Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Research" and "The Dance of Death"

The onset of winter -- all thoughts on Christmas even six seeks out (a freeness with time that Hans has not quite accustomed himself to yet) -- Hans gains temperature, perhaps because of the exertions of his reading -- how little serious reading is done at the sanatorium, and how time is frittered away -- late nights, reading about the mysteries of life and matter -- an interest in the body which has a barely sublimated sexual context.

I am increasingly left with the impression that Hans is not as dull a lad as the narrator had made out in the beginning.

Christmas season -- Hans proposes to break the embargo on talking about and seeing death and dying -- the idea is met with hostility at dinner -- Hans proceeds with his project, pulling Joachim in his train -- first paying respects to the deceased gentleman rider (who Hans had heard coughing his first day) -- from there Hans makes it his mission to visit the dying -- his motives were not strictly charitable; for he also meant to fight for taking a serious and dignified attitude toward suffering, death,and the pursuit of the cure, much against the prevailing atmosphere -- Popoff's seizure at dinner , and the alarmingly rapid (for Hans) return to normal routine after it -- Leila Gerngross -- Fritz Rotbein, the businessman -- the silly Frau Zimmermann ("Overfilled") -- Settembrini's objection -- Tous-les-deux's son Lauro, who made a show of defying death -- Anton Karlowitz Ferge, the Russo-German insurance man who went through pleura-shock and three-colored fainting; a great storyteller --Frau Mallinckrodt, the spurned adulteress, who like the other women saw Hans' visits through the lens of courtship -- Karen Karstedt, an impecunious girl under Behrens' care who stayed in cheap lodgings in the village -- Hans and Joachim take Karen out for excursions to see the winter sports and the movie theater -- Frau Stoehr insinuates, with some justice, that Hans' attentions to Karen are a sublimation of his desires for Frau Chauchat --In February, Hans and Joachim take Karen, who is near her end, to see the graveyard

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Whims of Mercurius", "Encyclopaedic", "Humaniora"

A stretch of brilliant, warm weather begins a few days into October. Hans' infatuation with Madame Chauchat continues. He avoids looking at or judging her defects, physical and moral, and even tries his hand at simulating some of them, such as slouching and slamming doors. One day, Hans conspicuously gets up from dinner and adjusts the curtains to stop a ray of sun from vexing her, and is rewarded with a look and a smile. But Hans' isn't always so secure in Madame Chacuchat's affections. On another day, he converses with Joachim within her earshot in order to draw her attention, even dragging Hermine Kleefeld into the conversation, but she only gives him a glance that he interprets as one of scorn. Despondent, his temperature drops. Three days later, he overtakes Madame Chauchat on the morning walk and they exchange friendly greetings. His gloom lifts, and so does his temperature.

229-230: "We have as much right as the next person to our private thoughts about the story we are relating; and we would here hazard the surmise that young Hans Castorp would never have overstepped so far the limits originally fixed for his stay if to his simple soul there might have been vouchsafed, out of the depth of his time, any reasonably satisfying explanation of the meaning and purpose of man's life."

Hans' passion becomes evident to everyone at the sanatorium. Hans, in fact, does a great deal to advertise it. One day, he even holds forth on the peculiarities of Madame Chauchat's face to a small audience of fellow patients on the veranda. Hans begins to look forward to the Sunday afternoon wait for letters in front of the porter's lodge because of the excuse it provides him to be close to Madame Chauchat. One Sunday, Settembrini pulls Hans away from the gathering into a side room, ostensibly to announce his participation in the production of an encyclopedia of human suffering. (One might wonder who would read such a thing!) In fact, Settembrini's purpose is to urge Hans to return home from the corrupting influence of the sanatorium -- a suggestion that Hans resists.

