Character Analysis
Dr. Krokowski
He is Behrens' assistant. Whereas Behrens views disease as something organic, Krokowski regards it as something inorganic. This causes him to be obsessed with the idea that all disease is the result of repressed love. He is incapable of thinking about love in any other way than as in his lecture series, which goes on throughout the entire length of Castorp's stay and deteriorates into occultism. He defines the sanatorium as Venusberg (Mountain of Venus in German, taken from Wagner's opera Tannhäuser, where it is the sinful world of physical love).
Called Minos, he is not interested in the cure of his patients. Preoccupied with the analysis of their souls, his lectures, besides satisfying his sensual interests, have the function of killing time in the boredom of the Berghof. Appropriately clad in black and residing in semi-darkness, he represents the deliberate distortion of psychoanalysis in the interest of perversion and death.