After a short time, the young protagonist Hans Castorf is somehow infected by the strangely lively charisma of the tuberculosis patients in the sanatorium. He himself is prone to hypochondria, and when he is sent to Hofrat Behrens for a lung X-ray with a slightly elevated temperature, means this one, there is a small one “Fleck”. Now Hans Castorf suddenly steps over into this sphere of the sick, that of cockiness, Die, Vitality and weariness is marked. (decadence?) And which both attracts and repels him. It is unclear, how sick Castorf is, and what considerations lead to it, that he stays in the sanatorium for seven years, quasi, until, due to the outbreak of World War I, the sanatorium dismisses most of its patients at once, definitely those below, die eben Kurgäste waren (second class) and not necessarily patients …..
“But why are they so high-spirited with such a serious illness??”, Castorf asks the humanist scholar Settembrini. (the parodic portrayal of a humanist.) Settembrini sagt: “My God, they are so free!”
And:
“Engineers, you know, what it means, to be lost to life? They do not regard sickness as a venerable substitute for the ordinary, easy working life?! To sympathize with the disease is confusion, because the disease is downright inhuman (!) is and demeaning.”
Castorf: “But the disease also makes people noble and clever and frees them from everyday life.”
September: “When a person is sick, he is only body.”
(ambiguous dialogue near the beginning of the book.)