On another day, Hans and Joachim are sitting in the veranda garden after dinner when Hofrat Behrens strolls by, and Hans wrangles an invitation to look at his paintings. Hans takes particular note of the portrait of Madame Chauchat -- he even removes it from the wall and carries it about Hofrat Behrens' house during their visit. Hans and Behrens converse at length about the human body: flesh, blood, lymph, its composition (mostly water), its life and death (both processes of oxidation). But the Hofrat becomes downcast and the visit ends when Hans questions the necessity of continuity of form, which for the Hofrat is the distinction between life and death.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Soup-Everlasting", "Sudden Enlightenment", "Freedom"

An authorial aside at the onset of the recounting of Hans Castorp's bed-rest establishes that henceforth the treatment of time will be telescoped, that much more time will be compressed into a shorter space of narrative. Hans' regular sick-bed regime is described. It is noted that the division of his his days into an unchanging pattern makes them seem shorter, but also makes it seem as if time is not passing at all. Joachim urges Hans to write a letter alerting his relations to the extension of his stay. Hans has some trouble bringing himself to write, but puts himself to it when his three weeks are up and the issue can no longer be avoided. Hans reveals as as little as possible, suggesting that he has been only briefly detained by a bad cold. This becomes part of a pattern of uncovering his true state only gradually, as we learn when he discloses, a week and a half later in a conversation with Settembrini, that he has he has written a second latter attributing further delay to mere suspicion about the condition of his chest. Castorp reveals to Settembrini his increasing alienation from his accustomed bourgeois society as a result of the perspective brought on by illness. Settembrini, alarmed anew, resumes his chiding. He first relates skeptical anecdotes about the diagnoses and cures of the doctors, and then launches a frontal assault on Hans' view that death and disease provide distance from and perspective on ordinary life. At the end of three weeks, Behrens releases Hans from bed rest, but only after he has been reminded -- he seems to have lost track of how long Hans has been confined.


A week later, Hans goes in for his first x-ray. In the meantime, he receives more intelligence about Madame Chauchat. His tablemate, Miss Robinson the schoolmistress, informs him that Madame Chauchat receives a Russian visitor who stays in town, and also that she is sitting for a portrait by Hofrat Behrens. This news distresses Hans, and causes his temperature to spike. He also observes that Madame Chauchat has another admirer at the sanatorium, a young man from Mannheim. Madame Chauchat ignores this other admirer. On the day of the appointment, Madame Chauchat comes in for her x-ray after Hans and Joachim and converses with Joachim in the waiting room. Hans speculates about whether she speaks to Joachim instead of him out of delicacy about their silent flirtation. Joachim appears to have perceived the goings-on between them, and seems uneasy with Madame Chauchat. Hans looks at the insides of Joachim in the x-ray room, at also looks at the skeleton of his own hand.


Some time later -- it must be a few days, for we learn that October is almost upon them -- Hans converses with Settembrini. After first mocking the put-upon pose of some of the young inhabitants of the sanatorium -- he contends that they are in fact enjoying their luxuriant irresponsibility -- Settembrini concludes with a cutting remark about Russians ("Parthians and Scythians"). An annoyed Hans concludes that Settembrini, too, has noticed his commerce with Madame Chauchat. Immediately after the discussion, Hans writes his third letter home, this time revealing that he must be expected to stay for at least the whole winter, and requesting supplies and money to cover his expenses. As he writes, his sense of dread about informing his relations evaporates, and a sense of satisfaction with his self-assertion comes over him.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Temperature"

Hans Castorp calculates the yearly cost of staying at the sanatorium and finds it is well within his means -- not that he admits even to himself that he did the sums on his own behalf.

It is half a week until Castorp's expected departure, and he has caught a severe cold. The cold drives the story in this section, from his encounter with Fraulein von Mylendonk, his acquisition of a thermometer, his discovery of his fever, and the overknowing and apparently mistaken reaction of his tablemates (who suggest and perhaps think he really has tuberculosis) to Castorp's decision to have an examination, the seemingly challenging look from Madame Chauchat as he is thinking about skipping it, and the final revelation of his diseased state.

Hans Castorp has trouble with time and the thermometer -- at first time goes too slow, and he can't seem to get to the end of the seven minutes. Then he daydreams a little, and the time goes by so quickly that he is already more than a minute over before he realizes it.

Castorp on Hofrat Behrens, and himself (thinking, I guess, of his odd relationship with Madame Chauchat), 174-175: "Settembrini said his joviality is forced, and one must admit that Settembrini has his own views and knows whereof he speaks. I probably ought to have more opinions of my own, as he says, and not take everything as it comes, the way I do. But sometimes one starts out with having an opinion and feeling righteous indignation and all that, and then something comes up that has nothing to do with judgments and criticism, and then it is all up with your severity, and you feel disgusted with the republic and the bello stile --"

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Doubts and Considerations", "Table Talk", "Mounting Misgivings. Of the Two Grandfathers, and the Boat-ride ..."

