The Magic Mountain: Part 4, Chapter 9: Growing Anxiety/Two Grandfathers and a Twilight Boat Ride Summary & Analysis

The lousy weather continues, making it difficult for Joachim and Hans to take another outing. Hans doesn’t mind the monotony though, since he’s only going to be here three weeks total. Curiously, though, Hans can’t help but feel regret that his stay at the Berghof seems to be flying by as his infatuation with Madame Chauchat grows. He stares at her in the dining hall but pretends not to, a bad performance meant for her to see right through—as she clearly does. One day she stares back at him, and their mutual shock at this causes her to drop her napkin. After this incident, however, she doesn’t look at him for another two days. 

Hans longs to be in Madame Chauchat’s company, even though he also admits that she is beneath him, with her poor posture, bad manners, and bitten fingernails. One day, when he overhears her in the lobby struggling to speak German, he feels a sudden pride in his native language and feels superior to Madame Chauchat. In a sense, he regards his “relationship” with the odd woman as little more than a vacation fling and therefore not quite real, however much he continues to daydream about her. 

Nevertheless, Hans does make some effort to meet Madame Chauchat properly. Knowing that she arrives late to meals, he starts arriving late, too, and discreetly making sure to pass by her door around the time she usually leaves for the dining hall. On the days she emerges from her room just after Hans has passed by her door, Hans can feel her eyes on his back, and it makes the nerves in his legs twitch. On days he arrives at the dining hall before Madame Chauchat, he sometimes makes up an excuse to go back to his room, allowing himself and Madame Chauchat to encounter each other head-on in the hallway.

The second time this happens, Madame Chauchat stares directly at Hans, causing his blood to run cold. He stares at her face, which he finds “foreign,” strange, and distinct. Her face is both sharp and soft. Her “Kirghizshaped eyes,” which are so stern and dark from afar, look so much like Pribislav Hippe’s. The encounter simultaneously thrills and terrifies Hans.

Meanwhile, Joachim’s mood becomes increasingly gloomy and dejected as he continues to plead with Behrens to let him return to the “flatlands” below and resume his military duties. Joachim insists each night near the start of the social hour that he and Hans return to their rooms for their rest cure. Hans knows why—it’s because Marusya is there, laughing, and Joachim cannot bear his attraction to her. Hans wonders if Joachim feels as trapped here as he does.

In time, Hans becomes totally acclimated to life at the Berghof, even learning to swaddle himself in his two blankets as well as any other resident. He starts to think it odd that nobody “down there” knew anything about this “art” form, and his fixation on this thought bothers him. He longs to confide in someone who can help him make sense of these unusual and troubling thoughts. He thinks back to the advice Behrens gave him when he first arrived about living as a resident. Hans thinks of Behrens as something of a father figure, he realizes, and he also realizes that he wants some paternal advice. Despite this, he finds it hard to trust Behrens, uncertain that the doctor is truly cured of his long-ago illness.

Hans considers whether Settembrini could be a mentor to him. Though Settembrini had criticized Hans’s idea that sickness and stupidity are opposites, he had also called himself a “pedagogue” and seems clearly interested in molding young minds.

One day, Settembrini stops by Hans’s table in the dining hall and asks Frau Stöhr about her present condition. When she complains about being in poor health, Settembrini jokes that she must have a doppelganger—last night, he saw Frau Stöhr’s light on her balcony and thought she must be dutifully taking her rest cure. But just moments later, he saw her eating desserts, drinking wine, and seeing a film at the cinema. The accusation makes Frau Stöhr squirm in her seat, and her discomfort only grows when Settembrini reveals that she was doing these things in the company of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. The other tablemates make eyes at each other—it’s common knowledge that Frau Stöhr sneaks off to have fun in the English quarter of town (while her unknowing husband waits for her back home). Settembrini also implies that Frau Stöhr is having sex with Miklosich.

Of course, Frau Stöhr isn’t the only resident to engage in such illicit behavior, Settembrini admits, noting Anton Schneermann’s empty chair—apparently, the teenager’s mother somehow found out that he’d been engaging in immoral (sexual) behavior and removed him from the facility immediately. Settembrini knows all the gossip, and everyone laughs at the insider details he shares.

Settembrini also talks about his family in Italy. He regretfully compares the life he wastes away at the Berghof to his grandfather’s revolutionary past—he conspired against Austria and the Holy Roman Empire  and was a political revolutionary, a Carbanaro. He was a courageous man full of national pride who wished to see his country free. He supported freedom not only in his own country but in all places. After 10 years of exile, he was able to return to Italy and find work as a lawyer in Milan. He continued to call and write for freedom in his own country and in all lands.

One detail from Settembrini’s story about his grandfather sticks out to Hans: he always wore black in public, out of “mourning” for his country. This reminds Hans of his own grandfather, who also wore black, though young Hans never knew why. Nevertheless, Hans ruminates now, both grandfathers built a wall between themselves and the “evil present” that surrounded them. But while his grandfather did so to honor the past, Settembrini’s did so for the future—for progress. 

Settembrini praises Hans’s homeland of Germany for contributing two key inventions, both of which he believes contributed to progress and democracy: gunpowder and the printing press. Meanwhile, he praises Italy for its major role in pushing forward enlightenment ideals and culture. Settembrini preaches that technology and morality go hand in hand: he believes the world was born in immoral darkness but, through advancement and progress, has become more moral. Though Hans consistently takes issue with some ideas Settembrini puts forth in his many lectures, he tries to at least listen to the man with an open mind, much like a traveler who takes care to learn about a new culture. 

Another of Settembrini’s big ideas is that the world is governed by two opposing principles: “might and right, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge,” and so forth. Settembrini claims the former may be thought of as the “Asiatic principle,” and the latter the “European principle.” He has no doubt that enlightenment and progress—the European ideals—will always win out, though there’s still much work to be done. To achieve complete enlightenment, however, Settembrini argues, it will be necessary to destroy the center of the Asiatic principle of tyranny: Vienna. Hans takes issue with this theory, and Joachim—the military man—does too.

Settembrini also lectures about his reverence for humanism (meaning, at its core, a love of humankind). He inherited this reverence from his father (the humanist philosopher) and grandfather (the freedom-driven political agitator). Settembrini, as a writer, believes that words and language are vessels for humanity’s “dignity and self-respect.” And he believes that politics play into this, too, since politicians are people putting dignified word into action.

The narrator observes that at first it might seem that the waking Hans is very different from the sleeping Hans. While the former listens to Settembrini with an open mind (even if he doesn’t agree with everything he says), the sleeping Hans, in his dreams, dismisses the man as an “organ-grinder” preaching lofty, meaningless ideals. Yet as soon as Hans considers Settembrini’s lectures alone, he finds himself drawn only toward views that oppose Settembrini’s love of patriotism, literature, and human dignity. And what’s more, Hans probably only listened to Settembrini in the first place to grant his troubled conscience permission to gravitate toward the opposite: toward “listless, worm-eaten, Kirghiz-eyed” Clavdia Chauchat.