seeing people who were about to die as skeletons. Hans' growing self-awareness leads him to take up serious reading, which is the prerequisite for any new insights. He concentrates on books dealing with the origin and composition of life, which is described as neither exclusively matter nor spirit but as something resulting from an interaction between the two. The more Castorp reads about the human body, the more he appreciates life. He realizes that his old notions about death as an independent force are wrong; they would keep him from enjoying life to the fullest. Nevertheless, he still clings to the idea of death and disease as something noble and so sends flowers and messages of hope to patients about to die. Yet Hans' well-meaning consolations lead to offenses and unintended cruelties in several instances, proving Settembrini right in urging him "to let the dead bury their dead." Taking the balance between intellectual and physical life as the goal of his reading, Hans moves further ahead on the road whose end brings the transcendence of all the dichotomies invented by man (and Mann). Yet our hero, "life's delicate child," also travels another path toward self-realization and self-awareness, which is the reason why in his reading he dwells on pathology. As has been indicated, Castor and Pollux

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make up Hans' soul. Nothing is really "simple" about him, and just as the several characters shaping his mind may be interpreted to be something akin to the different aspects of his (the average man's) consciousness, Castorp's own actions and reactions often seem to belong to different patterns of behavior. Indeed, the monolithical Castorp, cast out of one mold and consistent within himself, does not exist. He cannot exist because he is man depicted in the agonies of his lifelong battle toward self-realization. Hans' avid reading of books on pathology only seems to contradict his other reading. Castorp, the representative of us all, is fighting within himself, as when he says to Clavdia that "There are two paths to life: one is the regular one. . . . The other leads through death--that is the spiritual way." There are different approaches to life for different people, but there are also different souls within one and the same person. In terms of the reading Castorp does, this means that his delving into problems of pathology corresponds to that part within him which emphasizes disease as something positive. In his sick state, our hero's principle is pure feeling, which he readily admits. And since there is nothing like disease to provide undiluted feeling, he craves disease as a form of lust. The cause and symptom of his disease is Clavdia Chauchat, and what he experiences when he sees her is an intense and undecided battle between pain and lust. As a direct result of all his abstract reading, Castorp falls asleep and lapses into a rather sensual dream of Clavdia's embrace and lingering kiss. As the undisputed painter of human psychology that he is, Mann admirably succeeds here in depicting man's different levels of consciousness as one large reservoir. The treatment of human experience as essentially one reservoir, of which the various dreams and visions are but the most paramount expression, is closely tied up with the treatment of time. And time, as we have seen in connection with the carnival scene already, figures prominently in this chapter. At the beginning of Chapter 5, the narrator reveals that the description of Castorp's life at the Berghof will not take up nearly as much time as it has so far. This does not contradict what was said above, for it means that, unlike Chapter 1, which dealt solely with the newcomer's experiences during his first day, all subsequent chapters are not commensurate with the span of time they describe. This is consistent with Castorp's often-expressed belief that time passes quickest whenever a change of place is involved, and that after a while longer, periods can easily be condensed into relatively little space because they are not experienced as the same long periods any more. The novel, let us not forget, attempts to convey the sense of time as Castorp experiences it. The discussion of time now moves in the direction of what the author symbolically calls "soup everlasting." It appropriately describes the condition in which the sanatorium patients experience the fading away of past and future, their gradual blending into one indiscernible present. The soup they always get for lunch is the only reality for them because it comes regularly and divides up this uncertain something called "day." But nobody really knows whether it comes once a day, twice a day, or only every other day. Since this "eternal now" is increasingly hard for them to bear, they try to counteract it by various hobbies: Settembrini sticks to his reading and writing, Joachim has taken to studying Russian to survive, and Castorp reads copiously or keeps track of the days by arranging dates with Clavdia. Then, during the night of the carnival, Castorp's enchantment widens his experience of time to include magic touches of fulfillment. They are fleeting touches, to be sure, which do not bring the fulfillment of his longing as such. Fulfillment would be the end of all longing and would hardly justify Castorp's further adventures toward self-awareness and his own way of life. Yet, stammering his confessions of love to Clavdia, he raves that sitting with her is like a dream. The present and eternity have ceased to be two opposite aspects of time. From now on, Hans Castorp experiences them as one long, vague mystery.

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CHAPTER 6 Now that Walpurgis Night is over and Clavdia Chauchat has departed, Castorp takes off the fool's cap she put on his head and returns to studying botany. Left with nothing but Clavdia's farewell present and the framed X-ray portrait of her upper body, he slowly moves away from her and further up the path toward self-awareness. Now the path will lead steeply upward and Castorp will reach its high point during the snow adventure. Settembrini, of course, is unable to see that it is not only in spite of, but because of, his involvement with Clavdia that Hans resumes his search for knowledge and insight. Settembrini's understanding of Castorp's education does not go beyond the cynical inquiry of how Hans enjoyed the "pomegranate" of sensuality, suggesting that one who has tasted of the fruit of perdition is irretrievably lost. More than ever, Settembrini now appears as the moralist and rationalist par excellence, one who dismisses disease as mere illusion, the result of a lack of reason. In this context, it is interesting to note that Settembrini never actually meets Clavdia, the embodiment of what he battles against. Just how obstinate Settembrini is becomes clear when he, convinced of his hopeless condition, says that he will move into the town of Davos to complete his work for the encyclopedia. The subject of his contribution, it will be remembered, amounts to an attempt to conquer disease and death by denying its essence. If Settembrini represents the purely ethical approach to life, the equally intellectual Naphta, whom he introduces to the cousins, represents the purely esthetic one. Extremely intense and lost in their respective positions, these two adversaries charge the sanatorium atmosphere with sheer mental brilliance. There is one trait in Naphta that makes him radically different from Settembrini: As an intellectual, Naphta is doomed by his irrational mentality to fight his rationality. This renders him a living paradox which he will be driven to solve eventually by committing suicide. Naphta exerts a greater influence on Hans Castorp than Settembrini because our hero, in a way the embodiment of both his educators, is sensitive enough to respond to this tension in the newcomer. It is that part of Naphta he cannot grasp which fascinates him most, thus proving Naphta's point that humanity always tends to be drawn to the irrational elements rather than those that lend themselves to rational analysis. All the endless discussions between Settembrini and Naphta deal with the question of whether or not a monistic principle prevails in the cosmos (as the Italian contends) or whether spirit and matter are engaged in eternal conflict as two autonomous forces (as the Spaniard claims). It is important to understand that estheticism is related, in Mann's view, with disease and, ultimately, death. This is also a part of Schopenhauer's ultra-romantic philosophy in a nutshell: the purely esthetic, sensual, and mystical mode of life as the great temptation toward death, the final consoler. The discussions of Naphta and Settembrini cover a wide variety of subjects, beginning with politics and soon involving theology. Settembrini argues that natural law alone is the basis of democracy, whereupon Naphta replies that the concept of natural law is but a mutilation of divine law and that the so-called democratic ideal is merely the last attempt of the West to fend off the new order already building up in the East. When the Spaniard learns that Settembrini is a Freemason, he does not hesitate to call this organization a surrogate for the church and claims its success is not the result of the principles of enlightenment it cherishes but of its mystical rituals. At one point, when Castorp is overwhelmed by a beautiful fourteenth-century pietà, Naphta, to whom it belongs, says it is natural for Hans to be overwhelmed because only spiritual beauty reaches real intensity. Settembrini counters that he prefers Greco-Roman art with its balanced proportions to Gothic art with its emphasis on physical distortion in the interest of the spiritual. In reality, the Italian continues, Naphta's exaggerated enjoyment of the pietà's expression of pain illustrates his desire for the experience of the purely physical; suffering always intensifies this experience, often to the point of a perverted sensuality. Naphta's sympathy with disease even makes him argue that the sick people of the world would lose their status of priority in life and the

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healthy ones their best chance to gain salvation (through practicing charity) if there were no misery. Settembrini defends rationality to an absurd point, claiming to have healed insane people merely by looking at them "rationally." The relationship between esthetic appreciation, sensuality, and death is an integral part of Castorp's gradual spiritual growth, as was demonstrated most explicitly in his study of pathology and Behrens' sinister role in it. From the pietà, the discussion of the two men switches to the Inquisition, whose cruelties Settembrini cites to make Castorp think twice about Naphta's ideas on suffering. The Spaniard retorts, however, that even the worst tortures of the Inquisition were committed to save souls, something that cannot be said of the butcherings of the French Jacobites, who were convinced that when they killed a man they killed all of him--body and soul--for good. Naphta corners Settembrini by telling him that if he understood the essence of the Inquisition, he would know that rationalists of his (Settembrini's) kind instituted it. More than ever before, Mann demonstrates his thorough familiarity with medieval philosophy and that of its forerunner, St. Augustine. The heading "Of the City of God" is a direct translation of St. Augustine's masterpiece, and "Deliverance by Evil" reflects his concept of felix culpa (literally, "happy guilt"), whose essence is that deliverance can come only through sin and subsequent repentance. These ideas run through the entire novel, and although they are never wrapped in religious terminology, Mann justifies Castorp's disease as the prerequisite for his growing maturity. When Settembrini carries on about the merits of the rationalistic work ethic of the "West," Naphta comes back at him by explaining the teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century theologian. His symbology of humanity's progress toward perfection, which was a progression toward pure contemplation, was "Western" too; this is of course the main point Naphta wants to make. The trouble is that neither Settembrini nor Naphta really understands Clairvaux. For Settembrini, the dawn of humanity begins with the Renaissance at best (really with the French Revolution). His mind is therefore incapable of comprehending the full meaning of a symbol: Negating any non-rational component within him, a symbol remains inaccessible to him. All he gets out of Clairvaux is a cheap distortion of the symbol of the "bed of repose," standing for communication with God. Here we have an aspect of Settembrini which is too easily overlooked: He, too, has strong touches of sensuality about him, but he does not grant them room. Like disease, he simply suppresses the urge for sex, and when its pressures become too strong, he transfers his reaction to the level of jokes. In this connection, the reader may recall some of his crude approaches to female patients at the very beginning, which caused Castorp to call him a windbag. Denying humanity's sensual level of existence, he is bound to be a prude. Naphta, on the other hand, reacts in the other extreme. Although well-versed in theology, he, too, is a victim of his extreme--and therefore wrong--position. He cannot derive anything but voluptuousness from the spirit dwelling in the body. Naphta's voluptuousness again becomes apparent when he questions Settembrini as to whether monism does not bore him. Humanity, according to Naphta (whose name, incidentally, is also that of a flammable, volatile liquid) does not long for liberty, but for terror. Communism, of which early Christianity availed itself, may therefore get along very well with Catholicism, he argues, although the two are opposites in terms of their beliefs. His views, always preferring some form of error to compromise, are rooted in his conviction that death is an independent force. At Joachim's deathbed, he goes so far as to assert that virtue cannot be where there is reason, nor has religion anything to do with reason and morals because it has nothing to do with life. What keeps drawing the two adversaries toward each other may also be expressed in terms of what they lack. Settembrini's deficiency is that he lacks an entire sphere of human existence--the intuitive or spiritual one; Naphta's flaw is that he lives only in this sphere. By carrying their deficiencies to absurd extremes, each of these men forfeits his own standpoint which, up to a point, makes sense. Mann stresses

