Formation

The Theme in the Work

Chapter II shows what Hans Castorp takes with him when he climbs. An orphan raised in Hamburg in the house of his great-uncle Tienappel, he acquires the habits of a bourgeois of the port city, and his profession as a naval engineer comes from a suggestion made by the elder Wilms at Consul Tienappel's whist table. The narrator interrupts the biography to say that his era does not answer the question "For what?" and that the young man had neither the heroic isolation nor the robust vitality that make up for that lack.

In Chapter V another education begins. Bedridden, Hans Castorp hears Lodovico Settembrini compare him to a friar who has just finished his novitiate; in the apartment of Dr. Behrens he steers the conversation from the portrait of Clavdia Chauchat to the question of what the body is; on winter nights, on the balcony, he reads alone the books of anatomy, physiology, and embryology that he bought on his own. Settembrini advises him to leave and offers him the yardstick of humanism, and Hans Castorp returns the advice.

In Chapter VI the masters become two. Leo Naphta enters the scene, and Hans Castorp listens to the two pedagogues argue in front of him. He tells them both that the deck chair has given him, in ten months, more ideas than the plain did in all the years before, and he denies Joachim Ziemssen the separation between becoming more intelligent and getting better in health. In the Snow, alone, he rejects both masters, formulates the sentence that neither of them reaches in the chapter, and by evening no longer understands it very well.

It is a novel of formation in which the student has no vocation and the masters cannot agree. What shapes Hans Castorp is neither of the pedagogues: it is what he studies on his own and what the mountain imposes on him, from the X-ray to the snowstorm. The high point of this formation is a lesson he gives himself and cannot retain, and the book does not hide the price: the student learns for real once, and forgets.

Where It Appears

• Chapter II, The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather: Hans Castorp loses his mother and then his father between the ages of five and seven, and spends a year and a half in the house of his grandfather, Senator Hans Lorenz Castorp.
• Chapter II, The House of the Tienappels and the Moral State of Hans Castorp: At Consul Tienappel's whist table, the elder Wilms suggests that Hans Castorp study naval engineering, and it is from this suggestion by another that the young man's career comes.
• Chapter III, Satan: Settembrini lectures Hans Castorp on humanism and pedagogy and states that only the humanist keeps the tradition of human dignity and beauty.
• Chapter IV, Dawning Dread. Of the Two Grandfathers and the Boat Ride at Dusk: Hans Castorp begins to listen to Settembrini at table and on walks, and the Italian tells him about his grandfather Giuseppe, a Carbonaro who walked dressed in black through the oppressed homeland, and closes the lesson with the word civilization.
• Chapter V, Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity: Bedridden, Hans Castorp receives a nighttime visit from Settembrini, who compares him to a newly tonsured novice and gives him a lesson on death.
• Chapter V, Encyclopedia: Settembrini shows Hans Castorp the letter from the League that commissions him to write the entry on belles-lettres for a twenty-volume encyclopedia of human suffering, and urgently advises him to leave, and Hans Castorp returns the advice.
• Chapter V, Humaniora: In Dr. Behrens's apartment, Hans Castorp questions the doctor about the skin, the lymph, and the blood, until he reaches the question of what the body is.
• Chapter V, Research: On November nights, Hans Castorp stays on the balcony until after midnight reading heavy books of anatomy, physiology, embryology, and pathology that he bought on his own.
• Chapter VI, Someone Else: Between Settembrini and Naphta, Hans Castorp says that the deck chair advanced him over the last ten months and gave him more ideas than the plain had in all the years before.
• Chapter VI, Snow: In a dream, after falling asleep in the snow, Hans Castorp says he wants to join the courteous young men of the gulf, not Naphta or Settembrini, whom he calls charlatans, and by evening he no longer quite understands what he had thought.

Passages

The vocation arrives as someone else's suggestion, not as a calling.

In Behrens's house, the underlying question belongs to the student, not to the doctor.

Between the two masters, Hans Castorp speaks from his own experience.

In the Snow, the student rejects both at once.

And the lesson fades the same night.