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At the Tienappels'. And of Hans Castorp's Moral Condition

It was not to his disadvantage, for he came into the house of Consul Tienappel, his appointed guardian, and there had nothing to miss: certainly not with respect to his person, and just as little with respect to the care of his further interests, of which he as yet knew nothing. For Consul Tienappel, an uncle of Hans's late mother, administered the Castorp estate; he brought the real estate to sale, also took the liquidation of the firm Castorp and Son, import and export, in hand, and what he got out of it was still about four hundred thousand marks, Hans Castorp's inheritance, which Consul Tienappel invested in trustee-safe securities, deducting for himself, regardless of his feelings as a relative, two percent commission from the interest due at the beginning of each quarter.

The Tienappel house lay at the back of a garden on Harvestehuder Way and looked out on a lawn in which not the smallest weed was tolerated, on public rose beds, and then on the river. Every morning the consul, although he possessed handsome vehicles, went on foot to his business in the old city in order to have at least a little exercise, for at times he suffered from congestions of blood in the head, and at five o'clock in the evening he returned the same way, whereupon at the Tienappels' the midday meal was eaten with every cultivation. He was a weighty man, dressed in the best English fabrics, with watery-blue protruding eyes behind gold spectacles, a florid nose, a gray sailor's beard, and a fiery diamond on the squat little finger of his left hand. His wife had long been dead. He had two sons, Peter and James, of whom one was in the navy and little at home, while the other worked in his father's wine trade and was the designated heir of the firm. For many years the household had been managed by Schalleen, a goldsmith's daughter from Altona with white starched ruffles around her cylindrical wrists. She saw to it that breakfast and supper tables were richly supplied with cold fare, with shrimp and salmon, eel, goose breast, and tomato catsup with the roast beef; she kept a watchful eye on the hired waiters when there was a gentlemen's dinner at Consul Tienappel's, and she it was who, as best she could, took a mother's place with little Hans Castorp.

Hans Castorp grew up in miserable weather, in wind and watery vapor, grew up in a yellow rubber coat, if one may put it so, and on the whole felt quite lively in it. A little anemic he had probably been from the beginning, Dr. Heidekind said so too, and had him given every day for his third breakfast, after school, a good glass of porter - a substantial drink, as is known, to which Dr. Heidekind attributed blood-forming effects, and which in any case soothed Hans Castorp's vital spirits in a way he found estimable, pleasantly encouraging his inclination to "doze," as his uncle Tienappel put it, that is, to dream into emptiness with slack mouth and without a firm thought. Otherwise, however, he was healthy and proper, a useful tennis player and rower, even if, instead of handling the oars himself, he preferred to sit on summer evenings with music and a good drink on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst ferry-house and watch the lit boats, between which swans moved along over the colorfully reflecting water; and if one heard him speak - calm, sensible, a little hollow and monotonous, with a touch of Low German - indeed, if one merely looked at him in his blond correctness, with his well-cut, somehow old-fashioned head, in which inherited and unconscious arrogance expressed itself in the form of a certain dry sleepiness, no one could doubt that this Hans Castorp was an unadulterated and honorable product of the local soil and splendidly in his place; he himself, had he only tested himself on the matter, would not have doubted it for a moment.

The atmosphere of the great maritime city, this damp atmosphere of world trade and good living, which had been the life-air of his fathers, he breathed with deep agreement, with self-evidence and good comfort. With the exhalations of water, coal, and tar, the sharp smells of accumulated colonial wares in his nose, he saw on the harbor quays enormous steam slewing cranes imitate the calm, intelligence, and gigantic strength of serving elephants, as they unloaded ton weights of sacks, bales, crates, barrels, and demijohns from the bellies of resting seagoing ships into railway cars and sheds. He saw the merchant class in yellow rubber coats, as he himself wore one, stream toward the Exchange at noon, where, to his knowledge, things went sharply, and someone could quite easily have occasion to send out invitations to a large dinner in all haste in order to keep up his credit. He saw - and here later lay his particular field of interest - the bustle of the shipyards, saw the mammoth bodies of docked Asia and Africa steamers, tower-high, keel and propeller exposed, supported by tree-thick struts, in their monstrous helplessness on dry land, covered with dwarf armies of scrubbing, hammering, whitewashing workers; saw on the covered slipways, wreathed in smoky fog, the rib skeletons of ships in the making rise up, and engineers, construction drawings and bilge tables in hand, give their directions to the builders - familiar sights, all this, for Hans Castorp from youth on, and awakening in him nothing but feelings of cozy, native belonging, feelings that reached their high point perhaps in that situation in life when, on Sunday mornings with James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemßen - Joachim Ziemßen - he breakfasted in the Alster Pavilion on warm rolls with smoked meat and a glass of old port, and afterward, drawing devotedly on his cigar, leaned back in his chair. For in this especially he was genuine: that he liked to live well, indeed, despite his thin-blooded, refined exterior, clung inwardly and firmly, like a voluptuous infant at the mother's breast, to life's coarse pleasures.