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the futility of their intellectualism in the face of ultimate reality--a reality which kills both Settembrini and Naphta. Castorp is fascinated by their brilliance, but he has matured enough to realize the countless contradictions within each "system," much less between the "systems" and the men advocating them. He gradually arrives at a more harmonious view of the world. When Joachim insists they did not come to Davos to get wiser, but healthier, Hans reminds him that these inconsistencies are only superficial ones and that they ought to be reconciled. "Dividing the world up into two hostile camps," Castorp chides his cousin, "is a grievous error, most reprehensible." As implied above, Naphta's views are not all wrong, as, indeed, Settembrini's are not all wrong. What the Spaniard propagates is wrong only in that it is carried to self-defeating extremes. Suffering and disease may indeed intensify experience beyond that which is accessible to the "healthy" and "normal." The diseased organism, as Castorp's case illustrates, may be more restless and therefore more eager to learn; more sensitive and therefore more capable of learning; closer to physical dissolution and therefore more "spiritualized." Almost by necessity, the superior human being is in some way deficient or, expressed differently, diseased. This is why perfectly balanced or "normal" people tend to be average people; it is also the reason they do not come to grief as easily as do sensitive ones. They take, as does Joachim, the "direct" path to life. Naphta's failure does not consist in preaching these basically true aspects of life but in raising them to the position of exclusiveness. There is little doubt, for instance, that the vast majority of people really need some kind of authority--more, certainly, than Settembrini thinks, who judges people by his own demand for freedom. Freedom, however, is no absolute good, nor is anything else if elevated to exclusiveness. Although Naphta is right in principle, he fails here because he winds up advocating outright terror. Similarly, the discrepancy between his justified reply to Settembrini--that it is naive to judge the Inquisition by a modern-day standpoint--and his reactionary defense of medieval practices in today's church is frightening. It is both absurd and dangerous to propagate these practices in a time that has long since given up the theological prerequisites for them. (To understand the Inquisition, we must understand its underlying belief that the soul's salvation presupposes the death of the guilty body.) Thus, Mann takes sides neither with Settembrini nor with Naphta but remains eager to advocate the ideal of aloofness from all extremes. As a result, his approach is essentially ironic. Irony keeps him from the danger of seeing somebody or something only from a certain angle and only at a given moment. Mann is a great believer in the elusive quality of reality, and he prefers to depict its myriad, scintillating moods rather than supply a system of neat little tags. Hereditary and environmental factors, which Mann emphasizes as most instrumental in forming man, enhance this irony. Their discussion is resumed here at precisely the points where Naphta is about to drive home an idea to Settembrini or Castorp. It immediately reduces Naphta to the level of a product of his heritage: his Jewish ancestors, the cruel customs of his native Poland, and the accident that led him to Catholicism. The Spanish and the "Eastern" characteristics of Mann's ethnic "system" are accountable for Naphta's irrationality, cruelty, and sympathy with disease and death. We have seen that each of the novel's characters is described in terms of another one, and often in terms of its opposite. One of these sets of characters is Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim Ziemssen. Now, more than ever before, we can measure Castorp's growing self-awareness (and confusion) by the increasingly violent reactions of Joachim here. Joachim responds to his cousin's growing interest in botany, for instance, by telling him he understands him less than ever before. If Castorp gets tired of the intellectual fireworks of his discussion partners, he nevertheless derives insights from them. This is not true of Joachim: All he remembers of these discussions is Naphta's Jewish nose. Typical of a mind that judges by "racial" characteristics (essentially different, it must be stressed, from Mann's ideas on ethnically conditioned modes of behavior), Joachim refuses to think because thinking only confuses

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matters. Again Mann's irony forbids him to side with Castorp against his cousin. The purely intellectual approach to life is quickly shown to be inadequate and, using the farcical suicide later on, even as selfdestructive. The situation between the cousins climaxes when Castorp explains to Joachim that the sudden, unusual change in weather is merely the outward sign of the unusual state of affairs on the magic mountain. Joachim's impatience with Hans erupts because the latter has matured enough to accept this change. (Once upon a time, the reader will recall, our hero was utterly confused by the unusual climate.) Joachim makes plans to leave, demanding that Behrens let him return to the army; because he is a military man to the core, he departs. Before Joachim leaves, however, he implores Hans to follow him while there is still time. He even calls Hans by his first name. (Settembrini, too, will call him by his first name at the outbreak of the war.) Hans does get Behrens' permission to leave but then refuses to go. Irony plays an important role in Joachim's life. He, who has literally lived for the day he would be permitted to return to the world of law and order, is forced to give it up again because of his failing health; and, to make things worse, he has to return to the sanatorium just when the maneuvers, a symbol of strict obedience to authority, are about to begin. Not only his serious attacks, but also his behavior--his overly reserved treatment of his girlfriend Marusja, for instance--indicate his death is near. Nothing can keep him, however, from formally applying for an extension of his leave. Never has he ceased to be a deeply committed man. Eerily and symbolically enough, the beard growing around his dying face gives him the added likeness of an honorable warrior. It is true that Joachim has been sick all along, but he contracted his deathblow while he was with his unit "down below." He is a victim of fanatical call to duty, and "honor was the death of him," as the cynical Behrens sums it up. Appropriately, he is buried in a soldier's grave pierced by roots-the roots which never permitted him to become exposed to any flights of fancy. He is responsible for his own death, but contentment and harmony on his deathbed are the reward for his moral life. Joachim is, as our hero will explain to Clavdia, the prototype of the kind who travels the "regular, direct, and honest" path to life. There are other confrontations besides that between the cousins which exemplify the degree to which Hans Castorp has become part and parcel of the sanatorium world. Uncle Tienappel's arrival and his sudden departure serve no other purpose than to show the futility of his attempt to retrieve our renegade hero. It also illustrates convincingly how James Tienappel, like every other sensitive newcomer, becomes inevitably embroiled in the lures of the magic mountain and would, if he stayed, be privileged (and condemned) to share his nephew's fate. In fact, this new ambassador of the flatlands goes through the same dizzying experiences Hans once went through. And the heavy tongue, the feverish head, and the protruding veins all seem, in Behrens' opinion, to indicate that he is sick enough to stay "up here." Also, the uncle's sexual excitement mounts, and, as was the case with Hans long ago, he shows it not only by approaching a sensually attractive lady patient, but by asking Behrens to describe the process of physical decomposition to him. The thematic leitmotif of the affinity between sensuality and an exaggerated concern for the body's origin and makeup is taken up again. As one more parallel sensation which we remember from Hans' earlier days, Uncle Tienappel's sense of time becomes vague and his self-assurance begins to dwindle. Hans Castorp fully understands his uncle's reactions as those of initial adjustment-even though he is beyond them now. New insights have slowly led him away from the deep sensuality of his days with Clavdia (the fact that she is away has, of course, helped him), and his concept of time has lost its haunting vagueness because he has become used to it. "We don't feel the cold" is the stereotype with which he counters his uncle's complaints, emphasizing the different standards of the mountain world and his loyalty to them. Like "Walpurgis Night," the section entitled "Snow" warrants separate treatment. As far as Hans Castorp's

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educational process is concerned, the two sections are opposites. "Snow" brings Castorp's temporary attainment of his ideal whereas "Walpurgis Night" brought a temporary abandonment of an ideal. Both scenes are perfect battlefields for the forces of reason and sensuality in Castorp's life. And, as in "Walpurgis Night," Settembrini's warnings (the very words he shouted after Hans at the carnival) and Clavdia Chauchat's enticements (here in the form of the recurring mention of the pencil motif) play a leading role in this battle. That these warnings and enticements are the product of Castorp's overwrought imagination merely heightens their vividness and increases their effect. The present scene, with all its hallucinations and visions, superimposed upon each other, drawn together by leitmotifs, and whirling around in the emerging circular concept of time, reflects as a microcosm the scintillating macrocosm of the whole magic mountain world. Our hero's wanderings among the marvels of this world are condensed here in the hike away from the Berghof and his almost fatal entanglement with nature. Fascinated by the phantasmagorical landscape of an unusually deep winter, Castorp decides to learn how to ski so that he can venture into higher altitudes. This climb exposes our hero to the danger of succumbing to the awesome power of undiluted nature. On several previous occasions, the climate has been called unusual, but here the aspects of extremity and incalculability prevail. Described as "blinding chaos" and "white dark," snow is the paramount symbol (as sand will be in Chapter 7) of confusion, the harbinger of Castorp's sympathy with death. This sub-theme of snow symbolizing death finds its most explicit expression in Castorp's musings about snowflakes as too symmetrical and therefore opposed to the principle of life. He has outgrown his teacher Settembrini's notion of life as something regular, consistent, and purely rational. On the contrary, his studies of nature have shown him that these qualities are represented purest in inorganic nature. At the same time, he loves snow and enjoys it with an eminently defiant attitude. Hans is aware of his growing distance from the sanatorium, but he continues to climb and dismisses his own misgivings as "cowardice." His voracious appetite for primitive nature triggers the association with Clavdia Chauchat in him, thus demonstrating that his craving for the experience of nature is but another form of sensuality. He has never ceased to toy "with forces so great that to approach them nearly is destruction." Nowhere else is the close proximity of supreme insight and death so frighteningly revealed as during this almost fatal, yet indispensable, adventure. The blinding fury of the snowstorm, the vivid presence of Clavdia's greenish eyes touched off by the reflection of blank ice, the effects of a glass of wine--all these combine to drive him on. Having lost his bearings, he moves around in circles and loses his sense of time. This is Schopenhauer's philosophy about the inviting, soothing quality of death. Yet it is Schopenhauer about to be overcome by Goethe's life-asserting humanism in the ensuing vision. The vision Hans Castorp has while standing up against a cabin is the most comprehensive and profound of his many intrusions into the mysteries of life and death. More lucidly than any other one, it affords him a glimpse into the dual nature of human existence and quickly leads him on toward his triumph--the transcendence of dualism. That it springs directly from his exhaustion is consistent with the idea, dominant throughout the novel, that disease and suffering are, in the last analysis, positive forces serving spiritual growth--provided that they are not granted independence apart from life. Not white, gray, and black, but green, blue, and gold are the colors of the world of perfect harmony Hans sees. Glimpses of a luxuriant park where he watches the serene "children of the sun," mythical figures symbolizing the life-asserting forces, play among antique buildings and mingle in Castorp's mind with faint memories of happy holidays at the Mediterranean. A boy standing apart from his playmates and alternately smiling at Hans and the vision of harmony he shares with him, suddenly looks past him, his expression reflecting horror. Following the boy's eyes, Hans Castorp now sees a landscape of crumbling temples and a baby being dismembered by two witches, symbols of the dark forces slumbering in humanity. Desperately trying to escape the bloodthirsty vividness of his dream, Hans Castorp wakes up. Checking his watch, he realizes that all these visions of bliss and horror have been crammed into only a