The passage of Tuesday is marked with short scenes in which Hans discusses and pays his bill -- Hans' billing week ends on Tuesdays, since had had arrived on a Tuesday -- and then an account of Hofrat Behrens personal history -- he is the widower of a victim of the tuberculosis who had taken the altitude treatment before dying and being buried in Davos, and himself seems to have been afflicted. Hans expresses doubt about whether a fellow-sufferer is fit to approach a disease with the proper objectivity.

Some part of the second week is disposed of -- none too precisely -- in a chapter describing Hans' mounting infatuation with Madame Chauchat and the part that the schoolmistress at his dining-room table, Fraeulein Engelhart, plays in it. Fraeulein Engelhart, observing Hans' interest, becomes Madame Chauchat's advocate while Hans makes himself out to be her critic. She finds out Madame Chauchat's given name -- Clavdia -- and fills in Hans with what is generally known about Clavdia's life story, which doesn't seem to be something we can have any confidence in.

Hans assuaged his conscience about this preoccupation with the thought that he would soon be leaving anyway.

139-140: "Hans Castorp, when he rose from one meal, could straightaway by anticipation begin to rejoice in the next -- if, indeed, rejoicing is not too facile, too pleasant and unequivocal a word for the sentiments with which he looked forward to another meeting with the afflicted fair one. The reader, on the other hand, may very likely find such adjectives the only ones suitable to describe Hans Castorp's personality or emotions. But we suggest that a young man with a well-regulated conscience and sense of fitness could not, whatever else he did, simply 'rejoice in' Madame Chauchat's proximity. In fact, we -- who must surely know -- are willing to assert that he himself would have repudiated any such expression if it had been suggested to him."

The relationship provided the emotional correlate for the physical agitation which Hans had experienced since his arrival.

Clavdia, too, becomes aware of Hans interest. Hans contrives to meet Clavdia's eyes in the dining-hall, and to encounter her in the hallway.

Castorp casts about for somebody to provide a counterbalance to his indulgence. He determines that neither Joachim, with his own preoccupation with Marusja, or Hofrat Behrens, with his probable affliction, would do. He settles on Settembrini. And so a few more days are disposed of, again none too precisely, recounting what Settembrini had said over the course of several conversations and how Castorp had reacted to it.

Settembrini spoke about his grandfather, the lawyer and political agitator (who reminded Castorp of his own grandfather because he dressed all in black, though for opposite reasons, that is, to mourn the imprisonment of liberty by the old regime). Settembrini expounded on his understanding of human history as a conflict between justice, freedom, and knowledge, on one had, and oppression, tyranny, and ignorance on the other. Thus Settembrini saw his father, a humanist scholar, as engaged in the same fight as his grandfather.

The narrator's voice suggests that by subjecting himself to this stream of strenuous moralism, Hans Castorp felt more free to indulge his weakness for Clavdia Chauchat.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Politically Suspect", Hippe", "Analysis"

Hans' first Sunday is one of the fortnightly Sunday band days -- one of the regular variations in the sanatorium routine that Hans is beginning to discover. Settembrini is late, and Hans chides him. Settembrini responds that he is suspicious of music, because it only stimulates emotions, while words alone can convey reason. Joachim responds that he is grateful for music because it breaks up and organizes time. Settembrini that music can in fact enliven us to the passage of time, but then he says it has the tendency to do the opposite -- to deaden us, to encourage quietism -- and thus he calls it 'politically suspect.'

Monday brings another variation: Krokowski's psychoanalytic lectures on love and sickness. In the morning before the lecture, Hans takes a long, singing hike through the hills -- which proves too much for him. He is exhausted and coughs up blood. He has to take a long, delirious rest before returning to the sanatorium. He daydreams about Pribislav Hippe, a schoolmate who had been a two-year preoccupation is his youth. Hippe's 'Kirghiz' eyes are the hidden memory of which Madame Chauchat reminded Hans.

