by Thomas Mann
It was a busy world, with all sorts of activities taking place concurrently; and every now and then, one of them would become the rage, a mania that conquered all else. Amateur photography had always played an important role in the world of the Berghof; but twice now—and we have lingered up here long enough to experience periodic reoccurrences of such epidemics—it had become a passion that made fools of everyone for weeks and months. There was not a soul who at some point had not bent his head down over a camera wedged in the pit of his stomach, made a worried face, and snapped the shutter. There was no end of prints to be passed around at meals. Suddenly it was a matter of honor to do one’s own developing. The darkrooms available did not come close to meeting the demand. The windows and balcony doors of rooms were hung with black curtains, and people dabbled with chemicals under red lights—until a fire broke out, and the Bulgarian student from the Good Russian table came within an inch of being reduced to ashes. A general prohibition decreed by sanatorium authorities followed. Simple snapshots were soon considered déclassé and color photography à la Lumière was the thing. They all reveled in pictures of people caught in the flash of magnesium, with vacant eyes staring dully from faces frozen in cramped expressions, as if the corpses of murder victims had been set up in chairs, eyes wide open. Even Hans Castorp kept a glass plate framed in cardboard, which, when held up to the light, showed him standing in a garish green woodland meadow, between Frau Stöhr and Fräulein Levi of the ivory complexion, the former in a sky-blue sweater, the latter in a blood-red one, his own face coppery against a field of pale yellow buttercups, one of which glowed in his buttonhole.
Then there was stamp collecting, which was always pursued by a few individuals, but occasionally ran rampant as a general obsession. Everyone pasted, haggled, traded. People subscribed to philatelic magazines, corresponded with special vendors, clubs, and private hobbyists, at home and abroad; and amazing sums were spent to purchase rare specimens, even by those whose budgets barely permitted them to stay at a deluxe sanatorium for months or years on end.
That would continue until the next fad took over—when, for instance, the collection and incessant consumption of chocolate in every conceivable form might become the fashion. Everyone had brown lips, and the most delicious productions of the Berghof kitchens were greeted by lethargic, carping gourmets, who had already stuffed and ruined their stomachs with Milka nougats, chocolat à la crème d’amandes, Marquis napolitains, and little “cat’s tongues” sprinkled with gold.
Sketching pigs with one’s eyes closed—introduced one long-ago Mardi Gras evening by a high-placed personage and enjoyed frequently since—had led to successive geometric teasers, which occasionally engaged the mental powers of all Berghof residents, even the last thoughts and energies of the moribund. Week after week, the sanatorium stood beneath the banner of an intricate figure composed of no less than eight large and small circles, plus several interlocked triangles. The task was to trace this polygram freehand, without ever lifting your pencil from the paper; the ultimate goal, however, was to accomplish this blindfolded—which in the end, apart from a few minor blemishes that were easily disregarded, was managed only by Prosecutor Paravant, the primary booster of such intellectual crazes.
We know that he studied mathematics—know it from the director himself—and recall the chaste motive behind his devotion to the discipline, whose cooling effects and ability to blunt the thorn in the flesh we have heard praised and whose more general rewards would probably have rendered unnecessary certain measures that the authorities had recently been forced to adopt. Chief among these had been the barricading of the passage from balcony to balcony—there where the milk-glass partitions did not quite reach the railing—with little doors that were locked at night by the bath attendant, amid general smirks and sniggers. Since then, demand had grown considerably for second-floor apartments, from where, after climbing over the railing, one could avoid the little doors and move from room to room by way of the projecting glass roof of the veranda below. These disciplinary reforms would certainly not have had to have been introduced on the prosecutor’s account. The severe temptation that had coincided with the arrival of his Egyptian Fatima had long since been overcome, was indeed the last of its sort to tax Paravant’s system. After that, he threw himself with redoubled fervor into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, about whose soothing powers Director Behrens had so many virtuous things to say; and the problem that consumed his every thought day and night, to which he devoted all the persistence, all the sportsman’s tenacity he had once brought to the conviction of poor sinners—back in the days before his frequently extended leave of absence, which now threatened to become permanent retirement—that problem was nothing less than the squaring of the circle.
