It was not to his detriment, for he came to the house of Consul Tienappel, his appointed guardian, and there was nothing missing: certainly not in terms of his person, and just as little in terms of looking after his other interests, of which he still had knew nothing. Because consulTienappel, an uncle of Hansen’s blessed mother, managed the Castorp legacy, he sold the real estate, also took charge of the liquidation of the Castorp und Sohn company, import and export, and what he got out was about four hundred thousand marks, Hans Castorp’s inheritance, which Consul Tienappel invested in trustee securities by deducting two percent commission from the interest due at the beginning of each quarter, regardless of his family feelings.

The Tienappel house lay at the back of a garden on Harvestehuder Weg and looked out over a lawn where not even the smallest weed was tolerated, over public rose gardens, and then over the river. The Consul, although he had a nice carriage, walked to his shop in the old town every morning to get some exercise, for he sometimes suffered from congestion in his head, and returned at five o’clock in the same way, whereupon he did Tienappels was lunched with all culture. He was a heavyset man, dressed in the best English fabrics, with water-blue eyes bulging behind gold spectacles, a blooming nose, a gray sailor’s beard, and a fiery diamond on the squat little finger of his left hand. His wife was long dead. He had two sons, Peter and James, one of whom was in the navy and rarely at home, the other worked in his father’s wine trade and was the designated heir to the company. For many years, the household had been managed by Schalleen, a goldsmith’s daughter from Altona with white starch frills around her cylindrical wrists. She made sure that the breakfast and dinner table was plentiful with cold dishes, with shrimps and salmon,eel, breast of goose and tomato catsup was ordered with the roast beef; she kept a watchful eye on the hired servants when Herrendiner was with Consul Tienappel, and it was she who acted as much as she could as a mother to little Hans Castorp.

Hans Castorp grew up in miserable weather, in wind and water vapor, grew up in a yellow rubber coat, if one may say so, and on the whole felt quite cheerful about it. He was a bit anemic from the start, Dr. Heidekind and had him given a good glass of porter every day for his third breakfast after school – a hearty drink, as is well known, that Dr. Heidekind attributed the blood-forming effect and which at any rate soothed Hans Castorp’s spirits in a way he valued, and his tendency to “snooze”, as his uncle Tienappel put it, beneficially promoted his tendency to dream into emptiness with a slack mouth and without a fixed thought. But otherwise he was healthy and fit, a useful tennis player and rower, although he preferred to handle the oars himself sitting on the terrace of the Uhlenhorster ferry house on summer evenings with music and a good drink and watching the illuminated boats, between which swans floated on the colorfully reflecting water; and if you heard him speak: calm, intelligent, a bit hollow and monotonous, with a touch of Platt, yes, if you just looked at him in his blond correctness, with his well-designed, somehow archaic head, in which an inherited and unconscious conceit expressed itself in the form of a certain dry sleepiness, no one could doubt that this HansCastorp was an unadulterated and honest product of local soil, and brilliant in his place – he himself would not have doubted it for a moment if he had even examined himself.

