The Great God Dumps explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Spiritual and Intellectual Degeneration

  Manifest in the residents' trivial, obsessive fads (photography, stamps, chocolate, puzzles) and Castorp's mindless card-playing. Paravant's monomaniacal circle-squaring exemplifies a distorted intellectual pursuit.

• Disease and Death

  Behrens's shifting medical diagnosis from tuberculosis to a streptococcal blood infection, and the new treatment of bloodletting. The chapter probes the elusive, multifaceted nature of illness.

• The Search for Meaning

  Castorp's boredom and dread ('The Great God Dumps') represent a crisis of meaning. The trivial diversions of the Berghof are failed attempts to fill this void, contrasted with Settembrini's search for political and moral clarity.

Characters to notice

• Hans Castorp

  Plunged into ennui and existential fear, playing endless patience, described as 'collapsed like a punctured tire.' He is the subject of Behrens's new medical theory and undergoes bloodletting.

• Hofrat Behrens

  Proposes a new diagnosis (streptococci in the blood) and treatment for Castorp, promising a 'complete cure.' His lively, corps-student cadences are noted, possibly for the last time.

• Ludovico Settembrini

  Finds Castorp playing cards and expresses his own political 'wound' over the Balkan situation and the impending conflict, seeking consolation but finding none.

• Dr. Krokowski

  Assists Behrens with the portentous bloodletting operation on Hans Castorp.

• Frau Stöhr

  Appears in a color photograph with Hans Castorp, part of the sanatorium's faddish photography craze.

• Fräulein Levi

  Appears in a color photograph with Hans Castorp, part of the sanatorium's faddish photography craze.

• Lawyer Paravant

  The virtuoso of geometric puzzles, now monomaniacally devoted to the impossible problem of squaring the circle, having overcome his earlier fleshly lusts.

Key passages

• “You’re collapsed like a punctured tire⁠—if some first-class excitement doesn’t come along every day, you pull a face as though you were saying: ‘H’m, small potatoes and few in the hill!’”

  Behrens tells Castorp he is visibly bored and listless, needing constant external stimulation to avoid a feeling of utter triviality.

  Highlights Castorp's spiritual ennui and the 'small potatoes' motif of meaningless routine.

• “It seemed to him 'all this' could come to no good, that a catastrophe was impending, that long-suffering nature would rebel, rise up in storm and whirlwind and break the great bond which held the world in thrall...”

  Castorp feels a deep, apocalyptic fear that the unnatural order of things will lead to a terrible, world-ending rebellion by nature itself.

  Expresses Castorp's existential dread and intuition of impending doom, linked to 'The Great God Dumps.'

• “The Balkan Federation will go through... And the combination is aimed against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy... Shall I, on that account, lend support and countenance in my soul to the Sarmatian despotism, which is about to set the torch to the whole of our highly civilized continent?”

  Settembrini is torn between his hatred for Austria and his fear that Russian-backed Balkan alliances will lead to a despotic war that destroys European civilization.

  Shows Settembrini's political and moral dilemma on the eve of World War I.

• “Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on the list...”

  The sanatorium residents cyclically obsess over one trivial hobby after another, each craze eventually replaced by the next.

  Illustrates the theme of spiritual degeneration through meaningless, faddish distraction.