In the movie, he is a sad and fearful old man, who feigns defiance of death in several over-wrought scenes not found in the book. In the book, he is a larger-than-life charismatic figure who draws the other residents into his circle by the elemental force of his personality. Dismayingly, the Peeperkorn of Mann's novel is completely unrecognizable in the movie character. This makes unintelligible the climactic confrontation between the two pedagogues in the snowy field. Perhaps unavoidably, and to its detriment, the movie gives short shrift to all of these large ideas, and most lamentably, fails to capture the ferocity of the battles between Settembrini and Naphta over the soul of Hans Castorp. Later in the book, Peeperkorn introduces a third view of man centered on, daresay, pagan values (emotionalism, naturalism, non-idealism and anti-intellectualism). For me, the soul of the novel The Magic Mountain is the clash of ideas expressed in the incessant arguments between Settembrini (the champion of the enlightenment values of humanism, democracy, science) and Naphta (representing a hyper-ascetic belief in religion, war, revolution, social upheaval and the clash of God and the devil).
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