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few minutes. Time lasts as long as we experience it. Hans Castorp knows he has glimpsed into the future state of social bliss, but also into what Settembrini terms "cultural backsliding," which always lurks behind it. The scene is highly symbolic, the countless allusions to Mediterranean civilization (the Italian tenor, the mention of Naples, Sicily, and Greece) suggesting Mann's belief in the rational and peaceful quality of "Western" life and the "moss-covered" and "weathered" temples, the statue's "empty eye-sockets," and the gray witches suggesting the decayed world of political reaction. The sunny and shady sides of the temples represent the dual aspects of man, his reason and his irrationality. What is new about this dream is the purely negative aspect of death and the disgust with which Castorp treats it. There is not a trace left of the temptation to surrender to it that he displayed only a few minutes ago. Pondering his vision, Castorp realizes that man dreams not only individually, but also communally; that he who knows the body, that is, life, also knows death; that all "interest in disease and death is only an expression of interest in life"--in short, that man is the master of opposites just as he is their inventor. He now sees the utter sterility of the intellectual efforts of Settembrini and Naphta, neither of whom will be able to solve anything without the spark of love. It cannot be man's task to fight life in the name of unbridled reason (Settembrini) or to throw humanity back into barbarism by advocating the abandonment of all reason (Naphta). Since abstract systems can only be born of man, he must be superior to them. Thus Castorp now vows to side with man, who alone is worth fighting for, and to let death have no "sovereignty over his thoughts." Castorp, it seems, has accomplished his goal. Yet his supreme insight turns out to be little more than a fleeting moment's caper. We hear that "even that same evening it was no longer so clear as it had been at first." Is our hero's moment of triumph perhaps only the result of wishful thinking, part of his "dream of thoughts" that lingers after the actual vision is over? A number of questions arise here: Can Hans Castorp (Everyman) realistically be expected to develop his insights steadily and consistently without backsliding? Does he fail to live up to the ultimate goal, or his ultimate vision, because the task is superhuman? Even if we exonerate Castorp from the charge of deliberate irresponsibility, the nagging feeling remains that he has failed and that his failure is somehow connected with his impotence in the face of decisions. Confronted with endless alternatives, he never really makes a choice; when he sometimes comes close to making one, he does not stick to it nor act it out. He conspicuously lacks the capability of putting his insights to use; his unwillingness to commit himself gradually turns into a tragic inability to do so. Throughout his educational journey, Castorp is encouraged by his educators to devote his efforts to some cause. Yet Hans embraces the very opposite: aloofness and noninvolvement. This was, of course, Thomas Mann's intention. Castorp learns so well that he overshoots the limit. As a result, Hans is suspended between Yes and No. This was the author's ironical intention. It shows that every idea, including that of aloofness and noninvolvement, will inevitably work against humanity if carried to extremes. Hans Castorp's education does not (cannot) proceed in a linear fashion. Being the medium in which all experience, including that of his journey of education, takes place, time can be no linear continuum. At the outset, it will be remembered, this aspect of time was the one Castorp believed in. Studying the orbits of stars and musing how millenniums ago the ancients engaged in the same pursuits, he now concludes that time must consist of circular motion. This view of time as the perennial recurrence of events, already exemplified by Castorp's wandering around in circles, prevails in this chapter. It leads to the realization that a succession of events (linear movement) is impossible in a circular medium.

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CHAPTER 7 The present chapter is one long proof of the fact that Hans Castorp cannot or, at any rate, does not, retain the lucid synthesis of the snow dream. He continues to coast through the magic mountain world in a state of confusion. And, with Mynheer Peeperkorn, the Dutch plantation owner from Java (an "Asiatic" type), the author provides a third character for our hero to take as a guidepost. Although Mynheer Peeperkorn (Mynheer is merely the Dutch equivalent of Milord, and Peeperkorn suggests his flamboyant nature) is not pedagogically inclined, he is nevertheless "a prize for inquiring youth on its travels." Like Settembrini and Naphta, the Dutchman cannot live up to, as a human being, what he demands of himself as a type. He, too, fails because of his extreme position. Described as a "blurred personality" with irregular features and a totally unpredictable character, he is temperamental, illogical, and utterly irrational. Like the crumbling world around him, he cannot exercise enough self-control to express one thing at a time. He wants to say everything at the same time with the result that he says nothing. His unfinished and incoherent sentences (and the interrupted treatment of him in three separate scenes) indicate the hopeless task of doing justice to the range and intensity of his personality. Having nothing at all to do with mind or manners, the power he radiates lies in the mystical, elemental realm of human existence. His personality is "being, not meaning," as Mann puts it. He modeled Mynheer Peeperkorn after the forceful, ebullient, and renowned German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946). By his mere presence, Mynheer Peeperkorn dwarfs Settembrini and Naphta and exposes to ridicule their opposing intellectual stances. He dominates life at the sanatorium by appealing to people immediately. He tends to see himself as a priest of undiluted feeling and acts accordingly. Parodying Jesus at the Last Supper, he presides over the gambling table, and when the twelve patients fall asleep, he quotes the Lord's words at the sight of his disciples forsaking him on the Mount of Olives. The Dutchman moves his arms, but he moves them to a "heathen prayer." Comparing life to a "sprawling woman," he preaches the "sacraments of pleasure." His language is highly sensual and highly religious because he considers himself not merely a priest of Jesus but also one of Dionysus. He is the incarnation of the divine reveler celebrating the mystical union of the flesh and the spirit. Mynheer Peeperkorn's charismatic features are developed to the fullest in the scene where he leads a group of patients on a hike to a waterfall. Palms turned toward them and winecup in hand, he captivates his followers completely. His personality never fails to rally people behind him, even those ordinarily interested in Settembrini's and Naphta's debates. This demonstrates that Naphta has a point when he claims that phenomena which cannot be puzzled out by reason tend to exert far greater influence on people than those which lend themselves to rational scrutiny. No doubt Peeperkorn's overwhelming appeal is rooted in this simple psychological realization--as was the charismatic power emanating from Hitler, for instance, who, it has been asserted, was anticipated in the figure of the Dutchman. In spite of his powers, Peeperkorn cannot make himself understood because the wild waters drown out his words. He is helplessly exposed to an even more elemental force than he is himself, namely nature. His great influence over others is set against his weakness where coping with life is concerned. This is a major problem for him; he admits that "the defeat of the feelings, their overthrow when confronted with life--that is impotence." As a result, Peeperkorn commits suicide, which, like everything else about him, is done "to the n-th power." The dual aspect of his character--that of wielding power over certain people and completely yielding to others--rather resembles that of Clavdia, now his steady companion. Clavdia ridicules and even humiliates Hans when he addresses her in the familiar (taking it for granted that she, too, would remember their carnival-night affair). He tells her that he has waited for her return and asks if she still has his X-ray portrait; ever since her departure, X-rays have served as a leitmotif tying

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together Hans and Clavdia. Though she goes so far as to forbid him to inquire about her new company, she nevertheless permits herself to be ruled by Peeperkorn and admits his possessiveness has something frightening about it. In Mann's scheme of ethnic traits, both Clavdia and Peeperkorn combine the "Eastern" qualities of tyranny and slavishness, the active and passive facets of irrationality. As is to be expected from Castorp, his feelings toward Peeperkorn are characterized by ambivalence. Nowhere is this better illustrated than during the visit he pays the Dutchman at his sickbed. He is jealous of him, but his appreciation of Peeperkorn's vitality is genuine and, in the course of time, develops into sympathy. Eager not "to undermine the situation as it is," Castorp truthfully answers Peeperkorn's questions about his relationship with Clavdia; he even doubts--aloud--his qualities as a man. Why does he do all this? It may be partly true that Hans is trying to appease the irascible Dutchman, but when he subconsciously begins to imitate his gestures and cutoff sentences, it becomes clear that he is about to surrender to his spell. Finally, Hans tells his old mentor Settembrini, who is of course dead set against Peeperkorn, that "of all the various forms of stupidity, that of cleverness is one of the worst"--a clear sign that his sympathy for Peeperkorn goes beyond any attempt at appeasing him. All these manifestations of Castorp's ambivalence--yet submissiveness--toward Peeperkorn are an indication of his deterioration. His understanding of Peeperkorn and Clavdia's situation is the result not of his superior magnanimity but of his self-doubts. He seems to be living proof of the correctness of Naphta's opinion: Total realism is true nihilism in the sense that the intellectual approval of a position and its opposite logically results in the suspension of judgment and, eventually, in total withdrawal from involvement of any kind. Castorp is so much part of the sanatorium world by now that he does not even exchange letters with the "world below." Appropriately, he says of himself, "I am lost to the world" (the title of a song by Gustav Mahler, a famous composer in the Wagnerian tradition). The climax of Castorp's degeneration, which, as Behrens detects, does not have physical causes any more (his lung condition is improving), is expressed in his confession to Clavdia that he has to take the path to life leading through death, "the spiritual way." Those not sensitive enough to experience "spiritualization" through their condition--that is, the vast majority of patients--think up all sorts of pastimes and fads, ranging from gorging themselves with chocolates and drawing the outlines of pigs (the symbol of filthiness and stupidity, already employed in the carnival scene) to trying to figure out the last decimals of the complex fraction pi. Peeperkorn's drinking bouts and the various preposterous crazes show the degree of boredom prevailing at the Berghof; Dr. Krokowski's spiritualist sessions symbolize its decadence. The underlying mood now is one of dreams, visions, trances, and hallucinations. Using Elly Brand, a young girl with so-called spiritualist talents, as a medium, the Polish doctor establishes communication with the world of spirits. Through Holger, the mouthpiece of that world, Castorp learns that he has been here seven years. As the high point of one of these seance sessions, he requests the return of Joachim from the dead--a request which may be regarded as a manifestation of Han's desire to ask help from someone whose simplicity and sense of duty he used to value highly. Hans' wish is granted, and in an atmosphere of eerie magic and sensuality, Joachim's shape appears. Frightened by what he has done (he has disturbed his cousin's peace), Hans switches on the light and causes Joachim's likeness to vanish. One should remember that Settembrini also turned on the light some time ago when Castorp was endangered by the world of sensuality in the person of Clavdia. As far as Castorp's role in the seances is concerned, it is a sad commentary on his gullibility and confusion. This is not to say that the line of argument he follows against Settembrini, who detests not only seances but everything pertaining to the spiritual as "cultural backsliding," or at least fraud, is essentially incorrect. He argues that the boundary line between reality and illusion is so blurred that one