Comfortably and not without dignity he bore on his shoulders the high civilization which the ruling upper stratum of the trading city democracy bequeathed to its children. He was bathed as well as a baby and allowed himself to be dressed by that tailor who possessed the confidence of the young men of his sphere. The small, carefully marked linen treasure that the English drawers of his wardrobe contained was tended by Schalleen in the best manner; even when Hans Castorp studied away from home, he sent it home regularly for cleaning and mending - for his maxim was that outside Hamburg no one in the Reich understood ironing - and a roughened place on the cuff of one of his pretty colored shirts would have filled him with violent discomfort. His hands, although not especially aristocratic in form, were groomed and fresh of skin, adorned with a platinum chain ring and the grandfather's inherited signet ring, and his teeth, which were somewhat soft and had suffered damage more than once, were supplemented with gold.

When standing and walking he pushed his abdomen somewhat forward, which did not make an especially taut impression; but his posture at table was excellent. He turned his upright upper body politely toward the neighbor with whom he was chatting - sensibly and somewhat flatly - and his elbows lay lightly in, while he carved his piece of poultry or skillfully extracted the rosy flesh from a lobster claw with the table implement intended for that purpose. His first need after the meal was the finger bowl with perfumed water, the second the Russian cigarette, untaxed, which he obtained under the counter by way of comfortable smuggling. It preceded the cigar, a very tasty Bremen brand named Maria Mancini, of which there will be more to say, and whose spicy poisons united so satisfyingly with those of the coffee. Hans Castorp withdrew his tobacco supplies from the harmful influences of steam heat by keeping them in the cellar, down to which he descended every morning in order to incorporate the day's requirement into his case. Only reluctantly would he have eaten butter that had been set before him in one piece rather than in the form of fluted little balls.

One sees that we are intent on saying everything that can win favor for him, but we judge him without excess and make him neither better nor worse than he was. Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor a fool, and if we avoid the word "mediocre" to characterize him, this is for reasons that have nothing to do with his intelligence and scarcely anything to do with his simple person in general, namely out of respect for his fate, to which we are inclined to ascribe a certain supra-personal significance. His head sufficed for the demands of the Realgymnasium without having to overexert itself - but to do that he would most certainly not have been inclined under any circumstances or for the sake of any subject: less from fear of hurting himself than because he saw absolutely no reason for it, or, more correctly: no absolute reason; and perhaps precisely for that reason we may not wish to call him mediocre, because he somehow felt the absence of such reasons.

A human being lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, that of his epoch and contemporaneity; and even if he regards the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as absolutely given and self-evident, and is as far removed from the notion of exercising criticism upon them as good Hans Castorp truly was, it is nevertheless quite possible that he may feel his moral well-being vaguely impaired by their deficiencies. The individual may have all sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects before his eyes, from which he draws the impulse to high effort and activity; but if the impersonal around him, time itself, fundamentally lacks hopes and prospects despite all outward bustle, if it secretly reveals itself to him as hopeless, prospectless, and perplexed, and offers a hollow silence in response to the consciously or unconsciously posed, yet somehow posed, question of an ultimate, more than personal, absolute meaning for all effort and activity, then precisely in cases of more honest humanity a certain paralyzing effect of such a state of affairs will be almost unavoidable, and may extend by way of the psychic-moral even to the physical and organic part of the individual. To be disposed toward significant achievement, exceeding the measure of what is simply required, without time knowing any satisfying answer to the question "What for?" requires either a moral solitude and immediacy that rarely occurs and is heroic in nature, or a very robust vitality. Neither the one nor the other was Hans Castorp's case, and so he was probably mediocre after all, though in a quite honorable sense.