In the course of his studies, this sidetracked civil servant had succeeded in convincing himself that the proofs science claimed substantiated the impossibility of this construction were invalid and that Providence had removed him, Paravant, from the world of the living below and brought him here, because it had chosen him to grab hold of that transcendent goal and drag it down into earthly realms of exact realization. That was what he was about. Wherever he went, he drew circles and made calculations, filled vast quantities of paper with figures, letters, numbers, and algebraic symbols; his tanned face, the face of an obviously unwell man, bore the visionary and mulish look of the monomaniac. He knew only one, dreadfully tedious topic of conversation: the ratio pi, that forlorn fraction, which a lesser genius of mental arithmetic named Zacharias Dase had once worked out to two hundred decimal places—a superfluous task, since even at two thousand places he would have had no greater prospect of approaching unattainable accuracy, indeed would not have been one whit closer to it. People fled before this tortured thinker, for whoever he managed to buttonhole was subjected to a passionate torrent of words intended to awaken a deeper sensitivity to the hopeless irrationality of this mystical ratio and to its shameful defilement of the human spirit. After pointlessly multiplying pi by diameter to find the circumference of innumerable circles, pi by the square of the radius to find their area, the prosecutor increasingly began to wonder if since the days of Archimedes humanity had not just been making the whole thing too complicated, if the solution to the problem was not childishly simple. What, you weren’t supposed to be able to rectify circumference, or turn any given straight line into a circle? At times Paravant thought he was close to a revelation. Of an evening, he was often seen in the deserted and dimly lit dining hall, still sitting at his place, a piece of string carefully laid out in a circle on the bare tabletop; suddenly he would reach out in a surprise attack and pull it straight, only to hunch over again, prop himself on his elbows, and sink into bitter brooding. The director occasionally lent Paravant a hand in his melancholy puttering, even encouraged him in the fixation. In his suffering, the prosecutor brought his sweet anguish to Hans Castorp one day, and came back again and again, for in him he found a friend, someone with understanding and sympathy for the mystery of the circle. He illustrated the despairs of pi for the young man with a precise, painfully executed drawing of a circle trapped between two polygons, circumscribing one, circumscribed by the other, each with as many countless tiny sides as it was humanly possible to draw. The rest, however, the curvature that by some ethereal, spiritual means escaped the calculable embrace that could turn it into a rational number—that, said the prosecutor, his jaw trembling, that was pi! Sensitive as he was, however, Hans Castorp proved less susceptible to pi than Paravant. He called it smoke and mirrors, advised the prosecutor not to take this little game of tag so seriously, not to get so overheated, and spoke of the elastic turning points of which every circle consists, from its nonexistent beginning to its imaginary end, mentioning as well the mirthful melancholy of eternity, which has no permanent direction and keeps coming back onto itself—and spoke with such serene religiosity that it had a brief calming effect on the prosecutor.