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cannot simply dismiss these experiments. What is important for the reader to remember is that here, as in so many previous instances, it is the exaggeration of an idea--and its claim to exclusiveness, rather than the idea itself--that makes it wrong. By now, Castorp's confusion has reached a point where he experiences matter and spirit, consciousness and unconsciousness, as one and the same. All through the novel, the artificial maintenance of opposites and the resulting belief in a strong dualistic principle have been shown to be detrimental to life. Settembrini has fought against it and extolled a monistic view. Yet there is a limit to this position also, for, as Castorp's argument about seances shows, it is dangerous to carry monism so far that the faculty of differentiating between reality and illusion is dulled. That it is difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to tell one from the other by using the right criteria does not mean that such a difference between the two realms is nonexistent or irrelevant. Castorp's reasoning, for instance, that the term "love" is used to describe both the kiss Clavdia gives him and Dr. Krokowski's highly questionable practices marks his confusion. By the same token, Peeperkorn's explanation that certain tropical saps may be used both as poison and antitoxin touches on this same issue. Like Castorp, Peeperkorn is not wrong because he recognizes the dual aspect of something, but because he fails to clearly associate the act of poisoning with death and that of administering antitoxin with life. The way the narrator and Hans Castorp, whose viewpoints differ only slightly, react to Dr. Krokowski's lectures on love and psychoanalytical experiments in Chapter 5 already leaves little doubt that Mann never felt at ease with psychoanalysis. Although he was familiar with its essentials, he never ceased to feel endangered as an artist by its prodding nature. Castorp's timid reactions to being X-rayed (in Chapter 5) echo this idea; X-rays do with the body what psychoanalysis does with the mind. All the more understandable are Mann's negative reactions, expressed by the narrator and the hero, to Dr. Krokowski's various forms of meddling with the psyche, which, though supposedly conducted in the interest of "disinterested research," are poorly concealed actions of sensuality and black magic. Before each séance, the Polish doctor examines Elly Brand's physical condition, "invariably without any result." When she is forced, in a state of trance, to go through the motions of giving birth to Joachim, Castorp watches the scene with feelings of curiosity and disgust that remind him of a visit to a brothel many years ago. As the names of the individual sections suggest ("Vingt-et-un," "The Great God Dumps," "Hysterica Passio"), the inanity prevailing at the sanatorium grows, making the patients increasingly intolerant of one another. Nothing has really happened in the "hermetic" world so far, but now, in the anticipation of something terrible, movement comes into play. Little things signal the impending disaster, such as Frau Mylendonk's "stye in a perfect state of maturity" and our hero's arrival at the seventh and last dinner table, significantly occupied by Russians, Armenians, and Finns--in short, "Easterners." The disappearance of goodwill and sensible discussions, as well as the frightening rise of magic practices and sheer violence, marks the beginning of the end. For the slightest reason, patients jump at each other's throat, primarily Nazis at Jews and Poles at each other. The classical adversaries of the novel, Settembrini and Naphta, become so irritated over trifles that their verbal battles deteriorate into outright fights. Particularly, the Spaniard sarcastically ridicules every ideal having anything to do with bettering the human lot; he attacks scientific investigation, justice, and love. He revels in demonstrating to everybody the many ambiguities in which the Absolute manifests itself, and he loves to watch others suffer from the resulting confusion. The duel which takes place at Naphta's insistence illustrates how the two adversaries and Hans, who tries to intervene, act according to their respective intellectual positions. By engaging in something as atavistic as a duel, Settembrini and Naphta show, more clearly than ever, that values per se are an intellectual stance--a farce--in their presence. The Italian humanist shoots to miss whereas the Spaniard kills himself. Hans, aware of his mediating role as an individual who has caught glimpses of insight after his snow dream and as a German, tries to intervene--in vain. Not even at this point in the story does Mann lose his objective distance as regards the intellectual tit-for-

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tat between the two educators. He pokes fun at Settembrini's dangerous and preposterous simplifications, which are the consequence of his failure to live up, as a human being, to his intellectual notions of "philosophical monism." How grave must his political blindness be, for instance, if he, the fanatical antiAustrian, begins to wonder at the outbreak of war whether it really makes any sense to back the Kremlin against the monarchy? Yet there can be no doubt that Mann, if forced to choose between Settembrini and Naphta, would side with the former. By having Naphta commit suicide, he demonstrates the selfdestructive nature of sympathy with irrationality and disease, which inevitably results in terror if elevated to the level of an allegedly viable principle. The point has been made repeatedly that The Magic Mountain is a highly musical novel because of its strong antithetical elements. Critics point to the great influence exerted on Mann by what is known as contrapuntal elements in music. Besides Behrens' request for the piano version of the "Pilgrims' Chorus" from Wagner's Tannhäuser--a significant allusion, by the way, to Castorp as a questing hero in the religious sense--and the previously mentioned song by Mahler, there are countless implicit remarks about music throughout Chapter 7. Most important, however, is Castorp's excitement about the record player which the management has bought for the patients. Putting himself in charge of it, he whiles away many a day dreaming up visions to the various melodies he plays. He becomes particularly fond of five songs, each of which reflects some aspect of his love for Clavdia and the lure of death. Hans' love and his temptation to yield to disease and death have mutually intensified each other since the day he met Clavdia. Remembering how Settembrini calls certain phenomena of modern life "cultural backsliding," he realizes self-conquest would be the only way of getting rid of his feelings for her and his love for the tunes haunting him. But, then, what enchantment is there in these songs! Aren't they worth dying for? His growing fondness for this highly romantic music is the clearest manifestation yet of the intricate relationship between music and death. It has overshadowed his entire existence at the Berghof and increases now that his end is near. Verdi's Aïda intrigues him with its romantic concept for death. The message of Carmen is that the gratification of love leads to death. (Carmen, the gypsy who cannot understand why her soldier-lover must leave her, drops him for a matador. The jilted lover stabs her to death.) Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun lulls him into visions where he, in the likeness of Pan, enjoys life in the sun-drenched groves of love. Valentine's song from Gounod's opera Faust brings back memories of Joachim's likeness in his mind as it appeared during the seance. Most clearly of all, Schubert's "The Linden Tree" arouses Castorp's nostalgia for the tranquility of death. His flirtation with death is the main theme of all these songs. It bears out Mann's old belief that music is essentially a non-rational, if not anti-rational, medium which tends to dull man's senses to the point of causing him to flee responsibility in specific and life in general. Castorp's end, and with it the end of the novel, comes abruptly. It is important to bear in mind that this end does not result from an inner logic of his development. His continued confusion long after his promising insights after the snow dream shows that he has not changed at all and that he will not change "up here." Only his release from the world of the magic mountain can possibly make him change. That his return to the flatland takes place in his seventh year only underlines Mann's arbitariness in timing it, for he uses seven in a magical-mystical rather than a strict arithmetic sense. The total immersion in timelessness and spacelessness Castorp experiences now is most symbolically described in his vision of the seaside landscape of "dimensionless" sand. Deceptive and fascinating, sand and sea have replaced snow as the symbols of confusion and sterility. What the two scenes "Snow" and "By the Ocean of Time" have in common is the use of these symbols and Castorp's realization that there can be no time where there is no motion, that the experience of time is a correlative of measurable space. Hints have been dropped all along that, as the narrator puts it, "the pace and the story's contentual time has so increased that there is no more holding it." And, indeed, time does move faster and faster, racing

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toward the edge of the magic mountain, beyond which Castorp's existence will be reabsorbed by the sphere of carefully measured time. This condensation of events in the last third of our hero's travels expresses Mann's attempt to get across the point to the reader that in Castorp's mind, everything is registered as happening simultaneously. Just how quickly time passes, nobody knows, not even the narrator. Mann, always eager for his readers to identify with Castorp and the narrator, uses vagueness to draw them closer to one another. Intrigued by the complexity of time, Hans Castorp toys with the temptation of tasting its secrets and, doing so, gradually loses the interest and, finally, the ability to gain clarity about the spell he is under. Relieved from all responsibilities, he now feels as Herr Albin did long ago; Albin, knowing that he was bound to die, willingly resigned himself to the life of an aimlessly drifting candidate for death. While it is true that various circumstances (the dream character of the magic mountain, the Berghof environment, his contemplative mentality, his infatuation with Clavdia) have aided Hans' lack of will to extricate himself from his situation, there is some question as to whether we should excuse his laxness. The answer to this question will help determine whether we should consider Castorp's education a success or a failure and whether he accomplishes his ideal as envisaged by the author. Mann himself does not condone Hans' laxness; instead, he attacks his philosophizing as "baleful traffic with eternity" and contrasts it with Joachim's and Settembrini's sense of duty and self-discipline. Yet Mann is also aware of Castorp's bourgeois and moral side. This side makes him "catch time by the tail." This is the meaning of the scene in which Castorp watches a second hand slip over a watch dial at an even pace without stopping after each completed round. Realizing that time itself has no feeling for limits and divisions, he knows that the digits have been put there to make sense out of the hand's steady motion. Transplanted to a moral level, the meaning is: Where there are no limits or where man, a victim of permissiveness, has deliberately abandoned them, he must create new ones. As human beings, we cannot meaningfully survive in a vacuum. If Castorp's end does not come about through an inner logic of his development, it is equally important to remember that it does not result from an act of will on his part but through events acting upon his fate from outside the magic mountain. The war hurls him back into the flatland where, paradoxically, he will have to fight against his faithful mentor Settembrini on the real (as opposed to verbal) battlefield. "Go and fight bravely! More than that can no man" are the Italian's last words to him, ringing with all the fervor of active engagement but also with the tragic realization that he who becomes engaged wholeheartedly may easily meet death. This, of course, is the message of Castorp's whole bildungsreise: Life and death are but two aspects of one and the same phenomenon, neither of which can justly claim to exist independently of the other. Love alone, as he realizes in his snow dream, is the transcending element through which humanity may gain peace. This is why he sings Schubert's "The Linden Tree," the symbol of longing for love and peace, just as the narrator loses track of him marching toward the flaming front. That Castorp's deliverance from his spell comes about through his condemnation to the horrors of war is therefore no contradiction. The risk of death is the only chance he has of becoming adjusted to some measure of purposefulness in "real life" again, of attaining purification and eventual moral regeneration for himself and, on another level, for postwar European society. He has certainly traveled the perilous, roundabout path to life, the one to which he himself, "life's delicate child," refers as the one "that leads through death." The point is that he, the sum total of all his educators and yet also much more than that, could not have traveled any other road.

