Hans Castorp's Liberation – Part 2 (MM40) (2024) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain – Part 40

During the days of stifling suspense, while Europe's nerves were stretched on the rack, Hans Castorp did not go to see Herr Settembrini. The wild headlines from below now found their way directly to his balcony door, they sent the Berghof into spasms, filled the dining hall with an odor of sulfur that constricted the chest, seeping even into the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. And it was during those same moments that our sleeper slowly began to sit up in the grass, not knowing what had happened, not rubbing his eyes yet . . . and let us draw the metaphor out in full, so that we may be just to the rush of his emotions. He drew his legs back under him, stood up, looked around. He saw that the enchantment was broken, that he was released, set free – not by his own actions, as he had to admit to his shame, but set free by elementary external forces, for whom his liberation was a very irrelevant matter. But even if his little fate shrank to nothing before universal destiny, was it not, all the same, an expression of some goodness and justice intended personally for him, and thus in some way divine? If life was to receive back her sinful problem child, it could not happen on the cheap, but only like this, in a serious, rigorous fashion, as a kind of ordeal, which in this case did not perhaps mean life so much as it meant three salvos fired in his, the sinner's, honor. And so he sank back down on his knees, his face and hands raised toward a heaven darkened by sulfurous fumes, but no longer the grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight.

(English translation by John E. Woods)

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Thomas MannThe Magic MountainDer Zauberberg