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The Magic Mountain · Chapter VII

Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom, and the Thunder

DeathPassionReasonThe Meaning of LifeTime

Chapter summary

Chapter VII closes The Magic Mountain in two unequal halves. The first lives with Pieter Peeperkorn, the novel's answer to the duel of doctrines that runs through Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis, and Walpurgis Night and Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and Joachim's Death. The second describes the decay of the Berghof (see the Berghof) up to the shot that kills Leo Naphta and the thunder that returns Hans Castorp to the plain.

Walk on the Beach

Time

Section summary

The narrator opens Chapter VII by asking whether it is possible to narrate one's own time, and he answers that it is not: to say only that "time elapsed, flowed, followed its course" would not be narrative, just as holding the same chord for an hour would not be music. Narrative, like music, lives in time, but it has two times, the time it takes to be read and the time of its content, and the two can drift far apart, as in the dreams of opium smokers that span decades in minutes. For this reason a novel of an era can take time as its subject, and this is, he says, what he does with the story of Hans Castorp, returning to the reflection of the Excursus in Chapter IV: The Meaning of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer.

Hans Castorp, the narrator tells us, no longer knows for certain how long he has been at the Berghof, nor when Joachim left and died, nor since when Clavdia Chauchat has been back, nor even his own age, and he prefers not to do the reckoning. No one has an organ for sensing time, as shown by some miners buried alive who, when rescued, believed they had spent three days when it had been ten. The scrambled seasons, with snow in every month, blur the "still" and the "again," so that when Clavdia returns it is already Advent once more. The narrator recalls the dizziness Hans Castorp felt watching his hair and nails grow, the minutes he tried to hold on the clock's hand, and an imaginary walk by the sea, where a space without landmarks dissolves time. Medieval wisdom held that time is an illusion, but he concludes that the critique of reason serves duty and life, and he asks whether Joachim's death, to which the military "excess of enthusiasm" led him, would have confirmed Hans Castorp in his misuse of time and in his dangerous flirtation with eternity.

Analysis

The chapter opens by denying the possibility and at the same time practicing it: Can one narrate time itself, time as such, in itself? No, indeed, such a thing would be an insane audacity!

The question is rhetorical and works as a contract with the reader: the narrator promises to deal with time without pretending to make it an object of plot. He denies it, laughs at himself ("insane audacity"), and goes on to narrate time on its own terms. The paradox of someone who says it is impossible and throws himself into it is the paradox of the whole book.

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Mynheer Peeperkorn

Passion

Section summary

Mynheer Peeperkorn, Pieter Peeperkorn as he calls himself when announcing that he is going to treat himself to a little gin, is a Dutchman of a certain age, born in Java, a retired and wealthy coffee planter with a house in The Hague, who lodges at the Berghof among guests as varied as an Egyptian princess and her eunuch. He arrives at the station on the same night train as Clavdia Chauchat and rides up with her in the same sled, and the two dine together and occupy adjoining rooms on the first floor. Hans Castorp, who had been waiting for Clavdia and preparing a discreet reunion, is perplexed: Peeperkorn sits beside her at the table of distinguished Russians. Dr. Behrens says he did not know, that they must have met on the journey, that they are the closest of friends, and that Peeperkorn, immensely rich, suffers from catarrh and an intermittent tropical fever.

Hans Castorp describes him as robust and delicate: tall, broad-shouldered, with white hair, a sparse goatee, small dull eyes, and deep furrows across his forehead. Peeperkorn dominates any gathering through presence alone. He makes conductor's gestures, calls for silence, and begins speeches that never end, yet give the impression of great weight. He drinks very strong coffee and a bottle of wine at each meal, asks the dwarf maid, Emerentia, for a gin, which he calls "distilled bread," and kisses Clavdia's hand. Mrs. Stöhr teases Hans Castorp about the pearl necklace Clavdia now wears, and he corrects her slip with some grace (she meant "money magnate"). To Miss Engelhart, who asks what he thinks of the new guest, he replies with feigned indifference that Peeperkorn is a "faded personality." Clavdia does not even look toward his table, and the courtesies he had prepared for the reunion become useless. Caught off guard, Hans Castorp decides to keep his resentment under extreme reserve.

