Hans Castorp retained only vague memories of his actual parental home; he had scarcely known his father and mother. They died away in the short space between his fifth and seventh year, first the mother, completely unexpectedly and in anticipation of her delivery, from a vascular blockage as a result of nerve inflammation, an embolism, as Dr. Heidekind described it, which immediately caused cardiac paralysis – she was just laughing, sitting in bed, it looked as if she would fall over laughing, and yet she only did it because she was dead. That was not easy for Hans Hermann Castorp, the father, to understand, and since he was very attached to his wife and wasn’t the strongest on his part either, he didn’t know how to get over it. His spirit was disturbed and diminished ever since; in itsDazed, he made business mistakes, so that the company Castorp & Sohn suffered significant losses; The spring after next he contracted pneumonia while inspecting a storage facility at the windy port, and since his shattered heart could not stand the high fever, he died despite all the care that Dr. Heidekind turned to him within five days and followed his wife to the Castorpsche hereditary burial, which was beautifully situated on the St. Katharinenkirchhof, with a view of the botanical garden, with a considerable participation of the citizenry.
His father, the senator, survived him, if only by a little, and the short period of time before he also died – by the way, also of pneumonia, and with great struggles and torments, because unlike his son, Hans Lorenz was Castorp a nature that is difficult to fell, firmly rooted in life – so this period of time, it was only one and a half years, was spent by the orphaned Hans Castorp in his grandfather’s house, built at the beginning of the last century on a narrow plot in the taste of Nordic classicism, in a gloomy House on the Esplanade, painted weather color, with semi-columns on either side of the front door, in the middle of the ground floor risen by five steps, and two upper floors except the bel etage,where the windows ran down to the floors and were fitted with cast iron bars.
Here were only representative rooms, including the bright, stuccoed dining room, whose three wine-red curtained windows looked out onto the back garden, and where grandfather and grandson lived during the eighteen monthsate lunch together alone every day at 4 a.m., served by old Fiete with the earrings and the silver buttons on his tailcoat, who wore the same battisten tie with the tailcoat as the master of the house himself, and also hid his shaved chin in it in a very similar way , and whom the grandfather used to speak to him in Low German; not in a joking way – he was not humorous – but in all objectivity and because that was how he treated people from the common people, with warehouse workers, postmen, coachmen and servants. Hans Castorp liked to hear it, and he was also very happy to hear how Fiete answered, also flatly, as he was serving, leaning around from the left behind his master to speak into his right ear, in which the senator heard much better than before the left. The old man understood and nodded and went on eating, very upright between the high mahogany back of the chair and the table, barely bending over his plate, and the grandson opposite him silently, with deep and unconscious attention, watched the tight, well-groomed movements in which the beautiful, white, thin old hands of the grandfather with the arched, pointed nails and the green coat of arms ring on the right index finger arranged a bite of meat, vegetables and potatoes on the tip of the fork and brought it to the mouth with a slight tilt of the head. Hans Castorp looked at his own hands, which were still clumsy, and felt in them the possibility of later holding and moving knives and forks like his grandfather. barely bent over the plate, and the grandson, opposite him, watched silently, with deep and unconscious attention, the tight, neat movements with which the grandfather’s beautiful, white, thin old hands with the arched, pointed nails and the green coat of arms ring on the right index finger arrange a bite of meat, vegetables and potatoes on the tip of the fork and lead it to the mouth while tilting the head slightly. Hans Castorp looked at his own hands, which were still clumsy, and felt in them the possibility of later holding and moving knives and forks like his grandfather. barely bent over the plate, and the grandson, opposite him, watched silently, with deep and unconscious attention, the tight, neat movements with which the grandfather’s beautiful, white, thin old hands with the arched, pointed nails and the green coat of arms ring on the right index finger arrange a bite of meat, vegetables and potatoes on the tip of the fork and lead it to the mouth while tilting the head slightly. Hans Castorp looked at his own hands, which were still clumsy, and felt in them the possibility of later holding and moving knives and forks like his grandfather. grandfather’s skinny old hands with the curved, pointed nails and the green coat of arms ring on the right index finger arranged a bite of meat, vegetables and potatoes on the tip of the fork and brought it to the mouth while tilting the head slightly. Hans Castorp looked at his own hands, which were still clumsy, and felt in them the possibility of later holding and moving knives and forks like his grandfather. grandfather’s skinny old hands with the curved, pointed nails and the green coat of arms ring on the right index finger arranged a bite of meat, vegetables and potatoes on the tip of the fork and brought it to the mouth while tilting the head slightly. Hans Castorp looked at his own hands, which were still clumsy, and felt in them the possibility of later holding and moving knives and forks like his grandfather.