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CHARACTER ANALYSES HANS CASTORP Perhaps the greatest bit of irony in the novel is Mann's characterization of Castorp as "simple." All the characters around Castorp are "simpler" in the sense that they are wholly committed to some cause or idea without experiencing the complexities of reality. True reality, Mann sets out to show us, manifests itself in opposites and contradictions. Throughout the novel, Castorp lets conflicting views act upon himself without committing himself to any one of them totally, not even to Settembrini's or even his own at the end of the snow dream. He remains hesitant, ambivalent in his feelings, and hampered by passivity. The question arises whether he can, or even wants to, make decisions and take clear stands. Perhaps he prefers to deliberately change from one position to its opposite and on to their synthesis; the more he does it, the more he realizes that this is what comprehending reality entails. The longer he keeps up his approach of non-commitment, the less capable he becomes of making a decision. Thus Castorp is perhaps a questing hero, who, according to the critic Herman Weigand, "would never have overstepped so far the limits originally fixed for his stay if . . . any reasonably satisfying explanation of the meaning and purpose of man's life" had offered itself to him. As it was, he had to try to find meaning outside the "normal" world. He finds it in the ideal of the balance between extremes and, eventually, in the affirmation of goodness. That he cannot realize what he sees as a dream has perhaps justly been held against him. Yet the reader should also see that it was Mann's aim to show that ideals have a way of defying satisfactory realizations. According to Mann himself, the novel is the sum total of his own experiences as told from his own--as Castorp--vantage point. Castorp has great difficulties making decisions and taking clear stands because he is--as Mann was--the battlefield between the "normal" world and its conventional standards and the "world above." Whoever gets caught between the two is in trouble. This is what happens to Castorp, the "lost bourgeois," an epithet Mann used to describe himself. But Castorp is not only "life's delicate child." He is also the embodiment of civilization's precarious situation before World War I. He has lost his goal and is caught in self-destructive indifference toward, if not sympathy with, disaster. The outward symptom of this situation is his disease. At the same time, the development of Castorp's disease is the prerequisite for his growing selfawareness. Only above-average people like him can derive a more spiritualized existence from their disease, for it brings out latent, superior qualities. Clavdia is ill, too, but in her case disease merely enhances her purely physical traits. Over all these aspects we should never forget Thomas Mann, the master of irony. Irony permits him to bridge the gaps between vantage points by professing doubts about all sides. He admonishes us to keep a skeptical distance toward the absolute.

JOACHIM ZIEMSSEN Unlike his cousin, Joachim never loses touch with the "world below." His uncompromising views and disciplined way of life earn him the ridicule of Clavdia Chauchat and, to a lesser extent, also that of his own cousin. To Clavdia, Joachim represents the incarnation of the German military mind, eager to place order over liberty and anxious to live and die for a cause. Hans refers to him as "not exposed to intellectual dangers," but not without envying him for his uncomplicated nature. Joachim dies when he returns to follow the call of duty; he fully commits himself. And, since he dies willingly and contentedly, the question emerges as to whether Mann's "safe distance" and continued "selfeducation" have unlimited validity. Maybe his ultimate message goes beyond this demand and concedes that the lifelong search for the last answers and the most objective position (as Castorp practices it) should

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be restricted to the very strong. It is safer and, indeed, necessary for Joachim (representing the vast majority of people) to commit himself to a cause, to firmly believe in it, even at the risk of being "bourgeois." Mann does not condemn Joachim for his views and actions, though he might very well have condemned Hans had he acted like him. Whatever Joachim may be, he is not a dilettante. Considering that dilettantism is the basis of the decadence of the Berghof reality, Joachim's integrity remains unchallenged. The discrepancy between Joachim's goals and his fate is the object of Mann's irony. He, who has always known what he wants, cannot even join the maneuvers. His cousin, who has spent his life in the service of the avoidance of friction and the compromise of opposites, is plunged into the war.

CLAVDIA CHAUCHAT She represents the passivity, irrationality, slackness, and submissiveness of the "Eastern" mentality. Her casualness and sloppiness are outward signs of her inner softness. She dislikes Settembrini and Naphta because they are not "human" (emotional) enough for her, makes fun of Joachim because he is steadfast and uses foresight in his planning, and loves Mynheer Peeperkorn because "his feeling forced me to follow and serve him." As the temptress of Hans Castorp, she is Settembrini's adversary. Her lure is of a purely physical nature, and her disease enhances it. Her irrationality has the twin features of submissiveness (toward Peeperkorn) and seductive power (toward Castorp and Wehsal, a minor rival of Castorp). There is no doubt that, in Mann's scheme of "Western" and "Eastern" values, she stands for the danger of disintegration threatening Germany (Castorp) from Russia. This should not be taken as Mann's attempt to reject or even discredit the Soviet revolution which was in the making when he wrote the novel. Clavdia Chauchat's traits are negative in that they distort her personality and not because they are different from those of, say, Settembrini. Her whole laissez-faire attitude toward life is bad only because she overdoes it, just as Settembrini's intellectualism is bad only because it is exaggerated.

DR. KROKOWSKI He is Behrens' assistant. Whereas Behrens views disease as something organic, Krokowski regards it as something inorganic. This causes him to be obsessed with the idea that all disease is the result of repressed love. He is incapable of thinking about love in any other way than as in his lecture series, which goes on throughout the entire length of Castorp's stay and deteriorates into occultism. He defines the sanatorium as Venusberg (Mountain of Venus in German, taken from Wagner's opera Tannhäuser, where it is the sinful world of physical love). Called Minos, he is not interested in the cure of his patients. Preoccupied with the analysis of their souls, his lectures, besides satisfying his sensual interests, have the function of killing time in the boredom of the Berghof. Appropriately clad in black and residing in semi-darkness, he represents the deliberate distortion of psychoanalysis in the interest of perversion and death.

LUDOVICO SETTEMBRINI One of Castorp's two main mentors throughout the novel, he stands for the ideals of Western civilization, the Renaissance, and Enlightenment--in short, reason, individual liberty, humanism, and progress. Though Mann's sympathies lie with him rather than with his opponent Naphta, he also shows that Settembrini fails. He fails because he embraces his ideals too fervently and loses sight of reality in the process. Typical of many libertarians, he condemns every conceivable manifestation of the metaphysical,

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not realizing that his own boundless idealism for the cause of humanity has metaphysical origins. He condemns the church for its symbology, hierarchial structure, and rule of obedience, ignoring the fact that it is precisely these features which distinguish the Masonic order of which he is a member. He also refuses to accept humanity's sensual component, which also has a function in the realization of his humanistic dreams. He insists on seeing humanity as pure rationality. The futility of purely intellectual argument becomes most apparent when Mynheer Peeperkorn is introduced. He dwarfs the Italian by his mere presence.

LEO NAPHTA Mann sketches his characters by pitting them against each other rather than by describing them directly. Naphta is characterized in terms of his intellectual adversary Settembrini. Naphta's intellectual prowess matches that of the Italian, but his cast of mind is essentially irrational. Whereas in Settembrini's view death is but the absence of life, Naphta insists that death controls a realm of its own; independent of life, death is engaged in perennial battle against it. His dualism is therefore the basis of his glorification of disease, suffering, and death. His love of extremes and contempt for all forms of compromise make him defend the Inquisition and the authoritarian aspects of Catholicism and communism. As the antithetical element to Settembrini's rationality, Naphta replaces Clavdia Chauchat after Walpurgis Night. He takes over as the chief contestant for Castorp's soul on the side of irrationality. He is of Jewish-Polish background and the product of Spanish Jesuit schooling. This is as significant as Settembrini's Italian descent. "Spain. That country too lay remote from the humanist mean," Castorp muses upon hearing of Clavdia's plan to travel to Spain, "though on the side of austerity rather than softness. There death was present in the guise of form, not dissolution--black, refined, sanguinary, Inquisition, stiff ruff, Loyola; he wondered what Frau Chauchat would say to Spain. Perhaps a combination of the two extremes would bring her closer to the humane mean." But then comes the seamy side of that coin: "Yet something pretty awful might come to pass if the East went to Spain." Naphta, then, is characterized as even more dangerous than Clavdia Chauchat because he is the result of "Eastern" irrationality and the sterile Spanish overemphasis on rigid form.

MYNHEER PEEPERKORN The Dutchman's traits fit Mann's concept of the "Eastern" man. He is non-intellectual, mysterious, sensual, incoherent, and tyrannical. His forceful personality succeeds in regrouping the patients at the Berghof into those who are aware of the spell he casts on them and try to resist and those who surrender to him. By his mere presence, he dwarfs Settembrini and Naphta. We discern that mere intellectual argument is futile when we see Peeperkorn together with Settembrini and Naphta. But the vaunted superiority of feeling over reason comes to naught through Mynheer's suicide. What does Mann mean? Perhaps he simply wants to demonstrate that Mynheer Peeperkorn, too, commits a fatal error: He falters because of his total commitment to emotion, for, as he admits himself, he cannot bear sacrificing intensity of emotion to the demands of everyday life.

HOFRAT BEHRENS The key to an understanding of the head doctor is the name Rhadamanthus, which is the clear-sighted Settembrini's term for him. Rhadamanthus and Minos (Dr. Krokowski is called Minos), in Greek mythology, are the two sons of Zeus and Europa who preside over the realm of the dead. Behrens presides over the sanatorium, a world from which there is no escape. The little tours the patients go on lead back to the Berghof as surely as the last tour they travel leads to the cemetery. Like his

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patients, Behrens is but a representative. He has no power over the fate of his patients. All that he can do is determine the length of their respite from death. His jovial approach is deceptive. It merely serves to give his patients the impression as though he were really interested in their recovery. But he is not. He reduces the difference between life and death to a chemical term, pursues his profession for sensual and financial reasons. Appropriately, Behrens' office radiates the sinister atmosphere of a grave; it is located in the basement and is described as a labyrinth.