Hans arrives to Krokowski lecture just after the start -- and finds himself behind Madame Chauchat and her distracting back and arm. The theme of the lecture: suppressed love reappears as illness.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, "Necessary Purchases", "Excursus on the Sense of Time", and "He Practices His French"

The second day is dismissed in two paragraphs. On the third, it turns cold and snows. Hans walks to the village with Joachim to buy rugs for wrapping up outdoors. On the way back, they have another talk with Settembrini. Settembrini mocks the doctors and patients, which Hans and Joachim silently disapprove of. Hans attributes dignity to sickness and dying; Settembrini objects at length. Hans tells Joachim that he thinks Settembrini cares for the chance to talk beautifully as much as to instruct. He senses a tension with Settembrini about his purchase of the rugs (and he may be right; we have already seen Settembrini's hostility to anything that makes Hans' stay more permanent).

Over a short duration -- a few hours or a day -- time passes more quickly if one's experiences are new and varied, but over much longer periods this seems to stretch time out, while monotony compresses the recollection of even years to very little. These reflections are made in a narratorial excursus, but then are attributed to Hans. (The narrative time of the novel certainly seems to work this way. The passing of a few more days is noted in the sentence which begins the attribution of these thoughts to Hans -- presumably nothing unusual happened in those unexamined days.)

Hans sees his first dying man -- and is impressed with the dignity of his death. He practices the dying man's roll of his eyes, and Madame Chacuchat she is making eyes at her. Hans and Joachim labor to escape from Sister Bertha, the nurse. Hans meets Tous-les-deux, and consoles her in French.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Herr Albin", "Satana Makes Proposals That Touch Our Honor"

Herr Albin makes a show of shocking the women with suggestions of suicide during laying-in.


80: "[I]n effect it seemed to him that, though honour might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope. He tried to put himself in Herr Albin's place and see how it must feel to be finally relieved of the burden of a respectable life and made free of the infinite realms of shame; and the young man shuddered at the wild wave of sweetness which swept over him at the thought and drove on his labouring heart to an even quicker pace."


At dinner, Frau Stohr claims to know how to prepare 28 different sauces for fish.


Settembrini and Castorp converse at the after-dinner reception. Castorp babbles about Frau Stohr's sauces and his first impression of Settembrini as an organ-grinder. Settembrini sizes up Castorp's physical, mental, and moral fragility, and urges him to leave right away (an action which Castorp had earlier suggested he might have to take to Ziemssen). Castorp rejects this out of hand -- and perhaps not coincidentally is trying at the same time to recall what Madame Chauchat reminds him of.

Insight from the night's dreams. The silent sister -- a thermometer without it's own numbered scale -- as a metaphor for time. Hans remembers what Madame Chauchat reminds him of (although we don't yet find out).

Hans ends up dreaming about kissing Madame Chauchat's hand. 92: "And at that there swept over him anew, from head to foot, the feeling of reckless sweetness he had felt for the first time when he tried to imagine himself free of the burden of a good name, and tasted the boundless joys of shame. This feeling he experienced anew in his dream, only a thousandfold stronger than in his waking hour."

This concludes ten chapters devoted to a single day.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Satana", "Mental Gymnastic", "A Word Too Much", and "Of Course, a Female!"

Settembrini -- chatty, impecunious Italian, full of literary allusions, bon mots, and gossip -- an anticlerical freethinker, but at the same time a somewhat old-fashioned literary humanist

a philosophical Hans holds forth on the immeasurability of time -- the idea that time flows evenly is based on the convention that it can be measured by regular movements in space -- but this is arbitrary, time and space don't necessarily have any relation -- we don't experience time as something steady: sometimes it feels fast to us, and other times slow -- we have no direct perception of time, as we do with space

the lying-down cure -- breakfast again --Joachim smitten with Marusja but trying to hide it

beer, extreme drowsiness, a clouded head, and heart palpitations with no emotional trigger for Hans (the body acting without reference to the soul, as Hans sees it)

Hans discovers the culprit who bangs the door: Madame Chauchat, from the good Russian table, with braided hair and narrow eyes, who seems to remind Hans of something.

Herr Blumenkohl takes a break from lunch to use his Blue Peter -- Hans discovers blood on his handkerchief

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Drawing the Veil", "Breakfast", "Banter. Viaticum. Interrupted Mirth."