The atmosphere of the great seaside city, that damp atmosphere of world mongering and living well, which had been the air of his father’s life, he breathed it with deep agreement, with matter-of-factness and good contentment. The vapors of water, coal and tar, the pungent smells of heaped colonial goods in his nose, he saw on the harbor quays enormous rotary steam cranes imitating the calm, intelligence and gigantic strength of serving elephants by lifting tons of sacks, bales, crates, barrels and balloons from the Bellies of dormant seagoing vessels in railway carriages and sheds put out. He saw the merchants in yellow rubber coats, like himself wearing one, flocking to the Bourse at midday, where things were hot, to his knowledge, and someone could very easily get occasion to in a hurry to send out invitations to a big dinner to eke out his loan. He saw (and this was later his particular area of ​​interest) the swarming of shipyards, saw the mammoth bodies of docked Asia and Africa ships, towering high, keel and propeller bare, supported by struts thick as trees, in their monstrous helplessness on dry land, covered with dwarf armies scrubbing, hammering, whitewashing laborer; on the roofed slipways, spun around by a smoky mist, saw the frame skeletons of ships being built and engineers, construction drawings and drainage boards at hand, giving the builders their instructions – all this was familiar to Hans Castorp saw the mammoth bodies of docked Asia and Africa sailors, towering high, keel and propeller bared, supported by tree-thick struts, in their monstrous awkwardness on dry land, covered with dwarfish armies of scrubbing, hammering, whitewashing workers; on the roofed slipways, spun around by a smoky mist, saw the frame skeletons of ships being built and engineers, construction drawings and drainage boards at hand, giving the builders their instructions – all this was familiar to Hans Castorp saw the mammoth bodies of docked Asia and Africa sailors, towering high, keel and propeller bared, supported by tree-thick struts, in their monstrous awkwardness on dry land, covered with dwarfish armies of scrubbing, hammering, whitewashing workers; on the roofed slipways, spun around by a smoky mist, saw the frame skeletons of ships being built and engineers, construction drawings and drainage boards at hand, giving the builders their instructions – all this was familiar to Hans Castorpfrom youth on and aroused in him loud feelings of a cozy, homely feeling, feelings that found their climax in that situation in life when he had warm round pieces with smoked meat and a glass of old port wine in the Alster pavilion with James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemßen – Joachim Ziemßen breakfast, and then leaned back in his chair, puffing on his cigar with devotion. For he was particularly genuine in that he liked to live well, yes, regardless of his thin-blooded, refined appearance, dearly and firmly, like a voluptuous infant at its mother’s breast, clinging to life’s coarse pleasures.

Comfortably and not without dignity he carried on his shoulders the high civilization which the ruling upper class of the commercial urban democracy inherited from their children. Bathed as well as a baby, he was clothed by the tailor trusted by the young of his sphere. The small, carefully drawn treasure of linen, which the English features of his closet contained, was well looked after by Schalleen; Even when Hans Castorp was studying abroad, he regularly sent him home to be cleaned and repaired (for his maxim was that except in Hamburg one did not know how to iron in the Reich), and a rough spot on the cuff of one of his pretty colored shirts would have him filled with intense uneasiness. His hands, though not particularly aristocratic in form,

Standing and walking, he pushed his abdomen out a little, which didn’t make a very taut impression; but his bearing at table was excellent. He turned his erect torso politely to the neighbor with whom he was chatting (intelligently and a little flatly), and his elbows resting lightly as he cut up his piece of fowl or deftly pulled the rosy meat out of a lobster claw with the specially designed tableware. His first need after the meal was over was the finger bowl of perfumed water, the second was the Russian cigarette, which was duty unpaid, and which he surreptitiously obtained by way of leisurely piercing. It preceded the cigar, a very tasty Bremen brand called Maria Mancini, of which more will be said, and whose spicy poisons combined so satisfactorily with those of coffee. Hans Castorp protected his tobacco supplies from the harmful effects of steam heating by storing them in the cellar, where he descended every morning to put the day’s needs in his case. He would have been reluctant to eat butter that had been served to him in one piece rather than in the form of rippled little balls.

It can be seen that we think of saying everything that can please him, but we judge him without exaggeration 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 describe him, it is for reasons that have nothing to do with his intelligence and have little to do with his humble person at all, namely out of respect for his fate, to which we ascribe a certain transpersonal significanceare inclined. His head met the requirements of the Realgymnasium without having to overexert himself – but he would certainly not have been inclined to do so under any circumstances or for the sake of anything: less for fear of hurting himself than because he absolutely did not want to saw a reason for it, or to put it more correctly: no absolute reason; and for that very reason perhaps we do not like to call him mediocre, because he felt in some way the absence of such reasons.

Man not only lives his personal life as an individual but, consciously or unconsciously, also that of his epoch and contemporaneity, even if he should regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as absolutely given and self-evident andbe as far removed from the idea of ​​criticizing them as the good Hans Castorp really was, it is quite possible that he feels his moral well-being vaguely impaired by their shortcomings. Various personal goals, purposes, hopes, and prospects may hover before the eyes of the individual, from which he draws the impulse for greater exertion and activity; when the impersonal around him, the time itself, is basically without hopes and prospects despite all external activity, when it secretly reveals itself to him as hopeless, hopeless and helpless and the consciously or unconsciously asked, but somehow asked question about a opposes the ultimate, more than personal, unconditional meaning of all effort and activity with hollow silence,the mental and moral may extend to the physical and organic part of the individual. To be in the mood for significant work that exceeds the measure of what is absolutely required, without the time answering the question What for? knowing a satisfactory answer requires either a moral solitude and immediacy, which is rare and heroic in nature, or a very robust vitality. Neither was Hans Castorp’s case, and so he was probably mediocre, if in a very honorable sense.