Indeed, Hans Castorp’s good natur
e destined him to be the confidant of more than one fellow resident obsessed with some idea and yet sadly unable to find a hearing among the easygoing majority. An erstwhile sculptor from the Austrian provinces, a handsome older gentleman with a white moustache, aquiline nose, and blue eyes, had come up with a project for raising public revenues, which he had written out in a fine hand, underlining the important points in sepia watercolor. The plan was that every newspaper subscriber would have to save his daily paper, weighing 1.4 ounces, which would then be collected on the first of each month, yielding approximately thirty pounds of used paper a year, no less than six hundred pounds in twenty years—at ten pfennigs a pound, that would come to sixty German marks. Five million subscribers, the memorandum continued, would therefore in the course of twenty years recycle newspaper worth the immense sum of three hundred million marks, two-thirds of which would be applied to renewing subscriptions, making them much cheaper, and one-third, around one hundred million marks, made available for humanitarian purposes—to finance tuberculosis sanatoriums for the general public, to subsidize struggling artists, and so forth. The plan was worked out in detail, down to a punch-holed form to be used as the receipt for reimbursements and a sketch of a sliding scale from which the department in charge of collection could figure the value of the quantity turned in each month. From any point of view, it was a solidly based, well-justified plan. Imprudent waste and destruction of newsprint, unwittingly flushed down the drain or sent up the chimney, was high treason, a crime against our forests and the nation’s economy. Saving paper, conserving’ paper, meant saving and conserving cellulose, the forests themselves, and the human labor needed to produce cellulose and paper—both labor and capital. And since old newspaper would also be recycled as valuable packing paper and cardboard, which would then provide an important economic base for national and local taxation, the plan would also reduce the tax burden on newspaper subscribers. In short, it was a good plan, indeed incontrovertible; and if there seemed to be something uncanny and frivolous, sinister and mad about it, that was due simply to the skewed fanaticism with which the erstwhile artist pursued and advocated his one and only economic plan—which he evidently did not take seriously enough to make even the least attempt to put into action. Hans Castorp would tilt his head and nod as he listened to the man propagate his earth-saving ideas in flights of fevered eloquence, and all the while he would explore the nature of his own contempt and disdain that prevented him from joining the inventor in his battle against a thoughtless world.
Several Berghof residents studied Esperanto and had learned enough to converse in the artificial lingo at meals. Hans Castorp cast them dark glances, and kept to himself the fact that he did not think them the worst of the lot. A group of English guests had recently introduced a parlor game that consisted of nothing more than the first person’s turning to his neighbor in a circle and asking, “Did you ever see the Devil with a nightcap on?” to which that person replied, “No, I never saw the Devil with a nightcap on,” and then passed the question along—and on it went, round and round. It was dreadful. But poor Hans Castorp grew even gloomier watching the solitaire players, who could be seen at work everywhere in the Berghof at all hours. For the passion for this pastime had so taken hold of late that the whole place was a den of iniquity; and Hans Castorp had all the more reason to feel gripped by horror, because he fell victim to the plague himself for a while—was indeed perhaps one of the most serious cases. He was afflicted by a game known as “elevens,” in which a bridge deck is arranged in three rows of three cards each, and any two cards that add up to eleven, plus any of the three face cards when they turn up, are then covered anew, until, if fortune smiles, the game is won. One would not think it possible that such a simple game could be the source of such exquisite joy, to the point of sheer bewitchment. And yet Hans Castorp, like so many others, explored that possibility—explored it with a scowl, for debauchery is never cheerful. He was the plaything of the imp of the cards, a captive of the capricious whims of its favor, which would sometimes start things out on an easy wave of luck—all jacks, queens, kings, and sums of eleven—so that the game was over before the third time through (a fleeting triumph, which only pricked your nerves to try again); at other times the imp waited until the ninth and final card to deny any chance of its ever being covered or at the very last moment it abruptly blocked everything and cast an almost certain victory to the winds. Hans Castorp played solitaire everywhere, at any time of day—at night under the stars, in the morning in his pajamas, at meals, even in his dreams. He shuddered, but he played. Which was how Herr Settembrini found him one day when he stopped to visit, to “bother” him—as had been his mission from the very first.
“Accidente!” he said. “You’re playing solitaire, my good engineer?”
“That’s not quite it,” Hans Castorp replied. “I’m just laying the cards out, wrestling with abstract chance. I’m intrigued by its fickle tricks, the way it can toady up to you and then turn incredibly obstinate. This morning I got out of bed and easily won three games, one after the other, once only twice through—a record for me. And would you believe that I’ve laid them out thirty-two times in a row now, without being able to get halfway through even once?”