Another question was whether he would ever get around to covering his chin in such a bandage as the capacious oneOpening of the strangely shaped neck, with the sharp points brushing against the cheeksgrandfather’s collar. Because you had to be as old as he was to do that, and apart from him and his old Fiete, no one wore bands and collars like that for far and wide. That was a pity, because little Hans Castorp particularly liked the way his grandfather leaned his chin in the high, snow-white bandage; as he remembers it, when he was grown up, he liked it very much: there was something in it that he approved of from the very nature of his being.
When they had finished eating and folded their serviettes, rolled them up and put them in the silver rings, a business which Hans Castorp did not easily manage at that time, since the serviettes were as big as small tablecloths, the senator stood up in front of the chair , which Fiete pulled away behind him and shuffled over to the “cabinet” to get his cigar; and sometimes the grandson followed him there.
This “cabinet” was created by making the dining room three-windowed and laying it through the entire width of the house, which is why there was only room for two salons, not, as is usually the case with this type of house, but for two, of which one , perpendicular to the dining room, with only one window facing the street, would have been disproportionately deep. That is why about a fourth part of its length had been separated from it, namely the “cabinet”, a narrow room with a skylight, dim and only furnished with a few objects: a cake stand on which the senator’s cigar cabinet stood, a gaming table with a drawer containing attractive things contained: whist cards,Game tokens, small marker boards with hinged teeth, a slate together with chalk pencils, paper cigar holders and much more; finally with a rococo glass cabinet made of rosewood in the corner, with yellow silk curtains stretched behind the panes.
“Grandpa,” little Hans Castorp could say in the cabinet, rising on tiptoe and reaching up to the old man’s ear, “please show me the baptismal font!”
And the grandfather, who in any case had pulled the lap of his long, soft frock coat back from his trousers and pulled his bunch of keys out of his pocket, used them to open the glass cabinet, from inside which the boy smelled a peculiarly pleasant and strange smell. All sorts of obsolete and therefore fascinating objects were stored in it: a pair of silver candelabra, a broken barometer with figural wood carvings, an album with daguerreotypes, a cedar liqueur case, a little Turk, hard to touch under his colorful silk suit, with a Clockwork in his body that had once enabled him to walk across the table but had long since stopped working, an ancient model ship and at the very bottom even a rat trap.
Basin and plate did not originally belong together, as you can see, and as the little one teaches each other anewlet but, said grandfather, they have been in common use for about a hundred years, since the pool was bought. The bowl was beautiful, of simple, noble form, shaped by the austere taste of the early part of the last century. Smooth and solid, it rested on a round base and was gilded on the inside; but the gold had already faded from time to a yellowish sheen. The only adornment was a raised wreath of roses and jagged leaves running around its upper edge. As for the plate, its much older age could be read on the inside. “Sixteen hundred and fifty” was written there in squiggly numerals, and all sorts of frilly engravings framed the number, executed in the “modern manner” of that time, turgidly haphazard, crests and arabesques that were half star and half flower. On the back, however, the names of the heads who had been owners of the piece over the course of time were dotted in changing fonts: There were already seven of them, provided with the year of the inheritance, and the old man in the bandage pointed with the ringed one Index finger the grandson at each one. The father’s name was there, that of the grandfather himself, and that of the great-grandfather, and then the prefix “Ur” doubled, tripled, and quadrupled itself in the mouth of the explainer, and the boy listened, head tilted to one side, with a thoughtful or even thoughtlessly dreamy self fixed eyes and devoutly sleepy mouth on the great-great-great-great, – this dark sound of the crypt and the burying of time, which nevertheless at the same time a piously preserved connection between the present,namely, as it was expressed on his face. He thought he was breathing cool, musty air, the air of St. Catherine’s Church or the Michaelis crypt with this sound, feeling the whiff of places where, hat in hand, one falls into a certain, reverently rocking gait without using the heels of his boots ; he also thought he could hear the secluded, peaceful stillness of such echoing places; spiritual feelings mingled with those of death and history at the sound of that dull syllable, and all this seemed somehow pleasant to the boy, yes, it might well be that for the sake of the sound he had asked for it to be heard and repeated to be able to look at the baptismal bowl again.
