The Magic Mountain: Part 5, Chapter 9: Walpurgis Night Summary & Analysis

Time passes, and eventually Hans has been at the Berghof for seven months, and Joachim has been there for one year. Now, spring approaches—meaning it’ll soon be time for Mardi Gras and Midsummer Night festivities. Settembrini, with satirical excitement, gushes about the festival’s program, which features numerous “danses macabres.” He laments the people who won’t be able to join in on the late-night festivities, implying that they have rejected earthly pleasures. But Hans is genuinely looking forward to the festivities.

On Mardi Gras morning, the dining hall is filled with the sounds of toy instruments. People wear paper hats, and there’s an overall festive air to the place. Most residents head to the Platz that afternoon to watch the carnival parade make its way down the streets. The festive mood continues into suppertime. People exchange notes with playful but cryptic little verses on them. Settembrini sends one to Hans that reads: “But bear in mind, the mountain’s mad with spells tonight, / And should a will-o’-wisp decide your way to light, / Beware—its lead may prove deceptive.”

Hans spots Clavdia from across the hall. She’s wearing a sleeveless, silken black dress. Seeing Clavdia’s fragile, pale arms against the black fabric causes Hans to involuntarily whimper to himself—the dress is somehow extremely revealing yet does not stir him. A bit later, another note appears for Hans, this one about lovesick bachelors and maids who want to marry. Later on, people start arriving in costumes: men dressed as women, and women dressed as men. Frau Stöhr, who wasn’t initially wearing a costume, leaves the dining hall and reappears a short while later dressed as a cleaning woman, armed with a bucket and broom. Clavdia dons a paper hat, like the kind children make. Settembrini satirically warns Hans to beware of “Lilith,” alluding to the first wife of Adam in the Bible. Hans, quite drunk at this point, laughs off Settembrini’s warning.

Then Hans, made loose by lots of champagne and punch, addresses Settembrini with familiar pronouns and thanks him for all his guidance, apologizing for all the times he’d been a poor student—“one of life’s problem children,” as Settembrini once described him.

Meanwhile, Behrens and Krokowski also join in on the festivities. Across the dining hall, Behrens leads people in a parlor game in which participants are tasked with drawing a pig with their eyes closed. Of course, some of them wouldn’t be able to do this even with their eyes open, and this results in the creation of truly horrendous creatures. Hans demands to join in on the fun and scowls with mock outrage when he’s given only a stump of a pencil to draw with. The resultant “pig” is predictably awful, and he demands that someone give him a real pencil to draw with. From behind him, he hears a woman’s voice call out in French, and he’s suddenly transported back to the childhood schoolyard of his recurring dream. 

Clavdia Chauchat appears behind Hans and tells him, in broken German, that he is “very ambitious […] very…eager” before handing him a silver pencil-holder. Whereas the original pencil—the one Hippe handed him in elementary school—was practical and substantial, this device is useless and ornamental. Nevertheless, Hans thanks her, adding that he knew she’d have one. Clavdia and Hans bend their heads over the pencil and lean in toward each other, as though by a magnetic force. Hans abandons the parlor game and pulls up a seat next to Clavdia in one corner of the dining hall. They begin talking in German but switch to French, which Hans understands well enough.   

Clavdia notes that Joachim has since disappeared, and Hans remarks that Joachim is almost certainly in his room taking his rest cure. Clavdia thinks this is characteristic of Germans, who “love order more than liberty,” something she claims everyone in Europe knows to be true. Hans argues that Europe’s concept of “liberty” is in fact rather “bourgeois” compared to Germany’s love of order. Hans’s philosophizing amuses Clavdia.

Clavdia and Hans try to dance, but there’s not quite enough room, so Hans suggests they just stand off to the side and watch, separate from everyone else as though they are in their own little dream. He admits that being here with Clavdia really is something of a dream to him. She calls him “a bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet,” which is “Germany all rolled into one.” They make a bit of small talk, but Hans can hardly speak French and struggles. Still, he prefers it this way—not speaking in his native tongue somehow makes this scene more dreamlike, less real.

Hans suggests using informal pronouns with Clavdia—but just then Clavdia drops some big news—she’s leaving. Hans is shocked and taken aback. Clavdia clarifies: she’s leaving the Berghof tomorrow morning. She’s not fully cured, but Behrens doesn’t think there’s much more they can do for her here. Hans asks if she’ll be coming back, and she says she doesn’t know. She says she values freedom above all else, though—a feeling she doubts Hans can relate to. Anyway, Hans will likely be gone from here by the time she’d return, if things come to that.

Hans disagrees, insisting that he’s quite sick. He confirms that he has a “moist spot” in his lungs and had a fever of over 100 degrees this morning. Clavdia says her illness “is a little more complicated.” She then tells Hans that Joachim is more ill than he thinks. Hans asks if Joachim will die, but Clavdia merely responds that he likely will if he returns to his military service “on the plains.” Hans says death no longer scares him. And anyway, his own current condition—being in love—is just as severe as Joachim’s. Hans asks if he can see Clavdia’s “transparent portrait” (her X-ray), having already seen her “exterior portrait.” She says she keeps it locked away in her room.

Then Hans changes the subject to morality and what Clavdia thinks about it. Clavdia replies that one learns nothing about morality from being virtuous or applying reason—instead, they must turn to sin and self-destruction. She thinks it’s more moral to self-destruct “than to save oneself.” She thinks that all history’s great moralists have been quite sinful—meanwhile, they teach good Christians how to be miserable. She assumes her position shocks Hans.

Hans is silent a moment. The hall has mostly emptied by this point, with residents all returning to their rooms for the night. Hans reasserts his earlier pledge to use informal pronouns with Clavdia—to be formal is bourgeois, he insists. Then he tells Clavdia that nothing she’s said about morality has alarmed him. He asks Clavdia what she thinks of him, and she replies, frankly, that he seems like an ordinary, well-mannered young man who comes from a respectable family. He’ll soon leave the Berghof behind and return “to the flatlands” to live an honest life filled with honest work, and he’ll forget all about the dream world he inhabited in the place up in the mountains.

Hans thinks Clavdia is oversimplifying things. If that’s all there is to him, he asks, then where did his fever come from? Clavdia thinks Hans’s illness is just a phase, but Hans insists it’s more than that: he thinks that “love” has gotten him to where he is now. Beside himself with passion, Hans declares his deep and irrational love for Clavdia. Clavdia insists that he get ahold of himself—what would Settembrini say? But Hans insists that none of that matters. He could care less about time, or humanism, or progress, because he loves her.

Clavdia reaches out to touch the back of Hans’s head, and he replies with a long declaration about the links between the physical body, love, and death: the body produces both love and death, both of which are “carnal,” and both of which are simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. He declares physical passion to be “a festival of death with no weeping afterward,” and he pleads with Clavdia to let him touch her arteries and tibia and inhale her pores’ secretions. When he’s finished, Clavdia pauses and tells him that he is “indeed a gallant suitor, one who knows how to woo in a very profound, German fashion.” Then she places her paper hat on his head and bids him goodnight, predicting that he’ll have a high fever when he checks his temperature tonight. Before she leaves, she tells him to remember to return her pencil.