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Part 7, Chapter 8: Fullness of Harmony
Themes
and Colors
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
Over the years, Krokowski’s lectures have shifted from “physic dissections” to “magical, arcane matters.” His main focus remains the subconscious mind, but now, instead of talking about love and illness, he focuses on hypnosis, telepathy, and other mystical matters. To Krokowski, if one believes in the link between bodily illness and repressed emotions, it's not such a great leap to see how repressed emotions can manifest changes in the external world. And it’s worth noting, the narrator adds, that Krokowski was talking about such manners long before Ellen Brand entered the picture.
Here, with Krokowski’s new interest in telepathy and other mystical subjects, the “magic” of The Magic Mountain manifests somewhat more literally. Krokowski, it seems, has taken his psychoanalytic theories to the extreme, positing that repressed emotions can effect change. This attitude is dangerous to someone like Hans, as it absolves Hans of the responsibility to actually act on his theories, emotions, and beliefs.
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Ellen Brand, whom everyone calls Elly, is a sweet, 19-year-old patient from Copenhagen. She appears childish and innocent on the outside, but in time it becomes clear that she possesses hidden, strange talents. And Krokowski takes it upon himself to get to the bottom of them. Elly’s hidden talents first appear when residents are playing some parlor games during a social hour one night. One game begins with one person leaving the room, at which point the others will decide on some task for the person who left the room to perform. Upon the person’s return, they must guess what the task is. Everyone is unsettled when Elly correctly guesses each of her complicated tasks, such as taking some salt from the dining hall and sprinkling it on another resident’s head and then leading him to the piano and pounding out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
The “magic” of The Magic Mountain continues to intensify with Elly Brand’s arrival. Elly’s unbelievable ability to correctly guess the complicated tasks the other players assigned her suggests that she has genuine psychic abilities. Elly’s status as something of a gifted child reinforces Hans’s naïve drive to believe that illness and suffering imbue a person with honor and nobility. It’s as though Elly’s unfortunate illness has given her this special, supernatural gift to make up for everything else it’s taken from her.
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Everyone accuses Elly of cheating, and she apologizes. Though she hadn’t been listening outside the door, she can’t help but listening “in the room, after she came in.” At first everyone is puzzled, then they immediately call for Krokowski, informing him that Elly can apparently hear voices. Krokowski is immediately intrigued and sends everyone to their room to take a rest cure. He asks Elly to stay behind, though, so he can “chat” with her. This chills everyone to their core, including Hans, who feels full of terror as he witnesses Elly’s powers. Hans, like most everyone else, grew up hearing vague stories about the supernatural, but he’s never witnessed anything paranormal firsthand.
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From that night on, Krokowski forbids anyone from performing any unofficial experiments on Elly. Meanwhile, he starts inviting her for sessions in his “analytical dungeon” in the basement. Hermine Kleefeld, who has assumed the role of young Elly’s surrogate mother during her time at the Berghof, learns snippets about Elly’s psychic life through her close relationship with Elly and then passes that information on to the others.
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Everyone learns, through Hermine, that the “voice” who whispered things to Elly that night in the lounge was a boy named Holger, who is something of a guardian angel to Elly. They also learn that Elly has been hearing these voices since she was a young girl, and it hasn’t always been harmless fun. Once, she saw a vision of her older sister Sophie, who was living in America then, dressed in an odd white gown. The next morning, she learned that it was that very night that Sophie died of inflammation of the heart.
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Hans agrees to participate in a séance the others are holding with Elly. It will be a secret from Krokowski, of course. On the night of the séance, everyone gathers in Hermine Kleefeld’s room. There’s a table at the center of the room with an upside-down wineglass placed upon it. There are also lettered tokens on the table, which the spirit, should one appear, will use to communicate. After everyone has some tea, they all gather around the table, and Hermine dims the lights. Everyone places a finger on the wineglass and waits for it to move. Twenty or so minutes pass without anything happening, and people are getting restless. But suddenly, the glass tips and flies out from under everyone’s fingers before eventually settling back at the center of the table. Everyone is equally intrigued and terrified.
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Herr Albin asks if a spirit is in the room, and eventually the glass spells out H-O-L-G-E-R, confirming the presence of Holger, Elly’s supposed guardian angel. The group uses the wineglass to ask him questions, but he doesn’t seem too interested in giving specific answers. When they ask what his profession was (when he was alive), he replies “POT.” They guess this means he may have been a poet but simply forgot the “E.” One of the women asks Holger if he’d been handsome, and he replies, “Beautiful brown, brown locks,” much to everyone’s delight. Someone asks if Holger can recite some of his poetry for them, and he obliges, reciting poetry for a long while, with nobody able to make him stop. His poetry describes with great beauty the abode of a hermit and the private musings of Holger’s mind.
