Pieter Peeperkorn is a colonial Dutchman, born in Java and a coffee planter, who arrives at the sanatorium in chapter VII together with Clavdia Chauchat and dominates any circle through his mere presence, almost without finishing a sentence.
Ill with a malignant fever caught in the tropics, he speaks in fragments, and yet everyone at the table feels they have heard something of great weight. The narrator says that whoever saw him suddenly knew what a personality was. Beside him, the debate between Settembrini and Naphta loses its force. Peeperkorn raises wine, food, and sleep to gifts of life and makes feeling a religious duty: if a man fails in feeling, "the ignominy of God" breaks in.
Knowing of Hans Castorp's past with Clavdia, he calls him brother and proposes an alliance sealed with wine, instead of a settlement by arms that he says he cannot give him because of his age and illness. Later, he kills himself with poison, using an instrument that imitates the fangs of a cobra.
Peeperkorn is the strangest and most decisive figure in the book: the answer to the duel of the pedagogues is not a third doctrine, it is a presence. Anyone who summarizes the novel through the theses of Settembrini and Naphta loses precisely this.