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Part 2, Chapter 1: The Baptismal Bowl/Grandfather in His Two Forms
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Magic Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time
Coming of Age
Death and Illness
East vs. West
Abstract Ideals vs. Lived Experience
Summary
Analysis
After the death of his grandfather, young Hans moves in with Consul Tienappel, his late mother’s uncle and the executor for the Castorp estate. Tienappel provided Hans everything he needed and looked after his financial interests, liquidating the Castorp family firm and managing the investment of Hans’s inheritance. The Tienappel house has a garden out front that is impeccably neat. The Consul has two sons, Peter and James. Peter is in the navy and rarely home, meanwhile James works for the family wine business. A servant who has worked for the family for years, Schalleen, prepares elaborate meals for the household and acts as Hans’s mother.
The purpose of this section of the novel is to describe Hans’s early years. This gives readers a better sense of the person Hans is when he arrives at the Berghof and begins his educational journey toward maturity. Here, readers learn that despite the tragedy that has characterized Hans’s earliest years, he has enjoyed a cozy, bourgeois upbringing thanks to his affluent relatives.
Themes
All things considered, Hans grows up relatively happy, though perhaps initially a bit anemic, and so Dr. Heidekind prescribes him a glass of porter to drink each day when he returns from school. Young Hans is pleased to find that the prescription has a pleasantly calming effect, and he takes to dozing and dreaming the afternoons away. To an outsider, the clean and well-dressed boy would look right at home at the Tienappel estate.
This scene is played for comedy. Dr. Heidekind has essentially suggested that Hans get tipsy and then nap all afternoon, and he presents this as legitimate medical advice. But this also gives readers insight into the habits Hans has developed as a youth—notably, he’s accustomed to idleness, which will make him right at home in the Berghof years later.
Themes
Young Hans likes to live well, and he enjoys vices of rich foods, cigars, and glasses of port. Having enjoyed an upper-class status since birth, he accepts his wealth with dignity and has everything taken care of for him. Even when he’s away at school, he sends his clothing home for Schalleen to wash and mend. After dinner, he enjoys a Russian cigarette and then a cigar. The narrator notes that their goal is to say everything there is to say about Hans and to convey that information without judgment. Hans, they insist, was neither smart nor stupid, and it’s only because of his eventual fate that the narrator refrains from calling him “mediocre” outright.
Hans, this scene makes clear, has lived a soft and easy life. He’s endured great losses, to be sure, but generally, he hasn’t had to struggle or exert himself all that much. Indeed, he can’t even be bothered to do his own laundry and has Schalleen, the Tienappels’ servant, take care of it for him. The narration emphasizes Hans’s easy life and “mediocre” character to show readers just how inexperienced and impressionable he is at the start of his coming-of-age journey: when he arrives at the Berghof years later, he’s effectively a blank slate, ready to be educated or corrupted.
Themes
One day, the Consul reminds Hans that the Consul’s sons will inherit most of his money. And while Hans does have his own inheritance, the interest he’s gained won’t be enough for Hans to keep up the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to. So, Hans sets to work finding a career—ideally one that would let him prove his worth, both to himself and to others. He chooses that career after old Wilms, of the firm Tunder and Wilms, comes by to play whist with Tienappel one evening and suggests that Hans study shipbuilding and then come to work for his firm. Hans does so, and he finds his chosen course of study rewarding and well-suited to his calm disposition. He looks down on Joachim Ziemssen for becoming an officer, a job that demanded little intellectual rigor. Hans values hard work, though he “tire[s] easily.”
Here Hans encounters what is perhaps the first disruption to his easy, effortless existence: the Consul informs him that he’ll have to get a real job if he wants to continue living the comfortable life he’s grown accustomed to. But even this doesn’t add all that much conflict to Hans’s easy life: things simply fall into place for him when an acquaintance of his great-uncle’s offers him a promising opportunity. This scene also establishes Joachim as a foil for Hans: while Hans likes the easy life and “tire[s] easily,” Joachim seems to value hard work and honor. That Hans, whom the narrator has emphasized is not particularly smart himself, should look down on Joachim for not choosing a job that demands intellectual rigor, paints Hans in a rather negative light—at least Joachim is doing something useful with his life. Hans has yet to begin his career in earnest.
Themes
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When Hans comes home on vacation from school, people wonder which political party he’ll side with. He comes from an old, renowned family name, so it seems inevitable that he’ll hold some public office. It seems likely that he’d become a conservative like his grandfather. But Hans is an engineer—an embracer of modern technology—and so it’s just as likely that he’d become a radical.
Again, the narration portrays Hans as an inexperienced and impressionable blank slate. He hasn’t yet established which values and principles—political or otherwise—will guide his actions and influence his worldview.
Themes
When Hans leaves for the sanitorium in Davos Platz, he is 23 and has been studying at Danzig Polytechnic for four semesters, and he is about to join Tunder and Wilms as an unpaid engineer-in-training. But then things suddenly change. Studying for his exams exhausts Hans, and he returns home looking a bit too pale. Dr. Heidekind insists that Hans retreat to the Alps for a few weeks for “a change of air” before starting work on the docks. Consul Tienappel suggests that Hans pay his cousin Joachim a visit. This makes sense—Joachim, unlike Hans, is actually ill and has been sickly his whole life. At this point, he’s been a resident of the International Sanatorium Berghof for five months and has grown dreadfully bored there. It’s July when Hans leaves for the facility, and he plans to stay there just three weeks.
This passage concludes the novel’s brief overview of Hans’s past. Now, readers have a better sense of the kind of person Hans is. He was brought up with conventional, bourgeois values, he doesn’t have much life experience, abhors hard work, and doesn’t have any firmly held beliefs about the world and his place in it. And these aspects of Hans’s personality mean he’s especially vulnerable to others’ influences.
Themes