Then the grandfather put the vessel back on the plate and let the little one look into the smooth, slightly golden cavity that shimmered in the light from the skylight.
“Now it’s almost eight years,” he said, “that we held you over it and that the water with which you were baptized flowed into it … Sexton Lassen from St. Jacobi poured it into our good Pastor Bugenhagen’s hollow hand, and from there it ran over your head of hair here into the bowl. But we had warmed it so that you shouldn’t be frightened or cry, and you didn’t do that either, on the contrary, you had screamed beforehand, so Bugenhagen hadn’t had it easy with his speech, but when the water came, there you fell silent, and that was respect for the holy sacrament, we hope. And it will be forty-four years in the next few days when your blessed father was baptized, and the water flowed in here from his head. That was here in the house, his childhood home, over in the hall,in front of the middle window, and it was the old pastor Ezekiel who baptized him, the same whom the French almost shot as a young man because he had preached against their robberies and pillages – he has been with them for a long, long time now God. But seventy-five years ago, it was me that they baptized, also there in the hall, and they held my head over the bowl here, as it stands there on the plate, and the priest spoke the same words as you and your father , and in the same way the warm, clear water flowed from my hair (it was not much more then than I have on my head now) there into the golden basin.”
The little boy looked up at his grandfather’s slender old man’s head, which was just bent over the bowl again, as in the hour long gone that he was telling about, and a tried-and-tested feeling came over him, the strange, half-dreaming, half-frightening feeling of a at the same time pulling and standing, of an alternating staying that was return and dizzy sameness – a feeling that he knew from earlier occasions, and by which he had expected and wished to be touched again: it was partly, for the sake of it the presentation of the standing, wandering heirloom had been important to him.
When the young man examined himself later, he found that the image of his grandfather had stuck in his mind far more deeply, clearly and significantly than that of his parents: which may have been due to sympathy and special physical kinship, for the grandson resembled the grandfather to that extent a rosy milky beard a bleached and stiffSeventies can look like. In the main, however, it was characteristic of the old man, who without question had been the real character, the pictorial personality in the family.
Speaking in the public sense, time had passed over Hans Lorenz Castorp’s personality and intentions long before his departure. He had been a highly Christian gentleman, from the Reformed community, strictly conventional, intent on aristocratic narrowing of the social circle in which one was able to govern, as obstinately as if he were living in the fourteenth century, when the craftsmen faced the tenacious resistance of the old free patrician class had begun to gain a seat and vote on the city council and was too difficult to get for the new. His work fell into decades of violent upswing and manifold upheavals, decades of progress in forced marches that had constantly placed such high demands on public sacrifice and daring. But in him, old Castorp, God knew that it had not been appropriate when the spirit of the modern age had celebrated the well-known, brilliant victories. He had placed far more faith in fatherly customs and old institutions than in breakneck port expansions and godless big-city fantasies, had slowed down and appeased wherever he could, and if it had been up to him, the administration would still look so idyllic and old-fashioned today as in his own office at the time.
This is how the old man presented himself to the bourgeois eye, both during his lifetime and afterwards, and even if little Hans Castorp knew nothing about state affairs, he didChildren’s eyes silently looking, but essentially the same perceptions – wordless and therefore uncritical, rather only lively perceptions, which, by the way, also later, as a conscious memory image, retained their anti-word and anti-analysis, absolutely affirmative character. As I said, there was sympathy involved, that closeness and affinity that goes beyond a link, which is not uncommon. Children and grandchildren look to admire, and they admire to learn and educate what is inherited within them.
Senator Castorp was thin and tall. The years had curved his back and neck, but he tried to compensate for the curve by counter-pressure, his mouth, whose lips were no longer held by teeth but rested directly on empty gums (for he only used his teeth to eat), pulled himself down in a dignified, tedious way, and through this, as well as a remedy against an incipient infirmity of the head, the upright posture and chin rest came about, which little Hans Castorp so liked.
He loved the box—it was a long, gold-inlaid tortoiseshell box he handled—and for that reason used red handkerchiefs, the ends of which he used to hang from the back pocket of his frock coat. If this was a cheerful weakness in his appearance, it still worked as license from old age, as a carelessness that old age either consciously and jovially allows itself or brings with it in venerable unconsciousness; and in any case she remained the only one, Hans Castorp’s childish perspicacityever seen in grandfather’s appearance. For the seven-year-old, however, as well as later in the memory of the grown-up, the everyday appearance of the old man was not his actual and real one. In actual fact he looked even different, far more beautiful and correct than usual – namely as he appeared in a painting, a life-size portrait that used to hang in the parental living room and then together with little Hans Castorp on the Esplanade had moved from where it had found its place above the large red silk sofa in the drawing room.
It showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official dress as the city councilor – this serious, even pious bourgeois dress of a bygone century, which a solemn and daring community had carried through the ages and had been used in pompous fashion to ceremonially bring the past to the present, the present to make it a thing of the past and to declare the constant connection of things, the venerable certainty of their action signature. Senator Castorp stood there, full-length, on a reddish paved floor, in a pillar and pointed arch perspective. He stood with his chin lowered, his mouth pulled down, his blue, reflective eyes with the tear sacs underneath them wide open, in the black, more than knee-length, talar-like overcoat, which, open at the front, showed a wide fur trim at the edge and hem. Tighter undersleeves of plain cloth emerged from wide, high-puffed and bordered upper sleeves, and lace cuffs covered the hands to the ankles. The slender old man’s legs were in black silk stockings,the feet in shoes with silver buckles. Around his neck, however, lay the broad, starched, and often pleated plate ruff, pressed down in front and curling up on the sides, from under which a pleated cambric jabot hung to excess on his waistcoat. Under his arm he wore the old-fashioned hat with a wide brim, the head of which narrowed towards the top.
It was an excellent picture, created by a renowned artist, held with good taste in the style of the old masters that the subject suggested, and awakened all sorts of Spanish-Dutch-late-medieval ideas in the viewer. Little Hans Castorp had often looked at it, not with any artistic understanding, of course, but with a certain more general and even penetrating understanding; and although he had seen his grandfather only once in person as he was represented on the canvas, at a ceremonial driveway at the town hall, and even then only fleetingly, he could not, as we said, avoid seeing this pictorial appearance of his as to feel his true and real and in the grandfather of everyday life, so to speak, an interim grandfather, to see a makeshift and only imperfectly adapted one. For what was different and strange in his everyday appearance was evidently based on such an imperfect, perhaps somewhat clumsy adaptation, there were remnants and indications of his pure and true form that could not be completely erased. So were the parricides, the high white fascia old-fashioned; but it was impossible for this designation to apply to that admirable garment, of which those were only the interim allusion, viz., the Spanish frill. And so it was with the high white fascia old-fashioned; but it was impossible for this designation to apply to that admirable garment, of which those were only the interim allusion, viz., the Spanish frill. And so it was with the high white fascia old-fashioned; but it was impossible for this designation to apply to that admirable garment, of which those were only the interim allusion, viz., the Spanish frill. And so it was withthe unusual curved top hat that the grandfather wore on the street, and which in higher reality corresponded to the wide-brimmed felt hat in the painting; with the long and wrinkled frock coat, the archetype and authenticity of which appeared to little Hans Castorp as the bordered, fur-trimmed robe.
So he agreed in his heart that his grandfather should shine in his correctness and perfection when one day it was time to say goodbye to him. That was in the hall, the same hall where they so often sat opposite each other at the dining table; Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay in his midst on the bier surrounded by wreaths and surrounded by wreaths in a silver-bound coffin. He had fought through the pneumonia, had fought long and hard, although it seemed that in his present life he had only been at home to adapt, and now, one could not be sure whether victorious or defeated, he was lying in any case with a severely pacified expression and greatly altered and pointy-nosed from the struggle on his parade bed, his lower body covered by a blanket on which lay a palm branch, his head propped up on the silk pillow, so that the chin rested most beautifully in the front indentation of the ruff of honor; and between his hands, half-covered by lace cuffs, whose fingers, artificially and naturally arranged, did not hide the cold and lifelessness, an ivory cross had been placed on him, at which he seemed to stare fixedly with lowered eyelids.
Hans Castorp had probably seen his grandfather several times at the beginning of his last illness, but not towards the end. With the sight of the fight that toomost of what had happened during the night, he had been completely spared, only indirectly, through the anxious atmosphere in the house, old Fiete’s red eyes, the doctors’ coming and going, had he been affected by it; but the result that he found himself confronted with in the hall could be summed up in the following way: the grandfather had now solemnly removed the interim adaptation and had finally returned to his actual and appropriate form – a result worth approving, even if old Fiete cried uninterruptedly shook his head, even though Hans Castorp himself cried, just as he had cried at the sight of his mother, who had died suddenly, and his father, who was also lying there quietly and a stranger.