We have spoken here not only of the young man's inner behavior during his school years, but also of the following years, when he had already chosen his bourgeois profession. As for his progress through the classes, he even had to repeat one or another of them. On the whole, however, his origin, the urbanity of his manners, and finally also a pretty, though passionless, talent for mathematics helped him forward; and when he had his one-year certificate, he resolved to go through with school - chiefly, to tell the truth, because this prolonged an accustomed, provisional, and undecided condition and gained time for considering what Hans Castorp would most like to become, for that he did not know properly for a long time, did not know even in the highest class, and when it was then decided - to say that he had decided would almost be saying too much - he probably felt that it could just as well have been decided otherwise.

But this much was true, that he had always taken great pleasure in ships. As a little boy he had filled the pages of his notebooks with pencil drawings of fishing cutters, vegetable ewers, and five-masters, and when at fifteen he had been allowed to watch from a favored place as the new twin-screw mail steamer "Hansa" slid down the ways at Blohm & Voß, he had made in watercolors a well-caught and, far into the details, accurate portrait of the slender ship, which Consul Tienappel hung in his private office, and in which especially the transparent glass-green of the rolling sea was treated so lovingly and skillfully that someone had said to Consul Tienappel that this was talent and that a good marine painter might come of it - a remark the consul could calmly repeat to his foster son, for Hans Castorp merely laughed good-naturedly at it and did not for a moment enter into high-strung notions and starvation ideas.

"You haven't much," his uncle Tienappel sometimes said to him. "My money will essentially go to James and Peter one day, that is, it stays in the business, and Peter draws his annuity. What belongs to you is invested quite well and brings you something secure. But living on interest is no joke nowadays unless one has at least five times as much as you do, and if you want to amount to something here in the city and live as you are used to living, then you must earn a proper additional income, you'd better mark that, min Söhn."

Hans Castorp marked it and looked about for a profession with which he could stand before himself and other people. And once he had chosen - it happened at the suggestion of old Wilms, of the firm Tunder & Wilms, who at the Saturday whist table at Consul Tienappel's said that Hans Castorp ought to study shipbuilding, that was an idea, and enter his firm, and then he would keep an eye on the boy - he thought very highly of his profession and found that, although it was a damned complicated and strenuous one, it was also an excellent, important, and grand profession, and in any case far preferable for his peaceful person to that of his cousin Ziemßen, the stepsister's son of his blessed mother, who absolutely wanted to become an officer. Joachim Ziemßen was not even quite sound in the chest, but for that very reason an open-air profession, in which there could scarcely be serious talk of mental work and strain, might well be the right thing for him, as Hans Castorp judged with slight disdain. For he had the very greatest respect for work, although work personally tired him easily.

Here we return to our earlier hints, which aimed at the supposition that impairments of personal life by time might be capable of influencing the human physical organism directly. How could Hans Castorp not have respected work? It would have been unnatural. As matters stood, it had to count for him as the thing most absolutely worthy of respect; there was fundamentally nothing respectable besides it; it was the principle before which one stood or did not stand, the absolute of the time, it answered, so to speak, for itself. His respect for it was therefore religious and, so far as he knew, unquestionable in nature. But another question was whether he loved it; for that he could not do, however much he respected it, and for the simple reason that it did not agree with him. Strenuous work tugged at his nerves, soon exhausted him, and he openly admitted that he really loved much more the free time, the unburdened time to which the lead weights of toil were not attached, time that would have lain open before one, not divided by obstacles to be overcome with gritted teeth. Strictly speaking, this conflict in his relation to work would require resolution. Was it possibly the case that his body as well as his mind - first the mind, and through it the body too - would have been more joyfully and lastingly willing to work if, in the ground of his soul, where he himself had no information, he had been able to believe in work as an absolute value and a self-answering principle, and to rest content with that? This raises again the question of his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, which we do not intend to answer conclusively. For we do not consider ourselves Hans Castorp's eulogists and leave room for the supposition that work in his life simply stood somewhat in the way of the unclouded enjoyment of Maria Mancini.

He for his part was not drawn into military service. His inner nature resisted it and knew how to prevent it. It may also have been that Staff Surgeon Dr. Eberding, who visited at Harvestehuder Way, had heard conversationally from Consul Tienappel that young Castorp would regard the compulsion to arm himself as a sensitive disturbance of the studies he had just begun away from home.