Analysis

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Vingt-et-un

Passion

Section summary

Three or four weeks later, Hans Castorp, resentful of Peeperkorn's presence, is alone in the reading room on a lively evening when Clavdia Chauchat appears behind his chair and asks after his cousin. He answers, without looking at her, that Joachim died serving on the plain and was buried with rifle salvos; she recalls that she had warned him this would happen. They converse in French and German. He says he has been waiting for her all this time and that he still has a fever; she tells him she has been to Moscow, Baku, and Spain, where she liked a Catalan dance, the sardana, and now brings a blue beret that Peeperkorn likes. He asks whether she still keeps his inner portrait, and she says she would have to look for it; he says he carries hers with him. At that moment the Dutchman Peeperkorn appears.

Clavdia introduces them and tells Peeperkorn that Hans Castorp is an acquaintance from her last stay at the Berghof. Peeperkorn says the young man pleases him and, in broken phrases, suggests that they spend the night together. Clavdia proposes playing cards and drinking wine, and sends Hans Castorp to gather company. He brings other patients, such as Ferge, Wehsal, Mr. Albin, the public prosecutor Paravant, the Magnus couple, Mrs. Stöhr, and Hermine Kleefeld, and twelve sit down at a table of Vingt-et-un. Peeperkorn pays for everything, laughs at the shouts of those betting, and dominates the table through his personality, although no one understands what he says. When Mrs. Magnus nearly faints, he orders cold cuts served, but soon flares up and pounds the table, calling them "trifles." Clavdia calms him, and he orders omelets, gin, and champagne.

Drunk, Peeperkorn tells Hans Castorp that depravity does not lie in cocaine or opium, and that the unforgivable sin resides in… and he leaves the sentence hanging. Hans Castorp completes it with "pettiness" (abandoning oneself to refined pleasures without honoring life's simple and sacred gifts), and Peeperkorn accepts the word and ties it to the defeat of feeling before life. He says that life is like a woman who challenges manhood, and that failing before her is the "end of the world." Hans Castorp argues that vice can also be a tribute to life, and Peeperkorn raises his fist to strike him, but Hans disarms him by praising wine as a divine gift and the basis of civilization. Peeperkorn calls him "brother, to whom I say thou," invokes Gethsemane to wake the guests who doze, and presides until two in the morning over a bacchanal of champagne, coffee, and liqueurs. A rumor that Dr. Behrens is approaching breaks up the party. Hans Castorp and Clavdia take the drunken Dutchman to the door of his apartment, where, in the corridor, he orders the two of them to kiss on the forehead, and Hans refuses.

Analysis

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Mynheer Peeperkorn (continued)

IllnessPassionReasonThe Meaning of Life

Section summary

Peeperkorn spends the rest of winter and part of spring at the Berghof, with group excursions attended by Ferge, Wehsal, Settembrini, and Naphta, and Hans Castorp visits him on days of quartan fever, as on the day after the night of cards and champagne, when the Dutchman lectures on quinine and bark poisons until Clavdia Chauchat ends the visit. On walks, his presence empties the disputes between Naphta and Settembrini over the Church as a revolutionary or conservative force and over the "aristocratic problem": without a spark, the conversation turns personal. When the disputes drag on, Peeperkorn cuts them short with a speech about an eagle in the sky and leads everyone to a banquet with Valtellina wine, at which Ferge tells of his travels. Settembrini asks Hans what he sees in this "stupid old man," and Hans answers that there is in him a "personality," a vital value that "outclasses us," and that he does not see in Peeperkorn a rival.

One night, when Peeperkorn is bedridden with fever, Clavdia asks Hans for a stamp and a cigarette in the vestibule, where he smokes in a rocking chair. They speak of phlegmatic passion, of waiting, and of "humaneness." He says that his cousin Joachim died as she predicted and that he does not intend to leave on a "false start." She confesses that she is afraid to be alone with Peeperkorn, says she would like to have a good man at her side, perhaps that is why she came back, and proposes an alliance on his behalf. Then she kisses him on the mouth.