CRITICAL ESSAYS THE BILDUNGSROMAN As opposed to the social novel, a bildungsroman (a novel of education or a novel of educational formation) focuses on its hero's education toward a meaningful idea of himself and his role in the world. Other characters are clearly subordinated to this process, often to the extent of being assigned the function of a mere stepping-stone for the hero to proceed. The various temptations and obstacles he has to surmount on his bildungsreise (educational journey) bring out his character and faculties, gradually leading him toward greater selfawareness. That much of his traveling may amount to little more than treading on the spot or moving in circles is no argument against the fact that he strives to progress. It is important to remember that while the hero of the bildungsroman proceeds, he may not necessarily progress in absolute terms. This definition is broad enough to include the medieval quest legend, which, as some critics have claimed, is the beginning of the bildungsroman. And, indeed, Parsifal, for instance, may be regarded as the first hero of the genre, spending his life in pursuit of wisdom and eventually finding it in the form of the Holy Grail. Likewise, it is not difficult to see the Berghof as some sort of black Venusberg (mountain of Venus) which threatens our modern Tannhäuser, Hans Castorp. The question of whether The Magic Mountain is in the tradition of the quest legend was taken up in some detail at the end of Mann's 1939 Princeton address. A brief run-down on some of the most outstanding novels of the genre will have to suffice here. There are several novels which contain elements of the bildungsroman before the end of the eighteenth century, but Agathon (1766-67), was written by the foremost novelist of German Enlightenment, Wieland, and is considered to be the first real bildungsroman. Its Greek title suggests Wieland's interest in setting up the classical concept of man as the measure of things as an ideal; appropriately enough, the novel's young hero is saved from his fatal idealist dreams by the worldly wise teachings of a sophist and a courtesan, who help him balance out the sensual and spiritual elements of his self so that he can live "in accordance with the nature of things." Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich (1855) and Stifter's Nachsommer (1857) rank as the best representatives of the genre in the nineteenth century except for Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Though written considerably later, Hesse's novels are also in the vein of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman: Peter Camenzind (1904), Siddharta (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), and, most notably, Glasperlenspiel (Magister Ludi, 1943). Especially the hero of Magister Ludi follows the classical pattern of the bildungsroman, which is that of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: He renounces the perfect world of sages and voluntarily returns to this world of shortcomings to shoulder his share of human living and suffering. The absolute climax of the genre, however, comes with Wilhelm Meister. Begun in 1776 and finished in 1829, it reflects the whole range of Goethe's character and the manifold trials and tribulations of his life. Like all bildungsroman, it is highly autobiographical. The son of a wealthy merchant, Wilhelm Meister flees the bourgeois career staked out for him and joins a theater troupe. Living through countless disappointments, he completes the apprenticeship years of his life. Setting out to get to know the world, he encounters a strange society which requires each of its members to learn a trade. This is necessary because the society has decided to emigrate to the New World, where everybody must be able to

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contribute something practical to community life. The hero himself becomes a medical doctor, which causes him to return to the "normal" world of duties. This return to the bourgeois world is the prerequisite for his attainment of the "humane ideal"--that of serving humanity by becoming involved in its problems. Interestingly enough, Wilhelm Meister takes good care of his son by having him learn all the arts and sciences. One of the new aspects of this novel was its explicit statement of humanism as an ideal beyond that of how to live successfully and peacefully. Education must teach people to become useful members of society. The question concerning us now with regard to The Magic Mountain is why it is classified as a bildungsroman. One obvious answer is that Thomas Mann said so, first in his preparatory notes to the book where he talks about it as a "story on pedagogy in which a young man, placed between two equally fanatical educators, can choose." In later published correspondence between Thomas and Heinrich Mann, there are several remarks about the novel as belonging to this genre. One may well argue, of course, that an artist's evaluation of his own work is not necessarily correct or even accurate. A better answer is that the two criteria used in our definition of bildungsroman apply to The Magic Mountain. First and foremost, it deals with Hans Castorp's education. In fact, the entire novel, beginning with Castorp's breaking away from the "world below" (the typical beginning, incidentally, of quest legends), serves the sole purpose of advancing his education. As has been demonstrated, Castorp alone is the "hero"--so much so that the other characters tend to become mere means to the end of his being educated. Second, Castorp's education comes about through the gradual development of his faculties and leads to his growing self-awareness. The words in italics are the novel's major theme under which the other themes (the mystery of time and the political implications) are easily subsumed. One nagging problem remains in The Magic Mountain, which we do not have in, say, Wilhelm Meister: Does the hero really accomplish his goal? Despite Castorp's ever-new insights and growing awareness of his condition, he never takes the last step. He does not escape from the dilettante world of the sanatorium, hermetically shut off from the "real world below." Somehow his painfully acquired self-awareness does not lead him to follow through on his new knowledge. His education has taught him to steer a noncommittal course between different views of life, but it has also robbed him of the vigor to find the middle path between theory and practice--between what the Middle Ages called the via contemplativa and the via activa. He pays the formidable price of sterility for his prolonged flirt with the dream world of esthetical and sensual enchantment. There can be no doubt: Castorp neither can nor wants to translate his intellectual and moral insights (that to live meaningfully is to love, and that to love is to serve) into practice. Had it not been for the outbreak of war, he would never have returned to the "world below." The argument that there is no reason for him to plunge into this world because he would probably perish anyway is no real argument. First, the war Castorp is summoned to fight is the result of the impotence and depravity of those assembled at the Berghof; second, it is only by undergoing a process of purification that Castorp (humanity in general and, on another level, prewar Europe) has a chance of being cured--or, at least, of redeeming the world as a sane place for his descendants. Thus, if we see Castorp's ideal as including at least an attempt on his part of transferring his insights into the "real world below," the answer is that he has failed. More than any other view, this one has caused a number of critics to believe The Magic Mountain is a parody of the bildungsroman. They argue that, while Castorp's education is the result of masterful discussions, it leads absolutely nowhere. This view might make sense if we consider the hero's actual implementation of his insights (and not only his attainment of self-awareness) as a major criterion of the bildungsroman. This we have not done in our definition. Yet even if we accepted this narrower definition, would it necessarily make the novel a parody? Is it not possible to argue that Castorp does achieve his goal, if by this we mean the highest degree of insight possible for him? After all, awakening from his

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snow dream, he ponders: "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts." Since these lines are the only ones in italics in the novel, they must have special significance--even if that same evening Castorp will barely remember what it was that he had visualized. How did Thomas Mann feel about this? At the time he wrote the novel, he was preoccupied with having his hero transcend the several little dichotomies that clutter up his romantic mind. This transcendence is the inevitable prerequisite for any further aspiration toward his "ideal of humaneness." Yet the book emerged as the first one in which Mann tried to reach beyond this prerequisite with the express purpose of assigning a more important task to his hero. This task, quite in keeping with Mann's own changing views, came to be that of practical involvement for the cause of political and social freedom. It is probably fair to conclude that the older Thomas Mann became and the more distance he gained to The Magic Mountain, the more he came to regard Castorp's ambivalence and resulting failure to act as a serious flaw in his character.

TECHNIQUE AND STYLE On the highest level, The Magic Mountain tries to convey the experience of time by narrating it. This determines its technique and style. The plot does not move from beginning to end in the conventional and reportorial sense because it is the correlative, not of the hero's story, but of his experience. This accounts for the intercalary sections which unravel the past and tie it to the future ("Of the Christening Basin," "At Tienappels," or "Hippe"). Mann destroys the notion of past and future by merging them into one continuous Now ("Excursus" or "By the Ocean of Time"). Only a relatively limited stretch of the hero's life is singled out for close observation: Castorp has lived to be twenty-three years old before he sets foot on the magic mountain, and his life continues after the outbreak of the war. This explains why he is being literally plunged in medias res at the beginning and why he leaves the sanatorium just as quickly. Reality, according to Mann, reveals itself in antithetical ideas and situations. There is no view or position whose counterview or counterposition is not also part of truth. The novel is therefore an attempt to view the complexities of experience from all possible vantage points. This is why characters do not so much live by themselves as in confrontation with each other. Castorp and Ziemssen, Castorp and Settembrini, Settembrini and Naphta, Behrens and Krokowski, and so on are examples of Mann's idea of confrontation. As a result of this, everybody claims to represent the whole truth and nothing but the truth--and the situation sometimes becomes slightly ridiculous. To demonstrate the futility and irrationality of holding such one-sided views, Mann employs irony. All simplifications, especially the many instances of a forced dialectic between spirit and life, rationalism and romanticism, or health and disease, become logical targets of this irony. As if they had been part and parcel of the charmed mountain world from all eternity, the characters of The Magic Mountain lead lives hermetically sealed off from the outside. As a result, they barely age, have no real goals, and are rarely exposed to change of any kind. They are reduced to mannerisms, appearances, actions, or figures of speech. In order to emphasize this quality of changelessness in them, Mann uses the technique of leitmotifs. (Developed by Richard Wagner in his operas, a leitmotif is a short musical phrase representing and recurring with a given character, situation, or emotion.) Sometimes a leitmotif acquires a semi-independent existence and persons are alluded to only by mention of their leitmotifs: Settembrini's mustache, Clavdia's Asiatic features, or Frau Stöhr's gaucheries, for instance. The technique is of course ideally suited to stress the eternally recurring present in this particular novel.

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The "transposed" leitmotif is a slight variation of even greater significance. Its most perfect example in The Magic Mountain is the recurring combination of the motifs of the slanted eyes with that of the borrowed pencil. There is no need to go through the various dreams and the carnival scene where it figures so prominently. The point to remember is that it is transposed twice between Clavdia Chauchat and Hippe. There are several other "transposed" leitmotifs: When Castorp turns on the light in disgust during the seance at the end, for instance, he does so for the same reason that Settembrini turned on the light to keep Castorp from losing his senses over Clavdia. The song the hero sings on the battlefield is the reiteration of an experience which he had when the same song came over the record player at the Berghof. What these examples have in common is the repetition of the same motif for the sake of linking the past with the future and vice versa. They serve to weave the many-faceted novel into an organic whole by pointing to the fundamental presentness of time in the world of the sanatorium. Mann referred to himself as a "musician among writers." There is no better proof of the affinity he felt with music than his use of the lietmotif technique. Mann himself admitted the excessive length of the book. He said that "it is possible for a work to have its own will and purpose, perhaps a far more ambitious one than its author's--and it is good that this should be so." In this book, he seems to be concerned with the description of surface details to the point of meticulousness. We are perhaps even inclined to agree with his brother Heinrich that he was too involved with the analysis of reality. To Thomas, of course, reality was something altogether different than to his expressionist brother Heinrich. This is why The Magic Mountain is long, complex, and full of seemingly endless flights of fancy. This is why its chapters are not tightly knit, but flow and ebb and overflow with little apparent logical consistency. But the point is this: The construction of these chapters is perfectly attuned to Castorp's surging and receding consciousness.

