by Thomas Mann
He grew—despite miserable weather, despite wind and fog—grew up, one might say, in his yellow mackintosh, and on the whole was a quite cheerful lad. He was probably a little anemic from the start, or so Dr. Heidekind said, prescribing for him a nice daily glass of porter, to be drunk with his snack when he returned from school—a robust brew, as everyone knows, which Dr. Heidekind believed helped build the blood and which, however that might be, Hans Castorp discovered, much to his satisfaction, had a calming effect on his spirits and pleasantly assisted him in his proclivity to “doze”—as his Uncle Tienappel put it—when he would sit with his mouth slightly open, dreaming away without a single firm thought in his head. But otherwise he was a regular, healthy lad, a passable tennis-player and oarsman, although on summer evenings, instead of manning an oar, he preferred sitting on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst Boathouse, a refreshing drink in hand, listening to music and watching the boats as they drifted among the swans, their lights reflected in the bright, smooth water. And if you were to hear him talking—in his nonchalant, reasonable way, his voice a little hollow and monotone, with just a hint of Platt—or even if you just saw him there, so blondly correct, his hair nicely trimmed, his head with the stamp of something classic about it, his air cool and languid, suggesting an inherited, unconscious arrogance, then you could not doubt that this Hans Castorp was an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it—even he himself, had he ever actually considered the matter, would not have doubted it for a moment.
The atmosphere of the metropolitan seaport, the damp atmosphere of global shopkeeping and prosperity, had been the air of life itself for his forefathers, and with great gusto he breathed it now as a matter of course and found it profoundly satisfying. His nose took in the fumes of the harbor, of coal and tar, the pungent odors of the world’s produce piled high, and his eyes watched the huge steam cranes on the docks—so calm, wise, and monumentally strong that they looked like hardworking elephants—as they transferred tons of sacks, bales, crates, barrels, and carboys from the bowels of idle seagoing vessels to railroad cars and sheds. He watched the merchants in yellow mackintoshes, like the one he himself was wearing, as they streamed at noon toward the exchange, where things could get quite fierce, as he well knew, and someone might very suddenly be motivated to hand out invitations to a grand dinner, in hopes of prolonging his credit. He watched—and this would later prove to be his special area of interest—the teeming dry docks, the towering, mammoth cadavers of ships that had sailed to Asia and Africa, but now lay braced on strutbeams thick as trees, looking monstrous and clumsy on dry land, their keels and screws naked, swarmed over by hosts of midget laborers—hammering, scouring, whitewashing. He gazed at the roofed-over slips, which were wrapped in webs of smoky fog and from which the ribs of ships under construction protruded, while engineers, blueprints and pump-charts in hand, gave orders to the workers. From boyhood on, these were all familiar sights to Hans Castorp, awakening in him a warm sense of belonging, a feeling that reached its zenith, perhaps, on those occasions when he would join James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemssen—Joachim Ziemssen—in the pavilion on the Alster for a Sunday breakfast of warm rolls and smoked beef, washed down by a glass of old port, then lean back in his chair and puff devotedly on his cigar. For in this he was true to type: that he dearly and truly loved living well, and despite his thin-blooded, refined appearance, he clung to the cruder pleasures of life as a gluttonous baby clings to its mother’s breast.
The upper class of this commercial and democratic city-state bequeaths its children the burden of higher civilization, and Hans Castorp bore it on his shoulders with a certain easy dignity. He was bathed spotless as a baby, and he had his clothes made by a tailor who enjoyed the trust of the young men in his circle. Schalleen took splendid care of his little treasure of neatly monogrammed underwear and shirts, which were tucked away in the English-style drawers of his wardrobe. Even when Hans Castorp left home to study, he regularly sent his things home to be laundered and mended—for it was his maxim that no one in the empire except residents of Hamburg knew how to iron—and a badly creased cuff on one of his pretty pastel shirts filled him with a terrible unease. Although the shape of his hands was not particularly aristocratic, he took good care of them, keeping the skin supple and setting them off with a simple platinum band and his grandfather’s signet ring; his teeth, which were rather soft and subject to damage, had been repaired with gold inlays.
Both when standing and walking, he thrust his lower body forward somewhat, which left the impression of a certain slackness; but his posture at the dinner table was excellent. He would politely turn his erect upper body toward his neighbor for small talk (always reasonable, with a hint of Platt), would rest his elbows easily at his sides when cutting a piece of fowl or deftly extracting the pink meat of a lobster claw with the appropriate utensils. When a meal was over, his first requirement was a finger bowl of perfumed water, his second a Russian cigarette, on which he paid no customs duties, since he had found a way to obtain them with a few well-placed, casual bribes. This was a prelude to his cigar, a Maria Mancini, a very tasty brand from Bremen—we shall come to speak about that again—whose spicy toxins blended so satisfyingly with those of his coffee. Hans Castorp kept his tobacco away from the deleterious effects of the house’s steam heat by storing it in the cellar, and every morning he would descend to provide his cigar case with its daily ration. Only reluctantly would he have eaten butter served in pats rather than in fluted little balls.
