The Magic Mountain: Part 4, Chapter 7: Doubts and Considerations Summary & Analysis

After Hans has been at the Berghof for one week, he gets a bill. It includes “medical treatment,” but Hans is fine with that, even though he didn’t seek any—it’s just part of the daily rate. He finds the fee reasonable.

Later that day, Hans and Joachim discuss the management and structure of the Berghof. Director Behrens, it turns out, is not the owner of the institution—he is not an independent agent but merely acting on behalf of these more powerful forces. He came here by accident, when his sickly wife stayed here during the last few months of her life. It’s rumored that Behrens became deeply depressed after her death and seemed to lose touch with reality. After her death, he stuck around, both because he wanted to be near her grave but also because he’d become sick himself—and thus “belonged here.” The narrator, at this point, contemplates whether it’s possible for a doctor who is himself infected to be fully invested in curing others.

As Hans listens to Joachim talk about Behrens’s backstory, he expresses the same doubt about Behrens as the narrator has just voiced. Joachim counters that, while there’s no way to know for sure whether Behrens is still a patient, it’s likely that he’s fully recovered by now. His children visit him sometimes, too. When his son, a university student, visited, it caused many of the women residents’ temperatures to rise and led to many dissection appointments with Krokowski.  

Krokowski holds his consultations in a private room in a part of the sanatorium that people refer to as “the basement,” though the space is not  actually underground, it just looks like it is.  Hans glimpses the space once and notes how dark and mysterious it appears, as though stuck in a permanent dusk—so unlike the “clinical whiteness” of the rest of the facility.