For it was now the third time in such a short time and at such a young age that death had an effect on the mind and the senses – especially on the senses – of little Hans Castorp; The sight and impression were no longer new to him, but already very familiar, and just as he had behaved the first two times in a calm and reliable manner, by no means weak of nerves, although with natural sadness, so now too, and to an even greater extent degrees. Unaware of the practical importance of the events for his life or childishly indifferent to them, confident that the world would take care of him one way or another, he had shown a certain childish coolness and objective attention to the coffins,Repercussions not to be considered. In the three or four months since his father died he had forgotten about death; now he remembered, and all the impressions of that time re-established themselves precisely, simultaneously, and penetratingly in their incomparable peculiarity.
Dissolved and put into words, they would have looked something like this. Death had a pious, sensuous and sadly beautiful, i.e. spiritual, meaning and at the same time a completely different, downright opposite, very physical, very material, which one can neither call beautiful, nor sensuous, nor pious, nor even just as could actually address sad. The solemn spirituality was expressed in the pompous laying out of the corpse, the splendor of flowers and the palm fronds, which, as is well known, signified heavenly peace; further and more clearly in the cross between the deceased fingers of the former grandfather, the blessing Savior von Thorwaldsen, standing at the head of the coffin, and in the candelabra rising on either side, which on this occasion had also assumed an ecclesiastical character. All these arrangements obviously had their more precise and good sense in the thought that grandfather had now gone into his real and true form forever. In addition, however, as little Hans Castorp remarked, even if he did not admit it verbally, all of them, but in particular the multitude of flowers and among them especially the tuberoses, which were often represented, had another meaning and sober purpose, namely the , the other, neither beautiful nor actually sad, but rather almost indecent, low physical condition, which is related to death that the grandfather had now gone into his actual and true form forever. In addition, however, as little Hans Castorp remarked, even if he did not admit it verbally, all of them, but in particular the multitude of flowers and among them especially the tuberoses, which were often represented, had another meaning and sober purpose, namely the , the other, neither beautiful nor actually sad, but rather almost indecent, low physical condition, which is related to death that the grandfather had now gone into his actual and true form forever. In addition, however, as little Hans Castorp remarked, even if he did not admit it verbally, all of them, but in particular the multitude of flowers and among them especially the tuberoses, which were often represented, had another meaning and sober purpose, namely the , the other, neither beautiful nor actually sad, but rather almost indecent, low physical condition, which is related to deathhad to gloss over, to bring into oblivion or not to let come to consciousness.
It was connected with this circumstance that the dead grandfather appeared so alien, actually not as the grandfather, but as a life-size, wax doll, which Death had inserted instead of his person, and with which all this pious and honorable effort was now being made became. The one lying there, or more correctly: what was lying there, was not grandfather himself, but a shell – which, as Hans Castorp knew, was not made of wax but of its own material; only made of material: that was what was indecent and hardly sad at all – sad just as little as things are sad that have to do with the body and onlywith this. Little Hans Castorp looked at the waxy yellow, smooth and cheesy solid material of which the life-size death figure was made, the face and hands of the former grandfather. A fly alighted on the unmoving forehead and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete carefully shooed them away, taking care not to touch his forehead while doing so, and with a respectable scowl on his face, as if he shouldn’t and didn’t want to know anything about what he was doing – an expression of modesty that apparently referring to the fact that the grandfather was just a body and nothing more; but after a sweeping flight, the fly settled briefly on grandfather’s fingers near the ivory cross. But while this was happeningthat’s why she was reminded of schoolmates who were avoided on all sides, and who the scent of the tuberoses under her hand was intended to drown out, without being able to do so despite all the beautiful opulence and severity.
He repeatedly stood by the corpse: once alone with old Fiete, the second time together with his great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and the two uncles James and Peter, and then a third time when a group of dock workers dressed in Sunday clothes stood for a few moments at open coffin to say goodbye to the former boss of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral, at which the hall was full of people and Pastor Bugenhagen from the Michaeliskirche, the same who had baptized Hans Castorp, dressed in the Spanish ruff, gave the memorial speech and afterwards got into the cab, the first one just behind the hearse, who then followed a long, long line, chatting very friendly with little Hans Castorp – and then this phase of life was over too,