We have not only spoken here of the young man’s inner behavior during his school days, but also of the years that followed, when he had already chosen his middle-class profession. As for his career through the classes, he even had to repeat one or two of them. On the whole, however, his background, the urbanity of his manners, and finally a nice if dispassionate gift for mathematics helped him along, and when he had the one-year certificate he decided to go through school–mainly to tell the truth, because that’s what it was a familiar, provisional and undecided situation was extended and time was gained to consider what Hans Castorp would most like to be, because he didn’t really know that for a long time, didn’t know it even in the upper class,If he had made a decision, that would almost be saying too much), he felt well that it could just as well have been decided differently.

But it was true that he had always enjoyed ships. As a young boy he had the pages of his notebooks covered with pencil drawings of fishing boats,Vegetable evern and five-masted ships, and when at the age of fifteen he was allowed to watch from a privileged place how the new twin-screw mail steamer “Hansa” was launched at Blohm & Voß, he had a well-chosen watercolor and one that was precise down to the last detail portrait of the slender ship that Consul Tienappel had hung in his private office, and on which the transparent glass-green of the rolling sea was treated so lovingly and skilfully that someone had said to Consul Tienappel that it was talent and that a good one could come of it To become a marine painter – a statement that the Consul could calmly repeat to his foster son, because Hans Castorp just laughed good-naturedly about it and did not allow himself to be overexcited or starving for a moment.

“You don’t have much,” his uncle Tienappel sometimes said to him. “My money basically goes to James and Peter, which means it stays in business and Peter gets his pension. What belongs to you lies quite well and carries you something safe. But living on interest isn’t fun these days if you don’t have at least five times as much as you do, and if you want to present something here in the city and live like you’re used to it, then you have to earn a decent living, remember that ‘ you dear, my son.”

Hans Castorp noted it and looked around for a profession with which he could stand up to himself and the people. And once he had voted – it happened at the suggestion of old Wilms, in the company Tunder & Wilms, who said to Consul Tienappel on Saturday whist table that Hans Castorp should study shipbuilding, that was an idea, andjoin him, then he would probably want to keep an eye on the boy – so he thought very highly of his profession and found that it was indeed a damn complicated and strenuous job, but it was also an excellent, important and great job and for his In any case, the peaceful person was far preferable to that of his cousin Ziemßen, his late mother’s stepsister’s son, who definitely wanted to be an officer. Joachim Ziemßen was not even very firm on his chest, but for that very reason an outdoor profession, in which one could hardly speak of mental work and strain, might well be the right one for him, as Hans Castorp judged with slight contempt . Because he had the greatest respect for his work, although personally the work tired him a little.

We return here to our earlier suggestions, which aimed at the supposition that the impairment of personal life through time could actually affect the physical organism of man. How could Hans Castorp not respect the work? It would have been unnatural. As things were, he had to regard her as the most absolutely worthy of respect, basically there was nothing else worthy of respect apart from her, she was the principle by which one passed or failed, the absolute of the time, she answered herself, so to speak. His respect for her was therefore of a religious and, as far as he knew, undoubted nature. But another question was whether he loved her; for he couldn’t, much as he respected her, for the simple reason that she didn’t suit him. Hard work tugged at his nerves,Love time, the carefree one, on which the lead weights of toil did not hang, the time that would have lay open in front of one, not separated from obstacles to be overcome with gnashing of teeth. Strictly speaking, this conflict in his relationship to work needed to be resolved. Was it possible that his body as well as his spirit – first the spirit and through it also the body – would have been more willing and more willing to work if, in the depths of his soul, where he himself did not know, he would have turned to the to believe in work as an absolute value and a self-answering principle and to calm down? This again raises the question of its mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, which we do not intend to answer concisely. For we do not regard ourselves as Hans Castorp’s eulogists and leave room for the assumption that the work in his life simply got in the way of the unalloyed enjoyment of Maria Mancini. –

For his part, he was not called up for military service. His inner nature opposed this and knew how to prevent it. It might also be that staff physician Dr. Eberding, who frequented Harvestehuder Weg, had heard from Consul Tienappel that young Castorp would see the need to arm himself as a serious disruption to his studies that had just begun abroad.