Herr Settembrini gazed at him with sad black eyes, as so often in the course of these many little years. “At any rate, I find you preoccupied,” he said. “It doesn’t look as if this is where I shall find solace for my woes, balm for the inner conflict that torments me.”
“Inner conflict?” Hans Castorp repeated, and laid out his cards.
“The world situation baffles me,” the Freemason said. “The Balkan League will be formed, my good engineer, all my sources tell me so. Russia is working feverishly for it, and the arrow of the coalition is pointed at the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, without whose breakup Russia cannot accomplish a single one of its goals. Do you understand my scruples? I hate Vienna with all that is in me, as you know. But should I grant the support of my soul to Sarmatian despotism, when it is about to put the torch to our most noble continent? On the other hand, I would feel personally disgraced by diplomatic cooperation, even on a one-time ad hoc basis, between my own country and Austria. Those are questions of conscience that—”
“Seven and four,” Hans Castorp said. “Eight and three. Jack, queen, king. It’s going to work. You bring me luck, Herr Settembrini.”
The Italian said nothing. Hans Castorp could feel those black eyes, that gaze of reason and morality, resting in deep mourning upon him, but went right on laying out his cards for a while, before he finally laid his cheek in one hand and stared up with a naughty child’s sullen look of false innocence.
“Your eyes,” his mentor said, “try in vain to conceal that you know how things stand with you.”
“Placet experiri,” Hans Castorp had the impudence to reply, and Herr Settembrini departed—and then, to be sure, once left to his own devices, the young man did not lay out his cards again, but sat for a long time at the table in his white room, his head propped in his hand, brooding, gripped by the horror of the eerie and skewed state in which he saw the world entrapped, by the fear of the grinning demon and monkey-god in whose crazed and unrestrained power he now found himself—and whose name was “The Great Stupor.”
A fearful, apocalyptic name, very much calculated to instill secret terrors. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and the area around his heart with the palms of his hands. He was afraid. It was as if “all this” could come to no good end, as if the end was surely a catastrophe, a rebellion of patient nature, a thunderstorm and a great cleansing wind that would break the spell cast over the world, wrench life from its “dead standstill,” and overturn the “doldrums” in a terrible Last Judgment. He longed to flee, as noted—it was just lucky that medical authority had, as mentioned before, kept an “unblinking eye” on him, that it had known how to read the expression on his face and was intent on diverting him with new, fertile hypotheses.
In its fra
ternity jargon and cadence, medical authority had announced the true cause for the waywardness of Hans Castorp’s body temperature and offered its scientific opinion that the cause would not be difficult to overcome and that a cure and authorized release back to the flatlands suddenly loomed ahead in the near future. Assailed by manifold sensations, the young man’s heart pounded hard as he held out his arm to give blood, and he turned slightly pale as he admired the splendid ruby red of the sap of life rising to fill glass tubes. Assisted by Dr. Krokowski and a Sister of Mercy, the director himself performed this little operation with its far-reaching consequences. Then came a series of days that for Hans Castorp were dominated by one question: once outside his body, would what he had given pass the test under the eye of science?
Nothing had been able to grow as yet, of course, the director said at first. Unfortunately, nothing showed signs of wanting to grow, he said later. But then came a morning when he walked up to Hans Castorp during breakfast—seated nowadays at the upper end of the Good Russian table, where once had sat the great man with whom he had shared the bond of brotherhood—and, amid idiomatic congratulations, revealed to him that streptococci had been identified beyond a doubt in one of the prepared cultures. It was now a matter of probabilities: should the symptoms of toxicity be traced to the small tubercle bacillus, which was also present, or to strep, whose presence was quite modest? He, Behrens, would have to inspect the matter at length and more closely—the culture was not yet ripe. He showed it to Hans Castorp in the lab: a blood-red jelly with little gray dots here and there. Those were the cocci. (Every ass could have cocci, however, as well as tubercles; and if there had been no symptoms, these findings would have been of no further significance.)