As is apparent, we are attempting to include anything that can be said in Hans Castorp’s favor, and we offer our judgments without exaggeration, intending to make him no better or worse than he was. Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word “mediocre” to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance. He was bright enough to meet the demands of a modern secondary school without overtaxing himself; in fact, under no conceivable circumstances would he have been willing to do that, no matter what the goal—not so much out of fear that it might be painful as because he saw absolutely no reason why he should, or to put it better: no unequivocal reason. But perhaps that is why we do not call him mediocre—precisely because he felt that in some way or other such an unequivocal reason was lacking.
A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal—then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual’s physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and
immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
In saying this, we are speaking here of the young man’s innermost state not only during his years in school, but also during the period that followed, when he had already chosen his profession. As to his career at school, he did indeed have to repeat a class or two. But for the most part, his background, his urbane manners, and ultimately a pretty, if rather dispassionate talent for mathematics helped him move ahead; and after receiving his report card in his freshman year, he concluded he would finish school—primarily, truth to tell, because that allowed him to extend a familiar, provisional, indecisive state of affairs and to win time for reflection as to what Hans Castorp would most like to do, because he was not even close to deciding that, not even as a senior, and when it finally was decided (to say he decided would be saying almost too much), he was quite aware that the decision could just as easily have been otherwise.
But this much was true—he had always taken great delight in ships. As a small boy he had filled his notebooks with penciled drawings of fishing cutters, vegetable barges, and five-masters. And when at age fifteen he had the chance to watch from a front-row seat as the Hansa, a new double-screw mail-steamer, was launched from the docks of Blohm and Voss, he painted a strikingly good watercolor of the trim ship, exact down to almost the last detail, which Consul Tienappel had hung in his private office. And he had so lovingly and deftly captured the transparent, glassy-green, rolling sea that someone had said to Consul Tienappel that the lad had talent and would make a good painter of seascapes—a pronouncement that the consul had no qualms repeating to his ward, because Hans Castorp simply laughed amiably at the idea and gave not a moment’s thought to a life of eccentricity and starving for art.
“You don’t have much,” his Uncle Tienappel would remind him. “James and Peter will get the lion’s share of my money, that is to say, it stays in the business and Peter will draw an annuity. What belongs to you is invested quite nicely and will yield a secure return. But it’s no fun nowadays trying to live off interest unless one has at least five times as much as you have, and if you fancy living a nice life here in the city, like the one to which you’re accustomed, then you’ll have to earn a tidy sum yourself—take note of that, my boy.”
Hans Castorp took note and looked around for a profession in which he could prove himself—both to himself and others. But he thought quite highly of his profession once he had chosen it—at the suggestion of old Wilms, of the firm of Tunder and Wilms, who said to Consul Tienappel over a game of whist one Sunday evening that Hans Castorp should study shipbuilding, that was the ticket, and join his firm, where he would certainly keep his eye on him. Although damned complicated and demanding, it was nevertheless an excellent, important, splendid profession and far preferable, given his peaceable nature at any rate, to that of his cousin Ziemssen, who was the son of his late mother’s half sister and determined to become an officer. Joachim Ziemssen wasn’t exactly strong in the lungs, of course, but that was precisely the reason why a profession in the open air, one that could hardly be said to involve serious brainwork or stress, was probably just the thing for him—as Hans Castorp had remarked rather patronizingly. For he had the greatest respect for work, although, for his part, he found that he did tire easily.
Which brings us back to our previous suggestion, which proposed that the damage inflicted by the times on someone’s personal life can have a direct influence on that person’s physical organism. How could Hans Castorp not have held work in high esteem? That would have been unnatural. As things stood, work had to be regarded as unconditionally the most estimable thing in the world—ultimately there was nothing one could esteem more, it was the principle by which one stood or fell, the absolute of the age, the answer, so to speak, to its own question. His respect for work was, in its way, religious and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter to love it. And as much as he respected it, he could not love it—for one simple reason: it did not agree with him. The exertion of hard work was a strain on his nerves, tiring him quickly, and he quite candidly admitted that he much preferred his leisure—when time passed easily, unencumbered by the leaden weight of toil, and lay open before you, instead of being divided into a series of hurdles that you had to grit your teeth and take. Strictly speaking, the contradictions in his attitude toward work needed to be resolved. If he had been able to believe at the foundations of his soul (there where he himself did not know what was what) that work has unconditional value, is a principle that answers its own question, might not both body and mind—first his mind, and through it, his body—have been more amenable to work and exhibited more stamina? Would that have set his mind at ease? Which brings us back to our previous question about his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, to which we do not wish to give a conclusive answer. For we do not see ourselves as Hans Castorp’s eulogist and want to leave room for the suggestion that, for him, work was simply something that stood in the way of the unencumbered enjoyment of a Maria Mancini.