His head, which worked slowly and calmly, especially as Hans Castorp maintained the comforting habit of porter breakfasts when he was away, filled with analytical geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, projection theory and graphostatics, calculating charged and uncharged displacement, stability, trim displacement and metacentre when it himsometimes got angry. His technical drawings, these frame, waterline and longitudinal drawings, were not quite as good as his painterly depiction of the “Hansa” on the high seas, but where it was necessary to support the intellectual clarity with the sensual, shadows to be washed and cross sections To create in lively material colors, Hans Castorp had the skill of most before.

When he came home for the holidays, very clean, very well dressed, with a little reddish-blond mustache on his sleepy young patrician face, and evidently on the way to respectable positions in life, people who dealt with communal affairs also saw families – and personal details – and most people do in a self-governing city-state – his fellow citizens looked at him quizzically, wondering what public role young Castorp might one day grow into. He had traditions, his name was old and good, and one day, it was almost inevitable, one would have to reckon with his person as a political factor. He would then sit in the citizenship or the citizens’ committee and make laws, would volunteer in the concerns of sovereignty, belong to an administrative department, perhaps the Treasury Department, or that for construction, and his voice would be heard and counted. One could be curious as to how he would one day take sides, young Castorp. Appearances might be deceptive, but actually he looked just like mandidn’t look when the Democrats could count on you, and the resemblance to Grandfather was unmistakable. Maybe he would follow suit, a dragbecome, a conservative element? That was probably possible – and just as well the opposite. After all, he was an engineer, a prospective master shipbuilder, a man of world traffic and technology. It could be that Hans Castorp went among the radicals, became a daredevil, a profane destroyer of old buildings and scenic beauty, unbound like a Jew and irreverent like an American, inclined to prefer a ruthless break with worthy tradition to a deliberate development of natural living conditions and throwing the state into daring experiments – that was also conceivable. Would he have it in his blood that your good wisdom, before whom the double post at the town hall presented, knew everything best, or would he be voted to support the opposition in the legislature? In his blue eyes under the reddish blond eyebrows there was no answer to such questions of bourgeois curiosity, and he probably didn’t know any yet, Hans Castorp, this blank slate.

He was twenty-three years of age when he began the journey on which we described him. At that time he had completed four semesters of study at the Danzig Polytechnic and four more, which he had spent at the Technical Universities of Braunschweig and Karlsruhe Join Tunder & Wilms as an engineering trainee to receive practical training at the shipyard. At this point his path took the following turn.

For the main exam he had to work hard and persistently and when he came home he looked even weaker,when it suited his type. dr Heidekind scolded him whenever he saw him and demanded a change of scenery, that is, a thorough one. With Norderney or Wyk auf Föhr, he said, it wasn’t enough this time, and if you ask him, Hans Castorp should spend a few weeks in the high mountains before he goes to the shipyard.

That was quite good, said Consul Tienappel to his nephew and foster son, but then they parted ways this summer, because he, Consul Tienappel, couldn’t get four horses in the high mountains. That’s not for him, he needs reasonable air pressure, otherwise he’ll get accidents. Hans Castorp should kindly travel alone to the high mountains. He should visit Joachim Ziemssen.

It was a natural suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill – not ill like Hans Castorp, but ill in a really unfortunate way, it was even a great horror. He had always been prone to catarrh and fever, and one day he actually had red sputum, and Joachim had to go to Davos in a hurry, to his great chagrin and sorrow, because he had just achieved the goal of his dreams. He had studied law for a couple of semesters according to the will of his family, but out of an irresistible urge he had switched to becoming a cadet and had already been accepted. And now he had been sitting in the international sanatorium “Berghof” (directing physician: Hofrat Dr. Behrens) for more than five months and was half bored to death, as he wrote on postcards.went up to keep his poor cousin company – it was most agreeable for both parties.

It was late summer when he decided to make the journey. The last days of July were already here.

He drove to three weeks.