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After the poetry recitation ends, Hans presses his hand to the glass and asks if Holger can tell him how much longer his stay here will last: after all, he initially came here thinking he’d leave after three weeks, and now years have passed. Holger replies cryptically, spelling out “go,” “across,” and then saying something about Hans’s room (Room 34). Then, without warning, the lights blow out, and the room becomes pitch black. Frau Stöhr cries out with fright. Dr. Ting-Fu, another of the residents, suggests turning on the ceiling light, which calms everyone down. When the lights go on, though, Hans looks down at his knees and finds Clavdia’s interior portrait (her X-ray) resting there. Hans knows he didn’t bring it into the room with him.
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When Hans later tells Settembrini about the séance, Settembrini scoffs and calls Elly a fraud. Then Settembrini goes off on Hans for believing in such nonsense. He tells Hans it’s his “inalienable right” as a human to use his rational mind to tell the difference between good and evil and between “truth and the sham of lies.” Hans just nods along without responding.
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Later, Dr. Krokowski starts inviting select residents to the sessions he holds with Elly in his office. Hans doesn’t attend the sessions himself, but he hears bits and pieces from residents who do. Apparently, Elly made a wastebasket hover in the air during one session. Krokowski’s theory is that Elly’s condition is a matter of “biopsychic subconscious complexes into the objective world […].” By this logic, then, Elly might be capable of physically manifesting the spirits she convenes with in her head—in other words, she might be able to project apparitions of the dead into reality. He sets to work training Elly to make this a reality, and Hans hears that eventually Krokowski is successful, with various attendees of the sessions reporting that they were “touched by materialized hands.”
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Krokowski even manages to coach Elly to materialize Holger, who it turns out “really did have ‘beautiful brown, brown locks.’” Elly also claims that she’s able to materialize any deceased person. Hans hears this, and it eventually compels him to participate in the Berghof’s paranormal activities. One night, he heads to Krokowski’s basement office to attend a scheduled session. Krokowski and Elly greet all the attendees with lighthearted cheer, apparently to keep the room’s atmosphere calm and unmenacing. Despite this, Hans feels ill at ease.
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When all the attendees have arrived, Krokowski asks his assistants—Frau Magnus and Fräulein Levi—to accompany him and Elly to the adjacent office, where Elly will receive a preliminary exam before the main session begins. Meanwhile, Hans and the others, who are all regular attendees, wait in the consulting room. Hans looks about the room and sees a bust of Hippocrates and an engraving of Rembrandt’s painting Anatomy Lesson above the fireplace. The floor is covered with a red carpet.
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Literary Devices
Ten minutes later, Elly, Krokowski and the two assistants return from the examination room, and the session begins. Krokowski turns off the lights, enveloping the room in darkness. He explains, mostly for Hans’s benefit (because it’s his first time), that Elly will put herself in a trance state. After that, her attendant spirit, Holger, will speak through her. Now, Krokowski instructs everyone to link arms, and then he orders another attendant to turn on the music. A Millöcker overture begins to play from the gramophone. By the time it's over, Elly has fallen into a trance state. Hans is given the privilege of “exercising scientific control” over Elly, which requires him to sit facing her and grip her hands and allow her to whisper into his ear, essentially serving as a middleman between Elly/Holger and the attendees.
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Elly squeezes Hans’s hands, which means that Holger is present. Krokowski asks Holger if he’s still willing to make a deceased person appear, and Elly/Holger whispers “yes,” into Hans’s ear. Hans feels “goose bumps” prickle his skin. Krokowski asks which deceased person they should ask Holger to materialize. After a pause, Hans asks to see Joachim. Krokowski commands Holger to get to work materializing Joachim and then orders the music to resume. Elly remains in a trance for hours without anything happening. But then she suddenly starts to convulse. When the convulsions finally stop, Elly comes to, opens her eyes, and smiles. At this point, everyone takes a break to chat and smoke.
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The break comes to a close and the session resumes. Hans asks to have someone else be the mediator, but Krokowski refuses his request, and Hans sits back down in his seat facing Elly. The gramophone is turned on again, and Elly reenters a trance state, and then more hours pass with nothing happening. When one of the disks on the gramophone ends, Hans suggests they play a specific piece, a song from Gounod’s Faust, next. He explains that it will help set a particular “emotional state” and that the piece is “quite special.” The music begins.
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In the middle of the song, a deep voice announces, “I’ve been watching him for some time now.” The record ends, but nobody moves to lift the needle. In the corner of the room, off in the background, an additional person has materialized: Joachim, as he appeared in the final days before his death. But Joachim isn’t wearing his normal uniform—this one has a narrow collar, as well as a cross. He looks like a military men, yes, but one from the long-ago past. The room is utterly quiet. Hans feels like he’s going to be sick. He cries out, “Forgive me!” and then breaks down in tears before losing consciousness.
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Hans awakes to Krokowski calling him by name over and over again. Hans says nothing and goes to the door and turns on the lights. Then he walks toward Krokowski and tries to say something to him, but he can’t bring himself to speak. He instead “nod[s] menacingly” at Krokowski and then leaves the room without a word.
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