Encyclopaedic explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Spiritual and Intellectual Degeneration

  The sanatorium's obsessive, feverish gossip about erotic affairs is presented as a symptom of a diseased, degenerate society focused solely on temperature and physical passions, lacking higher purpose.

• The Search for Meaning

  Settembrini explicitly positions his League's program of human progress and reason as the antidote to the meaningless, time-wasting, and suffering-obsessed existence of the Berghof.

• Time and Temporality

  Settembrini's central critique targets the 'barbaric lavishness with time' and 'Asiatic' recklessness with it at the Berghof, contrasting it with the Western, productive 'carpe diem' attitude needed to serve humanity.

Characters to notice

• Hans Castorp

  His emotional state makes him crave self-revelation and opens his eyes to the altered, alarming significance of romantic affairs at the Berghof. He receives a moral and political lecture from Settembrini.

• Ludovico Settembrini

  Delivers a passionate lecture against the 'Asiatic' lavishness with time at the Berghof, advocates for the Western ideals of progress and action, and introduces Hans to the principles of his International League for the Organization of Progress.

• Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt

  Mentioned as a central figure in the gossip about shifting romantic liaisons at the sanatorium, illustrating the feverish social climate.

• Lawyer Paravant

  Cited in the gossip about broken and new romantic bonds among the patients, specifically his ended affair with Frau Salomon and potential rivalry over Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt.

• Frau Salomon

  Her shift in affection from Lawyer Paravant to the younger Gänser is noted as part of the pervasive gossip.

• Gänser

  The 'thick-lipped young man' now under the wing of Frau Salomon, according to the sanatorium gossip.

Key passages

• “people were possessed of two ideas, and only two: temperature—and then again temperature. By the second temperature he meant preoccupation with such questions as, for instance, with whom Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt from Vienna consoled herself...”

  Settembrini cynically observes that life at the Berghof revolves entirely around bodily temperature and feverish sexual gossip.

  Highlights the reduction of existence to physical and erotic concerns.

• “this fundamental fact of life bore up here an entirely altered emphasis. It was weighty with a new weight; it had an accent, a value, and a significance which were utterly novel—and which set the fact itself in a light to make it look much more alarming than it had been before.”

  Hans Castorp realizes that erotic matters at the sanatorium are charged with a novel, exaggerated, and frightening significance unlike anything in the flatlands.

  Marks Hans's initiation into the distorted reality of the mountain.

• “This barbaric lavishness with time is in the Asiatic style; it may be a reason why the children of the East feel so much at home up here... We Europeans, we cannot. We have as little time as our great and finely articulated continent has space, we must be as economical of the one as of the other...”

  Settembrini condemns the reckless waste of time at the Berghof as 'Asiatic' and un-European, arguing that Europeans must husband time to serve progress.

  Core expression of Settembrini's Western, activist ideology versus Eastern passivity.

• “The oriental attitude toward suffering is one of pity and a boundless patience—that cannot, it ought not to be ours, to be yours!”

  Settembrini urges Hans to reject a passive, pitying, 'oriental' attitude toward suffering and adopt an active, European one.

  Posits a cultural dichotomy in responding to illness and suffering.