He was not attracted to military service himself. Something deep within him resisted the idea, and he knew how to avoid it. It may also be that Dr. Eberding, the staff surgeon, who was a regular on Harvestehuder Weg, had heard in casual conversation with Consul Tienappel that young Castorp, having just left for the university, would regard being forced to bear arms as a serious disruption in his studies.
His brain, which worked calmly and slowly—particularly since Hans Castorp retained the habit of drinking porter with his morning snack—gradually filled up with analytical geometry, differential equations, mechanics, projective geometry, and graphical statics. He calculated displacements—with full cargo and empty—stabilities, shifts in trim, and metacenters, though it was drudgery at times. His technical drawings, all the sketches of ribbing, waterlines, and full-length projections, were not quite as good as his watercolor depiction of the Hansa on the high sea, but when the abstract graphics required the sensual addition of a wash for shading or lively colors for various materials in a cross section, Hans Castorp proved more skillful than most.
When he came home on vacations—very neat, very well dressed, sporting a little reddish-blond moustache in the middle of his sleepy, young, patrician face, looking for all the world like a young man on his way to a respectable place in life—the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community, who kept themselves well informed about various families and the staffing of municipal offices (and that means most people in a self-governing city-state), his fellow citizens, then, looked him over and asked themselves what public role young Castorp might one day grow into. He had tradition behind him, his was a good, old name, and it was almost inevitable that someday he would have to be reckoned with as a political factor. By then he would be sitting in the assembly or on the committee of burghers, making laws, would hold an honorable post where he would participate in the concerns of government, as an administrator, perhaps as director of the finance or building committees. His voice would be listened to and his vote would count. People were curious about which party young Castorp would one day embrace. Appearances were deceiving, but he looked exactly like someone democrats would not be able to count on, and the resemblance to his grandfather was undeniable. Perhaps he would take after him, become a conservative, a brake on other elements. That was quite possible—but so was the opposite. For he was an engineer after all, a shipbuilder in the making, a man of global commerce and technology. So that it might well be that Hans Castorp would join up with the radicals, turn out to be a go-getter, a profane destroyer of old buildings and beautiful landscapes, as footloose as a Jew, as irreverent as an American, a man likely to prefer a ruthless break with venerable traditions to cautious development of natural resources, a man who would plunge the state into reckless experiments—that was conceivable, too. Was it in his bl
ood to regard their Excellencies, the men for whom the sentries at the town hall presented arms, as elders who knew best—or would he be inclined to support the opposition in the assembly? His curious fellow citizens could find no answer to such questions in those blue eyes under their reddish-blond brows; and Hans Castorp, being an unwritten page, would probably have had no answer, either.
When he set out on the journey where we met him, he was twenty-three years old. He had four semesters of study at Danzig Polytechnic behind him, plus four more spent at technical colleges in Braunschweig and Karlsruhe, had recently put his first final exams behind him, passing them with no trouble, though without fanfare or drum roll, and was about to join the firm of Tunder and Wilms as an unsalaried engineer-in-training in order to gain practical experience on the docks. And at that point, his life took the following turn.
His exams had meant a long period of concentrated work, and upon returning home he looked paler than he ought—even given his general type. Dr. Heidekind scolded whenever he saw him and insisted on a change of air, and he meant a radical change. Norderney or Wyk on the island of Föhr, he said, would not do it this time, and if you were to ask him, what Hans Castorp needed was a few weeks in the Alps before going to work on the docks.
That was fine, Consul Tienappel told his nephew and ward, but then their paths would have to part for the summer, because wild horses couldn’t drag him, Consul Tienappel, to the Alps. That was not for him, he required sensible barometric pressure or he would have another attack. Hans Castorp could go right ahead and take a trip to the Alps. Why not pay Joachim Ziemssen a visit?
That was a logical suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill in fact—not ill like Hans Castorp, but really, dangerously ill, had even given them all quite a scare. He had always been susceptible to bronchitis and fevers, and then one day he actually coughed up red, and Joachim was shipped off posthaste to Davos—much to his great regret and dismay, because he was very close to seeing his ambition fulfilled. Bowing to the will of his family, he had first spent a couple of semesters studying law, but then, following an irresistible urge, he had changed horses and volunteered as an ensign, and had been accepted. And for the last five months he had been sitting in the International Sanatorium Berghof (Dr. Behrens, supervising physician), and was bored half to death, as he wrote in a postcard. And so if Hans Castorp was to treat himself to a little vacation before taking up his job with Tunder and Wilms, nothing could be more sensible than to provide his poor cousin with company up there in the mountains—it was the most pleasant solution for both parties.