Who He Is
The medical director of the Berghof, who settled in Davos after losing his wife to tuberculosis and falling ill himself, which raises in Chapter IV the question of whether a sick doctor can cure.
But is it possible that someone who places himself among the slaves of a power can exercise over it an effective spiritual mastery? Can he who is oppressed set others free?, Doubts and Considerations
Trajectory
In Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer he examines Joachim and Hans Castorp and gives the second the diagnosis that changes the visit.
I have arrived at the very firm opinion that you were, clandestinely, one of us, and that you would come to realize this, as so many others did who came here for amusement, studied the surroundings with a sneer, and one fine day found out that it would be advisable for them [...] to abandon their attitude of indifferent curiosity and spend an extended stay here, The Thermometer
Well, the air we have here is good against illness. [...] But at the same time this air is also good for the illness; do you understand? At first it speeds up its course, it upsets the body, it fosters the eruption of the latent disease, and that eruption is, with your permission, your catarrh, The Thermometer
it is not worth returning, Hans Castorp, for in a short while you would have to present yourself again, The Thermometer
In Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis, and Walpurgis Night he conducts the fluoroscopy (see the X-ray), calls the spectacle a phantasmagoria, paints Clavdia Chauchat in oils, and leads Hans Castorp from the skin to the chemistry of life.
Invited to Behrens's apartment after asking, out of jealousy, whether he paints, Hans Castorp finds there the oil portrait of Clavdia Chauchat and uses the visit to drag the conversation from the lyrical to the physiological, in a mixture that he himself states as a program of life: medicine, law, theology, and art would be merely variants of the same humanistic interest in man.
To the question about the composition of flesh, Behrens answers in a chain that ends by identifying life and death in the same chemical process.Life is essentially a combustion of the proteins of the cells, whence comes that pleasant animal warmth, which is sometimes excessive. Yes indeed, living is dying, there is no use disguising it at this point. It is an organic destruction, as some little Frenchman, in his innate frivolity, described life
In Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and the Death of Joachim he sums up the death of Joachim Ziemssen in military language.
He slipped off to the field of honor, that runaway. But in his case honor meant death, and death... Well, you may reverse the sentence as you like. Either way, he told us: "I have the honor of taking my leave".
In Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom, and the Thunder he takes from the hands of Pieter Peeperkorn, dead, the instrument of the suicide.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that pass through him are Illness, Death, and Science and Technology.
Behrens brings together in one person the two views of the body that Chapter V crosses: that of the doctor who dissects and that of the painter who portrays. He is also the sick man who treats sick people, and Chapter IV leaves the question about this unanswered.
Relationships
- Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen: the cousins he examines and X-rays.
- Clavdia Chauchat: the patient he paints.
- Lodovico Settembrini: who calls the doctors of the Berghof judges of Hades.