One afternoon of thaw, while Clavdia is out shopping, Hans visits Peeperkorn in bed and hears him say that feeling is divine and that a man's failure in feeling would be a cosmic catastrophe. The Dutchman asks whether he loves madame, notes that he never addresses her with the formal "Madame," recalls that on the night they met he refused to kiss her forehead, and concludes: "You were Clavdia's lover." Hans answers that denying it would be a half-lie, and speaks of the night of "the twenty-ninth of February" and of the sorrows of his fate. Peeperkorn says he would give him satisfaction with a weapon if his age and fever allowed, and offers fraternity in feeling. They drink with arms linked and begin using the familiar form of address. He sends the young man away before Clavdia returns.

Analysis

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Mynheer Peeperkorn (end)

DeathPassionThe Meaning of Life

Section summary

In May, with the thaw over, Peeperkorn, whose tropical fever often keeps him in bed, organizes a carriage excursion to the waterfall in the Flüela valley, with Clavdia, Hans Castorp, the patients Ferge and Wehsal, Settembrini, and Naphta. On the way, Wehsal, the young man from Mannheim, confides to Hans Castorp that he suffers from desire for Clavdia and envies Hans for having been in her arms, and he says that every night he dreams she slaps him and spits in his face. Hans Castorp tells him to be quiet. After a walk through a sickly forest, covered in lichen, they reach the waterfall, whose roar drowns out any word, and Peeperkorn, despite the others' displeasure, insists on having lunch right there, between port wine and coffee. Settembrini, who expected a conversation, resigns himself with a gesture. Peeperkorn then rises and, standing, makes a toast and a silent speech, made only of gestures and loose words that no one hears, which the others applaud with signs.

In the early hours of the next morning, Hans Castorp, who had already woken alone, hears a nurse knock at the door at Clavdia's request: Peeperkorn is dead. In the room are the doctors, the head nurse, Clavdia, and the Malay servant, dressed in the Javanese style. Dr. Behrens shows Hans Castorp what the Dutchman used, a steel and ivory instrument that imitates a cobra's fangs and injects poison, and he confirms the suicide, which must have been quick and painless. Hans Castorp is left alone with Clavdia, who tells him that he had the right to be sent for. He answers that he is ashamed of not having addressed the Dutchman as "thou" in front of others, and that for Peeperkorn the failure of feeling before life was a cosmic catastrophe. He tells her that Peeperkorn had guessed everything when he refused to kiss her forehead in his presence, and he asks permission to do so now, beside the dead man. He kisses her on the forehead, under the servant's gaze.

Analysis

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The Great Boredom

Time

Section summary

Dr. Behrens, seeing Hans Castorp bored and blasé, says he has had an idea for curing him: the X-ray shows the lungs improving, so the persistent temperature must have another cause, perhaps streptococci in the blood. He proposes a bloodletting, laboratory cultures, and then a treatment with a vaccine made from his own blood, and Hans Castorp accepts with irony. After Clavdia's departure, which she made with a kiss beside the dead man, and after Peeperkorn's death, he feels the world out of joint. The narrator names what dominates him: the Demon of Boredom, life without time, without cares or hopes, dead life.

At the Berghof, the patients surrender in waves to crazes: photography, with darkrooms and a fire; philately; the consumption of chocolate; the drawing of geometric figures with eyes blindfolded, a legacy of the game of little pigs; the prosecutor Paravant thinks only of squaring the circle; a sculptor proposes collecting old newspapers; others study Esperanto or play an English game, and the passages between the balconies have been locked. Hans Castorp listens to their confidences and spends his days playing patience. When Settembrini finds him with the cards and speaks to him about the world situation, Hans Castorp barely listens, and the Italian leaves him, saying that he knows very well where he has ended up. Hans Castorp is left alone, frightened by "The Great Boredom."

The bloodletting is done, and the cultures show cocci. Behrens applies the vaccine for weeks with no effect at all, and Hans Castorp continues to play patience before the demon, feeling that its reign will have a terrible end.

Analysis

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Abundance of Harmony

Section summary

One day the sanatorium gets a new gramophone, a Polyhymnia, with twelve albums of records, which Dr. Behrens presents to the public. The boarders marvel at an overture by Offenbach, an aria from The Barber of Seville, a hunting horn, an aria from La Traviata, and dance records, and some of them dance the tango. Hans Castorp, who has listened in silence, feels that "a new era is beginning," a new love. After the councillor leaves, he pushes the others away from the machine, says "leave this to me," and takes charge of it. The boarders, who prefer to be served without responsibility, comply, and he spends the night examining the records. Then he confiscates the key to the cabinet that holds the albums and the needles, so that whoever wants music must call on him.

