The Magic Mountain
The events in the order the book tells them.
Chapter I
- Chapter I1
The Arrival in Davos
Hans Castorp, a young engineer from Hamburg, climbs by train into the Swiss Alps to spend three weeks in Davos with his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is being treated at the Berghof sanatorium. He thinks he will soon be back.
- Chapter I2
Room 34
Joachim takes Hans to room 34, where an American woman died days earlier and everything was disinfected. Nervous, Hans talks about cigars and cold feet and, on the way to dinner, hears the cough of an Austrian aristocrat.
Chapter II
- Chapter II3
The Baptismal Font
Orphaned of father and mother, little Hans Castorp spends a year and a half with his grandfather, Senator Hans Lorenz Castorp. He asks him to show the silver baptismal font, and the old man recites the names of the seven owners.
- Chapter II4
Great-Uncle Tienappel
After the grandfather's death, the great-uncle, Consul Tienappel, becomes Hans's guardian. He sells the properties and liquidates the family firm, saving about four hundred thousand marks of inheritance, and the boy grows up neither a genius nor a fool.
Chapter III
- Chapter III5
The Room of the Seven Tables
At breakfast, Hans expects a funereal atmosphere and finds, in the room of the seven tables, tanned young people chatting and trading photos and stamps. Joachim tells him who the woman in black is, who only repeats the words tous les deux.
- Chapter III6
The Half-Lung Society
On the first walk, Hans passes smiling patients and a girl who whistles without moving her lips. Joachim explains that it is pneumothorax, a treatment that puts a diseased lung at rest, and that there time means nothing.
- Chapter III7
The Italian Humanist
On a bench, Joachim introduces Hans to the Italian man of letters Lodovico Settembrini, a disciple of Carducci. He calls the doctors judges of the world of the dead, says that there no one counts by weeks, and quotes the hymn to Satan.
- Chapter III8
The Glass Door
At lunch the glass door slams again, and Hans finally sees who slams it: a young woman in a white sweater, whom Miss Engelhart identifies as Madame Chauchat. During the afternoon rest, he smokes the cigar to the end.
Chapter IV
- Chapter IV9
The Excursus on Time
Joachim teaches Hans to wrap himself in blankets, and the narrator interrupts the scene to explain why time seems long in the first days of a new place and then shrinks with habit. Hans feels the same.
- Chapter IV10
Hippe's Pencil
On a solitary walk, tired of horizontal life, Hans remembers his schoolmate Pribislav Hippe, with slanted eyes, for whom he felt a feeling he could not name, and from whom he had asked for a pencil in the schoolyard.
- Chapter IV11
Krokowski's Lecture
Hans arrives late at the lecture of Dr. Krokowski, the sanatorium doctor, with his clothes stained with blood, and sits behind Madame Chauchat, who turns and looks at him with eyes like Hippe's. Krokowski says repressed love returns as illness.
- Chapter IV12
The Thermometer
With a cold that no one there recognizes, Hans buys a thermometer from the head nurse. Dr. Behrens, the chief physician of the sanatorium, examines him, finds a damp spot in his lung and sends him to bed: the three-week visit becomes treatment.
Chapter V
- Chapter V13
The X-Ray
In the dark X-ray room, Hans sees in Joachim's body the skeleton and the beating heart, and thinks about death. Then Dr. Behrens examines the inside of Hans himself.
- Chapter V14
The Dying
After the Austrian aristocrat dies, Hans decides to visit the seriously ill of the Berghof and sends flowers in the name of two companions, in protest against the custom of hiding the death of the other patients.
- Chapter V15
Walpurgis Night
On Shrove Tuesday, amid masks and champagne, Hans asks Clavdia Chauchat for a pencil and, alone with her, learns that she leaves the next day for Daghestan, and declares his love to her on his knees, in French.
Chapter VI
- Chapter VI16
Clavdia's Departure
Clavdia leaves the Berghof by sled, bound for Daghestan, saying she may return. Hans keeps over his heart what she left him when she departed: the X-ray plate of her chest.
- Chapter VI17
The Jesuit Naphta
Hans visits Leo Naphta, a Jesuit who lives in the house of the tailor Lukacek, neighbor of Settembrini. In the silk-lined study, a Gothic wooden pietà, which Naphta calls a sign of mortification, impresses the young man.
- Chapter VI18
Joachim Returns to His Regiment
In September, Joachim tells Behrens he is leaving without waiting for a cure, to report to his regiment. Hans takes him to the station and, at the farewell, the cousin calls him by his first name for the first time.
- Chapter VI19
The Snowstorm
To be alone with his thoughts, Hans buys skis. Caught by a snowstorm, he falls asleep in the snow and dreams of a sunny beach and a terrible temple; he wakes, returns to the Berghof and soon forgets what he had thought.
- Chapter VI20
The Death of Joachim
Joachim, back with the regiment, falls ill again and returns to the Berghof with his mother. The illness reaches his larynx, and he dies beside his mother and Hans, who later hear Dr. Behrens say that he slipped away to the field of honor.
Chapter VII
- Chapter VII21
Peeperkorn Arrives
Hans waits for Clavdia's return, but she arrives at the Berghof on the same train and in the same sled as the Dutch coffee planter Pieter Peeperkorn, born in Java, and the two occupy adjoining rooms.
- Chapter VII22
The Reunion
In the reading room, Clavdia asks after Joachim, and Hans answers, without looking at her, that he died. The two talk in French and in German, until Peeperkorn appears.
- Chapter VII23
The Flüela Waterfall
In May, Peeperkorn takes Clavdia, Hans, Settembrini, Naphta and others by coach to the waterfall in the Flüela valley. The roar of the water drowns out every voice, and he makes a toast and a speech that no one hears.
- Chapter VII24
Peeperkorn's Death
In the early hours of the next morning, Hans is called to Peeperkorn's room, where the man has killed himself with an instrument that imitates a cobra's fangs. Beside the dead man, Hans kisses Clavdia's forehead.
- Chapter VII25
The Great Boredom
Bored and feverish, Hans hears from Behrens the proposal of bloodletting and of a vaccine made from his own blood, and accepts with irony. Without Clavdia and without Peeperkorn, he feels the world off its hinges: it is the great boredom.
- Chapter VII26
Joachim's Spirit
At a session of occultism run by Krokowski, Hans asks to see his dead cousin. With Valentin's Prayer playing on the gramophone, Joachim appears in the armchair; Hans asks forgiveness, turns on the light, and the armchair is empty.
- Chapter VII27
The Duel in the Snow
Naphta challenges Settembrini, and the two face each other with pistols, at dawn, in the snow. Settembrini fires into the air, Naphta calls him a coward and kills himself with a shot to his own head.
- Chapter VII28
The Thunder
Hans completes seven years at the Berghof, and the war breaks out. Settembrini, shaken by Naphta's death, bids him farewell at the crowded station, and Hans, who came for three weeks, goes down from the mountain to fight.
- Chapter VII29
The Last Scene
On a muddy battlefield, Hans advances with the soldiers under artillery fire, softly singing a stanza of "The Linden Tree." The narrator loses sight of him without saying whether he survives, and asks whether from the war love will still arise.