Spanish mother of two afflicted sons -- tous le deux

description of Hans Castorp's reaction to hearing the Russian couple's lovemaking -- avoidance, attempted escape, embarrassment -- 40: "And he began to blush through the powder; for what he had all along seen coming was come, and the game had passed over quite frankly into the bestial." -- all from within Hans Castorp's point of view


My impression is that Castorp is light-headed, even giddy, when he discusses meeting the Russians and Tous le deux with his cousin

breakfast room -- Hans Castorp seated looking toward down the length of the room with the door to the front hall behind him to his left -- he became annoyed when the door was slammed

We get only Doctor Behrens' side of a conversation with Hans Castorp and his cousin, and are left to infer how they responded -- he urged Castorp to follow the regimen of the sanatorium.

walking with Joachim, who struggles to keep up -- a whistling pneumothorax and sick young people for whom time has no meaning -- Joachim: "Sometimes I think being ill and dying aren't serious at all, just a sort of loafing about and wasting time. Life is only serious down below." (51-52) -- Hans' cigar disappoints him --last rites for little Hujus, terminal cases who make a fuss on the verge of death, Behrens admonishment to one such, and Hans' protestation in favor of the priority of the dying

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Of the Christening Basin" and "At Tienappels', and of Young Hans's Moral State"

Hans Lorenz Castorp -- grandfather -- conservative throwback

christening basin -- names of seven generations of owners engraved on the accompanying plate -- one must be Hans Castorp, but this is not made explicit -- gives young Hans Castorp a feeling of change and continuity at the same time -- 23: "A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity" -- the original German is more starkly oxymoronic, and the reference to time is not made explicit

24-25: "The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Councillor: the sober, even godly, civilian habit of a bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-assertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to the perpetual continuity of things, and the perfect soundness of its business signature."

grandfather in the really old public outfit as the true grandfather, and grandfather in his old-fashioned everyday attire as an imperfect expression

funeral - grandfather in his public outfit -- decay

The two years of Hans Castorp's life with his grandfather are captured with just a handful of descriptions: of the house and his grandfather, of the (recurring) scene with the christening basin, of the picture, of being shielded from witnessing his grandfather's struggle with sickness, of his grandfather's laying in state.

Hans spends the remainder of his youth in the charge of his uncle, Consul Tienappel. Tienappel liquidates Hans's father's business and invests the proceeds so that Hans has a comfortable endowment. Hans intended to supplement this by a career in ship design -- a field that he more or less fell into rather than choosing.

Hans has a lethargic disposition -- he respects work, but has no appetite for it. Mann depicts this as a symptom of a more general tendency of an age that lacks conviction of the meaningfulness of its efforts. Another theme: this moral degeneration is linked to physical deterioration. And in fact, Hans becomes sickly and pale while away from home pursuing studies, and his doctor counsels a restorative vacation to the mountains.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Foreword", "Arrival" "In the Restaurant"

Rather in the manner of a philosophical treatise, this novel has a foreword, and Mann occupies it by playing with the theme of time. He beseeches his reader to consider the story old, although the setting is quite recent. He takes up this time motif again in the opening passage of the first chapter, as he describes Hans Castorp's trip to Davos. He observes the fungibility (though imperfect) of time and distance, noting that the effect of distance in changing Castorp's preoccupations is similar to the passage of a considerable stretch of time.

Mann makes the scene feel more distant by presenting the protagonist impersonally at the start. From the first paragraph, we find out only that there was a young man on a trip to Davos. After two paragraphs describing the route (in present tense), we finally learn Hans Castorp's name -- and immediately have him put at a distance again with a parenthetical interpolation noting that he has been introduced (a trick which is soon repeated with his uncle Consul Tienappel).

Soon enough, time becomes compressed for Hans Castorp, for his trip ends one stop earlier than he expects -- just as he thinks that the journey will be over soon, it is already over.

Castorp's conversation with his friend Joachim Ziemssen quickly turns to time, too. Ziemssen informs Castorp that the scale of time is different for the inmates of the sanatorium, whose lives have been suspended. For them, Castorp's three week visit feels like nothing more than a day.

Krokowski -- psychoanalysis -- 16: "I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being."