Chapter summary
Chapter II interrupts Hans Castorp's arrival at the Berghof (see the Berghof), told in Chapter I: The Arrival at the Berghof, in order to return to his childhood in Hamburg: it is the great backward leap of the novel, and for that very reason it is the place where the book installs, before any explicit discussion, its first thesis about time and about death.
Of the Baptismal Basin and the Two Figures of the Grandfather
Section summary
Hans Castorp loses his mother to an embolism and then his father to pneumonia, between the ages of five and seven, and spends a year and a half in the house of his paternal grandfather, Senator Hans Lorenz Castorp, in a mansion on Esplanade Street. He lunches with him every day, served by the old servant Fiete, and silently observes the grandfather's precise hands and his chin resting on a white cravat, which only the two old men still wear. The ritual he remembers best is asking his grandfather, in the study, to show him the baptismal basin: a silver bowl on a tray from 1650, on whose back are the names of seven owners. The grandfather recites these names and says that the baptismal water of the boy, of his father and of himself ran over that same basin. Hearing the "bis, tris, tetra" of the ancestors, the boy feels the dizzying impression of something that passes without moving, and breathes a churchly air of death and history.
The senator is a Reformed and traditionalist Christian, averse to the city's novelties, thin and stooped, who holds himself upright to hide the beginning of a tremor in his head. For the boy, this everyday grandfather is a provisional and ill-fitting form; the true one is the life-size portrait, of a councilman, in a fur-trimmed robe and a Spanish ruff, of which the hard collar and the street top hat are mere allusions.
At the wake, after fighting pneumonia to the end, the grandfather lies in the coffin with the ruff and an ivory crucifix between his fingers, and Hans Castorp approves of his finally appearing in his authentic form. It is the third death the boy has seen in a short time, and he notes in it two aspects: one pious and solemn, of flowers, palms and candelabra, and another purely material, almost indecent, of a body that looks like wax, with a fly on its forehead and a smell that the tuberoses cannot mask. After the burial, at which Pastor Bugenhagen also speaks in a ruff, the boy changes houses for the second time.
Analysis
His parents die while he is still a child: Both died in the brief interval between the fifth and the seventh year of his life.
The narrator gives the orphanhood in a few lines and without drama, as a family fact, and it is this early familiarity with death that will leave Hans at ease among the dying of the sanatorium.
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Of the Tienappel House and the Moral Condition of Hans Castorp
Section summary
Also orphaned of his grandfather, Hans Castorp comes to live with his maternal great-uncle, Consul Tienappel, his guardian, who sells the Castorp properties, liquidates the firm Castorp & Son and saves some four hundred thousand marks of inheritance, invested in safe securities. The narrator describes the young man raised among wind and mist, somewhat anemic and dreamy, at ease in the damp air of the port city, among cranes, quays and shipyards, attached to good food and comfort, and presents him without exaggeration: neither a genius nor a fool.
The narrator then interrupts the account to diagnose the young man's moral condition: when the age does not answer the question "What for?", whoever has neither a heroic nature nor robust vitality loses vigor, in soul and even in body, and Hans Castorp has neither. He repeats some years, studies only to gain time, and does not know what he wants to become; only ships have always interested him. When his uncle tells him that his income is not enough to live on interest, and old Wilms, of the firm Tunder & Wilms, tells the consul that the young man should study naval engineering and join his firm, Hans Castorp chooses that profession. He respects the work almost like a religion, but cannot love it, because the effort irritates his nerves.
Exempted from military service, he studies in Danzig, Brunswick and Karlsruhe, and at twenty-two he passes the theoretical examinations, without distinction but with dignity. Exhausted, he is advised by the doctor to spend a few weeks in the high mountains before entering the shipyards. The uncle, whom the altitude would harm, sends him alone to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who traded law for a military career and has been interned in Davos for five months with a lung disease. At the end of July, Hans Castorp decides to travel for three weeks.
Analysis