INFLUENCES ON THOMAS MANN JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE According to Mann's own words, the life, thought, and works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) influenced him considerably. Death in Venice was originally conceived to deal with Goethe's life; the tetralogy of Joseph and His Brothers is full of allusions to his life and his nineteenth-century visions of a social utopia; Doctor Faustus and Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns), show the spiritual kinship even in the choice of titles; and in The Magic Mountain two section headings are called to mind--"Walpurgis Night" and "A Soldier and Brave"--both direct references to Goethe's Faust. Concerning The Magic Mountain, this novel represents Mann's first attempt to create a modern version of Wilhelm Meister, Goethe's classical bildungsroman. The aim of this type of novel--literally it means "novel of education"--is to show a young man's self-education. In The Magic Mountain, Castorp's exposure to the intellectual battles between Settembrini and Naphta is as much a part of this journey toward a fuller understanding of life as is his growing devotion to the natural sciences. In fact, Mann, like Goethe, contends that it is the duty of the true artist to observe closely the phenomena of life. Only in this manner can he overcome the false dichotomies of art-science and spirit-life which, in the case of Mann, he had failed victim to the spell of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This is why both Wilhelm Meister and Hans Castorp study medicine. The more deeply they penetrate into the mysteries of nature, the more they understand life and humanity. This understanding becomes the basis for their compassion for life. In The Magic Mountain, Mann celebrates art as a humanistic discipline; and, a decade later, he advanced far enough along the path toward synthesis between art and life to proclaim, "Life wants to be taken seriously--so does art."

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Goethe, whom Mann called a "representative of the bourgeois era," stands as the embodiment of the middle way between false antitheses including that between democracy and totalitarianism. Shocked by the impotence of the French Revolution to keep its promises of libretto and égalité, he was convinced that revolutionaries who promise both ideals at the same time are dreamers or charlatans. So was Thomas Mann. He not only questioned the meaningfulness of radicalism, but for a long time also he questioned traditional Western democracy with its inevitable basis of expansive capitalism. It was not until Europe lay in ruins after World War I that, under the influence of Goethe's humanism, he began to turn into an ardent defender of the German Republic. Yet Mann remained very much aware of the serious problems facing the democratic ideal, in which he never ceased to detect a built-in tendency toward anarchy. "In a sense, democracy presents an obstacle," he said in 1924, "for what Europe really needs is some force of enlightened dictatorship." Upon being confronted with Whitman's writings for the first time, Mann exclaimed, "I can see well that Whitman called democracy what we, in a more old-fashioned way, have called humanism." This is why Mann, like Goethe over a century before him, celebrated America as the symbol of a new social order on a worldwide basis. "My exile," he wrote from California, "has nothing to do with waiting to return; in a sense, it bears the traces of this new age in which nations will dissolve and the world become united." How close this vision is to that of the emigrants to America in Wilhelm Meister! Their motto was "Seek to help wherever you go, for everywhere is your home." In his famous lecture Goethe and Democracy, delivered at the Library of Congress in 1949, Mann emphasized his affinity with Goethe by restating the latter's aspirations for America as his own. The bourgeois, humaniste et poète, as Clavdia Chauchat refers to Castorp in The Magic Mountain, represents Mann's idea of the German as the mediator between East and West. This is true for the political realm as much as any other one. In this connection, it is important to note that Castorp never really embraces anybody or anything completely, though, literally speaking, heaven and hell are summoned to aid in his education. He manages to maintain distance. Here we find Goethe's ideal of his old age, "renunciation." It means self-conquest, the realization that the only significance of the individual lies in what he accomplishes for humanity. The concept of the "communal bond" emerges. In Faust, the protagonist seeks salvation by contributing physically to the improvement of the world; in Wilhelm Meister, America stands as the dawn of the age of communal responsibility and happiness for those willing to share in its realization; and in The Magic Mountain, Castorp, partly because he wants to and partly because there is no alternative, becomes the sacrifice indispensable for the rebirth of a hopefully saner civilization. RICHARD WAGNER From his earliest days, Mann was exposed to music, especially that of the Romantics, at his home. The adolescent author admired Wagner's operas and, as he never tired of emphasizing, would not miss a performance at the Munich Opera for anything in the world. His brother Klaus, however, disagreed with Thomas' musical tastes. He complained that Wagner's music was "always the same rhythm, dragging and driving at the same time, the same wooing and enticing, the same exhaustion following the ecstasy--it was always Tristan." And Tristan and Isolde is, by any standard, the pinnacle of Romanticism, its furthest artistic expansion bordering on the unbearable with its intoxicating longing for death. Concerning Wagner's influence on Mann's writings, it is not difficult to detect Wagner's influences in Buddenbrooks, this "epic train of generations interwoven by Wagnerian leitmotifs," as Mann referred to it. And, in the short story Tristan, the tuberculosis-ridden patient-heroine, having brushed aside her doctor's warning not to become emotionally upset by Romantic music, meets death as she finishes playing the love duet from the second act of Tristan and Isolde on the piano. In The Magic Mountain, the countless stages of Castorp's journey toward self-education are tied together by leitmotifs. The story does not move from a beginning to an end but surges and subsides in a vacuum of timelessness. This is a

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literary parallel to Wagner's concept of eternal melody--a single, continuously surging, all-encompassing melody within which each motif flows and ebbs in harmony or contention with every other one. LEO TOLSTOY Mann's philosophical and political development received its major impulses from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, to an increasing extent, Goethe. Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), however, next to Wagner, was the main source of his artistic maturation. From Tolstoy, Mann acquired his early predilection for sweeping epics, and from him he learned the device of an almost painful observation of even the most minute details. A well-known example of the Russian's accuracy, and one which Mann admired tremendously, is Tolstoy's personal and thorough study of the battlefield of Borodino, figuring so prominently in War and Peace. Another artistic device is that of the leitmotif which Wagner, and in the literary realm, Thomas Mann expanded to include the symbolic. Tolstoy successfully integrated autobiographical elements into his writing. Mann was to follow him in this respect, magnificently weaving his doubts and agonies into the structure of The Magic Mountain through Castorp, his personification. During most of his life, Mann had to defend his art against his brother Heinrich's charge that he wasted too much time recording the world around him. Against this charge, he defended himself by accepting Tolstoy's view of literature as a "critique of reality through the spirit." He believed that "truly great writers have never invented anything but have charged material handed to them with their soul, thus reviving it." ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER In his The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) celebrates the will as an insatiable force without conscious purpose or direction. Human beings may deceive themselves into thinking that they are acting from considerations dictated by reason alone, but this is never true. The function of the intellect is only to assist the will to achieve its ends. Since the will is "blind," all participation in life is to be avoided. The death-wish (not suicide) therefore assumes central proportion in this philosophy, for it terminates the journey of tragic delusions which is life. The importance Schopenhauer assigns to artistic experience is understandable in the light of these views. It is he who deliberately spends life in "contemplation" rather than in practical action who comes closest to the ideal of total noninvolvement. What Mann learned from Schopenhaner was that artistic sensitivity and intellect can only grow at the expense of vitality and vice versa. Whereas Schopenhauer preached the renunciation of this vitality, however, Mann was not so pessimistic and contented himself with presenting this dualism. Beginning in The Magic Mountain, he tried to transcend it and became cautiously optimistic. In terms of his political attitudes, this meant that he eventually overcame the ideal of aloofness from political and social concerns. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Like Schopenhauer, with those writings he was familiar, Nietzsche (1844-1900) is thoroughly convinced of humanity's inability to perceive anything but phenomena, never reality behind them. Only a purely esthetic view of life (as opposed to moral) can compensate for the fact that life is but a recurring show of images. Hence, he revolts against all notions of truth and morality, attacking not only religion but also reason. So far he is in total agreement with Schopenhauer. While the latter advocates not only noninvolvement in the affairs of the world but also the renunciation of individual desire, however, Nietzsche violently affirms the will to life. His attempt to affirm the basic will to life, but without a rational or conventionally moral basis, leads him

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to celebrate irrationality as subjective, esthetic experience. In his The Birth of Tragedy, he pits reason and consciousness against irrationality and blind power. Represented by the deities of Apollo and Dionysus, these forces are engaged in eternal battle. Nietzsche contends that Apollonian man, infected by the naive faith in reason, science, and humanity, is incapable of bearing the joys and sorrows of primitive life; he is incapable of killing and suffering, and therefore too decadent to live intensely. Nietzsche is convinced that the rebirth of barbarism is about to replace the contemptible common belief in reason and superficial happiness. Nietzsche despises Christianity as a sanctuary of the spiritually and physically inferior, and his hero is indifferent, if not hostile, toward any notion of assuming responsibility for society. Since he abides by his self-made code of conduct, he lives apart from society and what he considers its trappings of conventional morality and cheap satisfaction. Fiercely individualistic, he sees the democratic ideal as the institutionalization of the "herd morality." Instead, he assumes an aristocratic position which regards a people as "nature's roundabout way of producing three or four outstanding human beings." Nietzsche thoroughly disliked and attacked the attitudes of the typical bourgeois, an important aspect of which is its exaggerated sense of nationalism. As a result, he considered himself decidedly anti-German. Although Nietzsche held these views, Hitler was to adopt his idea of individualism, culminating in the concept of the "superman" and his transvaluation of all values, as the basis for his projected millenium of Nazi rule. As in the case of Wagner, Hitler found elements in Nietzsche which lent themselves to easy distortion. THE EAST, THE WEST, AND GERMANY Thomas Mann has been called reactionary (because of his long hesitancy to embrace Western democracy as the panacea of Germany's problems prior to and immediately after World War I); he has been called chauvinistic (because he saw the historical role of Germany to be that of the great mediator between Russia and the western powers); and he has been called anti-German (because of his early condemnations of Nazi ideology and his later, extremely violent statements on the subject from his American exile). Yet Thomas Mann was not a political writer in the conventional sense and least of all in The Magic Mountain. In this novel, Hans Castorp does not become involved in any one school of thought too deeply. In keeping with the ideal of self-education, however, Mann does demand that Castorp concern himself with the issues of his time. Hans Castorp's vision becomes increasingly broadened as he studies medicine, biology, and astronomy in an attempt to bridge the gap between the individual fields of knowledge; this is why he tells Joachim, "You say we did not come up here to get wiser, but healthier. But all this confusion must be reconciled. . . . Why are you dividing the world into two hostile camps, which, I may tell you, is a grievous error." Mann regarded as the duty of the modern writer to be creative in this sense. This is why he deliberately worked toward transcending the dangerous dichotomy between artistic and political life which has been particularly widespread in Germany. As a place of intellectual, political, and moral decay, the Berghof is a miniature Europe. Its international character emphasizes the contagious nature of the disease which has crippled the entire continent. While it is certainly futile to try to attach special significance to each character's nationality in the novel, a few facts deserve attention. The striking absence of any Swiss patient in a Swiss sanatorium is easily explained. As a time-honored democracy, Switzerland has managed to stay out of political trouble and can afford to be the host to the sick representatives from the rest of Europe. It is also not by accident that Settembrini is an Italian, Clavdia Chauchat a Russian, and Mynheer Peeperkorn an Asian. The nationalities and ethnic backgrounds of these characters as well as many others in the novel fit into Mann's view of essential cultural differences between East and West. Rationality,