Hans Castorp's best hours come at night, when the others sleep and he listens to the records alone in the salon, hands folded, without seeing the singers, whom he knows only by their voices. He has five favorite pieces. One is the finale of Verdi's Aida: Radamès, condemned by the priests for treason, is walled up alive and finds Aida, who had waited for him in the tomb so as to die with him, and Hans Castorp admires how the music beautifies the horror of reality. The second is a French symphonic prelude that makes him dream of a summer meadow, where he, with goat's legs, plays a flute without duty or time. The third brings together passages from Carmen: the soldier José is called by the barracks bugle just when the gypsy wants to dance for him, and she mocks him. In his aria he sings of the flower she gave him, and the chorus sings of the freedom of the wandering life. The fourth is the prayer of the soldier Valentin, in Gounod's Faust, who entrusts his sister to God before leaving for war. Hans Castorp, inwardly, calls it by another name, one more familiar and full of painful memories: that of Joachim, as the session in which he evokes his cousin will show.

The fifth is Schubert's lied "The Linden Tree," to which Hans Castorp is especially attached. The narrator explains that love for an object reveals the world it symbolizes, and that Hans Castorp knows what the song means: behind it stands death, so loving it is a forbidden love, a fruit of life begotten by death. This love, which he himself criticizes, demands a triumph over oneself. It would be worth dying for this song, but whoever dies for it dies for something new, for a new word of love and of the future.

Analysis

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Very Questionable Things

Death

Section summary

Dr. Krokowski's lectures, which already dealt with hypnotism, somnambulism, and telepathy, move into the experimental phase with the arrival of Elly Brand, a nineteen-year-old Danish woman and former bank clerk from Odense, who eats at Hermine Kleefeld's table. In the games of the evening gatherings she carries out, to the letter, actions combined in secret, and she confesses that someone whispers everything into her ear. It is the ghost Holger, whom she has known since childhood apparitions, such as the shawl that wrapped itself up by itself, and her sister Sophie seen on the stairs at the hour she died in America. Krokowski claims her for science and forbids amateur experiments, but Hans Castorp, curious and at the same time averse, agrees to take part in a séance with the tumbler in Kleefeld's room, with Albin, Wenzel, Dr. Ting-Fu, and Mrs. Stöhr and Mrs. Levi.

The tumbler spells out Holger, who says he is a poet, "serene" in "impatient imminence," with "beautiful brown curls." Offended by a joke from Dr. Ting-Fu, it rolls across the table and then improvises, for more than an hour, a poem about the sea, the dunes, and the hourglass. To Hans's question about how long he will remain up here, it gives an incoherent answer and sends him "to his room at an angle." Then a blow shakes the door and the table, the lamp goes out, and Elly sits motionless, with an empty gaze. With the light on again, Hans finds under his knees the lantern slide with the portrait of Clavdia Chauchat that he kept in his room, and he hides it. Settembrini calls Elly an impostor and extracts from his disciple almost a promise of abstention. It becomes known later that at Krokowski's sessions, with hypnosis and the gramophone, a handkerchief rises, a materialized hand and Holger's head appear, and Elly promises to bring back any dead person.

One night, on hearing the Prayer of Valentin in the music room, Hans Castorp decides to take part. At the session in Krokowski's office, under red light, he controls Elly's hands and knees, while she writhes for more than two hours in an effort that recalls childbirth, between the gramophone and the guitar of the Czech Wenzel. He had asked to see his cousin Joachim, and at his suggestion the Prayer record is put on, which happened to be among the light pieces already. When the record ends, Mrs. Stöhr murmurs "Ziem... ssen," and Hans sees Joachim seated in the patients' armchair, with his warrior's beard, a saber, and a helmet that looks like a mess tin, looking at him calmly. Hans sobs, murmurs "Forgive me!", ignores Krokowski's request that he speak to him, turns on the white light, sees the armchair empty, takes the room key from the doctor, and leaves.