His head, which worked slowly and calmly, especially since Hans Castorp maintained the soothing habit of the porter breakfast even away from home, filled itself with analytic geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, descriptive geometry, and graphic statics; he calculated loaded and unloaded displacement, stability, trim displacement, and metacenter, though at times it came hard to him. His technical drawings, those frame, waterline, and longitudinal plans, were not quite as good as his painterly representation of the "Hansa" on the high sea; but where it was a matter of supporting intellectual clarity by sensory clarity, of washing in shadows and laying out cross sections in cheerful material colors, Hans Castorp surpassed most in skill.

When he came home during vacations, very clean, very well dressed, with a small reddish-blond mustache in his sleepy young patrician face and evidently on the way to respectable stations in life, people who concerned themselves with municipal matters and were also well informed about family and personal relations - and most people are in a self-governing city-state - looked at him appraisingly, asking themselves into what public role young Castorp might one day grow. He had traditions, his name was old and good, and one day, this could almost not fail, one would have to reckon with his person as with a political factor. He would then sit in the citizenry or the citizens' committee and make laws, would take part in the cares of sovereignty in an honorary office, belong to an administrative department, perhaps the finance deputation or the one for building matters, and his voice would be heard and counted. One could be curious about how he would one day declare his party, young Castorp. Externals might deceive, but actually he looked very much the way one did not look if the democrats could count on one, and the resemblance to the grandfather was unmistakable. Perhaps he would take after him, become a brake, a conservative element? That was possible - and equally possible the opposite. For after all he was an engineer, a budding shipbuilder, a man of world traffic and technology. It could be that Hans Castorp would go among the radicals, become a daredevil, a profane destroyer of old buildings and scenic beauties, unbound like a Jew and lacking reverence like an American, inclined to prefer ruthless rupture with venerable tradition to a deliberate development of natural living conditions and to plunge the state into hazardous experiments - that too was conceivable. Would he have it in his blood that Their Sagacities, before whom the double sentry at the town hall presented arms, knew everything best, or would he be inclined to support the opposition in the citizenry? In his blue eyes beneath the reddish-blond brows no answer to such questions of civic curiosity could be read, and he probably did not yet know one himself, Hans Castorp, this blank page.

When he set out on the journey on which we encountered him, he was in his twenty-third year. At that time he had behind him four semesters of study at the Danzig Polytechnic and four more, which he had spent at the technical universities of Braunschweig and Karlsruhe; he had recently emerged from the first main examination without brilliance or orchestral flourish, but with good propriety, and was preparing to enter Tunder & Wilms as an engineer-volunteer in order to receive his practical training at the shipyard. At this point his path now took the following turn for the time being.

For the main examination he had had to work sharply and persistently, and when he came home he looked, after all, still more worn than suited his type. Dr. Heidekind scolded whenever he saw him and demanded a change of air, that is: a thorough one. Norderney or Wyk on Föhr would not do this time, he said, and if one asked him, then before going to the shipyard Hans Castorp belonged for a few weeks in the high mountains.

That was all very well, Consul Tienappel said to his nephew and foster son, but then their ways would part that summer, for four horses could not drag him, Consul Tienappel, into the high mountains. That was nothing for him; he needed sensible air pressure, otherwise he would have attacks. Into the high mountains Hans Castorp should very kindly travel alone. He ought to visit Joachim Ziemßen.

That was a natural suggestion. Joachim Ziemßen, namely, was ill - not ill as Hans Castorp was, but ill in a truly awkward way; it had even been a great fright. He had always been inclined to catarrh and fever, and one day there had actually been red sputum too, and head over heels Joachim had had to go to Davos, to his greatest sorrow and distress, for he stood precisely at the goal of his wishes. For a couple of semesters, according to the will of his family, he had studied jurisprudence, but from an irresistible impulse he had changed mounts and reported as an officer cadet, and had already been accepted. And now for more than five months he had been sitting in the International Sanatorium "Berghof" (medical director: Hofrat Dr. Behrens) and boring himself half to death, as he wrote on postcards. If, then, Hans Castorp was going to do some little thing for himself before taking up his post at Tunder & Wilms, nothing lay nearer than that he too should go up there to keep his poor cousin company - for both parties it was the most pleasant arrangement.

High summer had come when he resolved on the journey. The last days of July were already there.

He went for three weeks.