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objectivity, individual liberty, democracy, and progress are distinctly Western ideas; literature, the spoken word, is the most cherished form of art in the West. By contrast, feeling, irrationality, subjectivity, hierarchial order, and monarchy are Eastern traits and concepts; music and a highly mystical brand of religion are its forms of artistic expression. Italy, the homeland of the Renaissance, stands for Western ideals. The Slavic world, as the vanguard of the East, and Asia itself, represent the East. Conditioned by its geographical location and historical role, Germany has been influenced by both East and West; this is why Mann envisages Germany as the ideal mediator between the two worlds. Let us look at the major characters of the novel in terms of this pattern of Western and Eastern traits and ideas. As a fervent rationalist, man of letters, and fighter for true humanism, Settembrini is eminently Italian and Western. Clavdia Chauchat's slackness and submissiveness make her characteristically Eastern (she hails from the Caucasus); Naphta is of Polish descent, but his sympathy with terrorism is also the result of his Jesuit training. Krokowski's Polish name is a pointer to his sensuality and addiction to magic; Mynheer Peeperkorn's messianic complex and tyrannical personality reflects his southeast Asian background. Several minor characters, like the Austro-Hungarian gentleman rider, the promiscuous Russian couple at the beginning of the novel, and the submissive Ferge later on, also correspond to Mann's scheme. Castorp's attempt to find a balance between the total negation of an individual's responsibility to society in the East and annihilation of individuality through mass democracy in the West symbolizes Mann's attempt to entrust Germany with the role of mediator. Through Settembrini, he says: "There will be decisions to make, decisions of unspeakable importance for the happiness and the future of Europe; it will fall to your country to decide; in her soul the decision will be consummated. Placed as she is between East and West, she will have to choose between the two spheres." The essential difference between Joachim and Hans is that Joachim is the German conformist whereas Hans is the nonconformist of Mann's projection. Although most characters in the novel fit into Mann's scheme, it would be wrong to try to force each one into rigid character molds. Since a clear-cut definition of ethnic and cultural characteristics does not exist, and since these characteristics do not logically and consistently apply to all members of a given ethnic group, any such attempt must remain unsatisfactory. ON THE NOVEL'S MEDICAL ASPECTS The publication of The Magic Mountain caused something of a stir, not only among writers, but also among doctors. Many of them took the novel to be an attack on medical conditions at Davos or at sanatoriums in general. Some went so far as to set up lists of the novel's key figures and match them with their alleged counterparts in real life. There were even people who threatened Mann with lawsuits and others who could not understand why the director of the sanatorium at Davos did not quit his position in disgust. Yet there were also countless favorable comments from medical circles. One well-known physician thanked Mann for directing the attention of professional people to the extreme psychological pressures to which patients are exposed as a result of their time-consuming rest cures and the whole mode of life these involve. Another renowned doctor was so impressed by the author's firm grasp of the medical techniques and terminology relating to the treatment of tuberculosis that he devoted a lecture to the medical aspects of The Magic Mountain. Whatever their view, the majority of doctors commenting on the book did not see that it was not about the problems of medicine, let alone about the people engaged in it. Mann's choice of setting in a sanatorium

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for the high-altitude treatment of tuberculosis as well as his detailed description of life there had led many to believe just that. The truth is that the author needed the sanatorium atmosphere as an appropriate framework within which to develop his diagnosis of European society as morally decadent. Davos is a symbol enabling Mann to present his case in the tangible terms of concentrated, physical decay. The fact that tuberculosis was as rampant during the first quarter of the century as heart trouble is today is another reason for the author's choice of this disease. Above all, however, there is a personal motivation: his wife's illness, her prolonged stay at Davos, and his visit there. At Davos, Mann actually met most of the people whom he--under different names, of course--recast in the roles of his Magic Mountain characters later on. The novel's excursions into the realm of parapsychology, very much in vogue in Munich after World War I, are also the result of Mann's own experience. Mann's reaction to the comments on his alleged assaults on the medical profession was primarily one of dismay at the gigantic misunderstanding. In an open letter to the editor of the German Medical Weekly, he conceded that it is tempting to take the novel as but "a parallel to Upton Sinclair's epic of revelation about conditions in the Chicago stockyards." But it is difficult to see the resemblance of this novel to The Jungle. The latter was extremely popular in Germany, but it does not contain a fraction of the artistic complexity and philosophic dialectic of The Magic Mountain. The Jungle was intended as an attempt at social remedy; Mann's novel was not. The Magic Mountain is a novel about the ideal of self-education in which Castorp represents the age-old resistance of youth to the attempts of adults to teach and guide. It is also a novel full of metaphysical ambitions in which a young man, through the experiences of death and disease, gradually gropes his way toward a humanistic ideal. It is, furthermore, a novel about growing political awareness without ever prescribing a fixed political view beyond that of the broad principles of democracy. Essentially, however, The Magic Mountain stands as its author's diagnosis of a decadent society caught in nationalistic selfishness. Whatever else the novel may be, its medical aspects remain secondary. They are a means, not an end. As Mann once worded it, "Medicine and music are the two neighboring spheres of my art."

ESSAY TOPICS AND REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What has Joachim's delight about his cousin's arrival at the Berghof in common with his unusual reason for liking music? 2. What is the principal function of the sections "Of the Christening Basin" and "At Tienappels"? 3. During their first encounter, Settembrini compares Castorp to Odysseus. What does this illustrate with regard to the Italian's impression of the sanatorium and with regard to his background? 4. In what sense is the interlude of Herr Albin's attempted suicide characteristic of life at the Berghof? 5. How does Castorp react to the fourteenth-century woodcarving in Naphta's apartment? Contrast his reaction with Settembrini's. 6. Investigate and explain Settembrini's views on music and literature. 7. What is the relationship between Castorp's fascination with certain melodies and his recurring flirtations with death? 8. What is the significance of the two cousins seeing themselves on the X-ray screen in Behrens' office?

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9. What is Walpurgis Night in German legend? Why did Mann choose to name the carnival scene that way? 10. Why does Castorp address Clavdia Chauchat in French? 11. What is the significance of the fact that Castorp's vivid snow dream fades away on the very evening of his adventure? 12. Clavdia Chauchat and Mynheer Peeperkorn are both represented as characteristically "Eastern." Which traits form the basis of their relationship? 13. What is the meaning of the Dutchman's suicide? 14. Interpret the connection between Naphta's delight in purely esthetic experience and his terrorism in the light of Nietzsche's philosophy. 15. It has often been remarked that few authors have succeeded in developing two intellectual positions with such accuracy and fervor in the same novel as well as Mann in The Magic Mountain. How does this reflect his notion of reality and his ideas on the task of the modern writer? 16. Discuss the irony of Hans Castorp as a "simple, young man." 17. Compare and contrast attitudes toward disease and death of Settembrini, Naphta, and Hans Castorp. 18. Discuss the Berghof as a symbol of the decadence of European society prior to World War I. 19. Compare the essential evil of Hofrat Behrens and Dr. Krokowski as illustrated in their respective functions. 20. Examine carefully Hans Castorp's two dreams drawing together Pribislav Hippe and Clavdia Chauchat. What is the relationship of these dreams to Castorp's meeting with Clavdia Chauchat in "Walpurgis Night"? 21. How does Hans Castorp (Thomas Mann) try to achieve the humanist ideal of humanity by delving into medical, biological, and astronomical books? 22. Discuss the mystery of time with special emphasis on its aspects of "dimensionless present" and "circular motion." 23. Carefully read and analyze the temptations and hardships of Castorp's ski tour and outdoor sleep in the light of Schopenhauer's renunciation of the will and Nietzsche's affirmation of life. 24. Discuss the fundamental meaning of Castorp's dream in "Snow." 25. Is it possible to reduce the countless religious, historical, and political discussions between Settembrini and Naphta to a common theme? If so, what is it? 26. The last three chapters take up roughly three times as much space as do the first four. Show how this reflects consistency with the author's view of time and its relationship to change.

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27. Explain, by means of specific illustrations, the function of leitmotifs in this novel. 28. Pursue Settembrini's arguments in favor of a monistic interpretation of reality by establishing his views on the nature of disease and the power of death. 29. Discuss the war as Hans Castorp's only hope for a meaningful survival. 30. Select Castorp's experiences which you believe may be considered as the most significant milestones on his journey toward greater self-awareness. Be specific and back up your choices.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY FAESI, ROBERT. Thomas Mann. Zürich: Atlantis, 1955. An excellent, full-length study on Mann and the essence of his work, it has the decided advantage of Faesi's acquaintance with Mann. FROMMER, HARALD. Die Komposition menschlicher Lebensforemen in Thomas Mann's "Der Zauberberg" (The Composition of Human Ways of Life in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain). Tübingen: University Press, 1966. This doctoral dissertation ranks among the most successful attempts to prove that the novel belongs to the genre of the bildungsroman. Its key characters are representatives of three one-sided and therefore wrong concepts of life, which Castorp weighs against each other to arrive at a "humane medium." GAERTNER, JOHANNES A. "Dialectic Thought in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain." The Germanic Quarterly XXXVIII (1965): 605-18. The different concepts of life between which Castorp is free to choose are represented by characters developed to the point of caricature and drawn together by the leitmotif technique. Choice presupposes opposites, and these opposites occur in the form of sets of characters. MANN, THOMAS. Actung, Europa! Aufsätze zur Zeit (Attention, Europe! Contemporary Essays). Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1938. _____. Freud, Goethe, Wagner: Three Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937. A fascinating study of the three figures who substantially influenced, not only this novel, but Mann's entire works and life. _____. Goethe and Democracy. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1950. Mann pits the great humanist and internationalist Goethe against the traditional German Romantics, above all Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. Fully aware of Germany's failure to fend off barbarism during the Hitler era, he nevertheless argues for a common struggle against tyranny rather than a unilateral condemnation of everything German. SAUERESSIG, HEINZ. Die Entstehung des Romans "Der Zauberberg" (The Genesis of the Novel The Magic Mountain). Biberach: Verlag Wege und Gestalten, 1965. A convincing demonstration of the novel as Mann's breakthrough from his earlier Romanticism to humanism in the tradition of Goethe. SCHRÖTER, KLAUS. Thomas Mann in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddockumenten (Thomas Mann: Testimonials and Picture Documents of Myself). Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964. Largely autobiographical, this study shows the diverse political and literary influences shaping and changing Mann's views.

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THIEBERGER, RICHARD. Der Begriff der Zeit bei Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann's Concept of Time). Baden-Baden: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1952. A thorough study of the different aspects of time as revealed during Castorp's stay at the Berghof. WEIGAND, HERMAN J. Thomas Mann's Novel "Der Zauberberg." New York: Appleton-Century Co., 1933. This is one of the earliest, "most fundamental and comprehensive critical treatments" (Mann). Weigand's ideas of the novel as essentially a treatment of the "Quest Legend" is taken up by Mann in his 1939 Princeton address, published together with the novel under the title The Making of The Magic Mountain.

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