Analysis

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The Great Irritation

DeathReason

Section summary

Over the years, the Berghof is overtaken by a general irritation: quarrels over trivial matters, shouting, and fits of rage that spread to whoever watches. A girl from Minsk has a hemoptysis after arguing with a dressmaker and is considered incurable from then on. A schoolboy shouts at the maid because the tea is said to be cold. The anti-Semite Wiedemann and the sick man Sonnenschein come to blows in the vestibule, and Poles exchange slaps in a bar and distribute declarations of honor, which everyone reads with passion, even Naphta and Settembrini. Hans Castorp notices that he himself is catching it. The two adversaries, increasingly ill, quarrel more and more. Naphta, feverish, denies that spirit can realize itself in matter, treats justice as an empty idea and science as a belief, and finds war desirable, since it scorns the softness of the bourgeois state, concerned only with safety. He sees an edifying effect in the sinking of the Titanic. Settembrini, also shaken by illness, can hardly respond.

On a February afternoon, five men go by sled to Monstein: Naphta, Settembrini, Hans Castorp, and the patients Ferge and Wehsal. During coffee, Naphta addresses only Hans Castorp and discourses on the ambiguity of ideas and of freedom: Romanticism was liberating, the Reformation mixed freedom and reaction, and a "deed," such as the murder of Kotzebue by the student Sand, is never clear. Settembrini interrupts him by asking whether he intends to finish with these indecencies, and Naphta challenges him to a duel, saying that it is from radical doubt and moral chaos that the sacred terror time needs is born. On the way back, Hans Castorp argues that insulting someone with ideas is not insulting the person. Settembrini replies that spirit, being rigorous, leads to "either you or me," and that the duel is a return to the primitive state for which every man must be ready. Hans Castorp finds himself without the strength to rebel against this. Naphta chooses pistols and has Wehsal as his second; Ferge is Settembrini's; Hans Castorp, who had offered himself, is accepted only as referee. He manages to reduce Naphta's demands, from five paces and three shots to fifteen paces with an advance of five and a single exchange of shots. He asks Mr. Albin to lend the pistols and proposes as the place the bench by the stream, where he is accustomed to meditate.

On the third morning, at eighteen degrees below zero, the five arrive at the site. On the way, Settembrini tells Hans Castorp that he will expose himself to the bullet, but will not kill. Naphta smokes a cigarette in front of the snow-covered bench, asks for the weapons, and cuts short Hans Castorp's attempt at conciliation. Ferge measures the ground and marks the limits with walking sticks. Naphta advances with his arm extended. Settembrini, at the third step, fires into the air. Naphta calls him a coward and, instead of firing, points the pistol at his own head and kills himself. Settembrini exclaims, distressed, "Unhappy man!", and Hans Castorp helps him turn the body over.

Analysis

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The Thunder

DeathReasonThe Meaning of LifeTime

Section summary

Hans Castorp completes seven years at the Berghof, after eating about a year at each of the seven tables, and he is now at the table of the "ordinary Russians," with a blond goatee. The doctors barely speak to him, as to a failed student from whom no one expects anything more. The boy Teddy, a seriously ill patient whom the cousins had visited as children, grows up and dies at twenty-one. On the plain, the old Consul Tienappel dies, and Hans Castorp writes to the Tienappel relatives in Hamburg that he cannot interrupt his stay. He no longer writes or receives letters. He smokes a local brand, Rütlischwur, which he uses as an hourglass, and he has no working clock (see the clock), because his stopped when it fell off the little table, nor any calendar.

Settembrini, weakened since Naphta's suicide, spends his days lying in the attic, and Hans Castorp visits him to hear his remarks on the world situation, which mix humanitarianism and bellicosity: he is horrified by the attack on the heir to the throne, but thrills at the idea of a blow against Austria. Then the thunder of war breaks over Europe and flings Hans Castorp out of the mountain like a sleeper who wakes in the grass. The patients rush off on "false starts" to the plain, the station fills with luggage, and Hans Castorp also packs his bags. Settembrini embraces him, kisses his cheeks, addresses him for the first time as "thou" and as "Giovanni," and says that he will fight among his own, while he himself will urge his country to fight on the other side.

In the final scene, the narrator accompanies, like a shadow, a regiment of three thousand young volunteers through the mud and under artillery fire. Hans Castorp, with his goatee, runs singing "The Linden Tree" among the shells, steps on a comrade's hand, narrowly escapes a shell that tears two friends apart, and disappears from view in the twilight. The narrator takes his leave of him and asks whether from this world festival of death love will still be born.

Analysis

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