Why do you think the narrator keeps calling Hans “our hero” despite his plainly unheroic characteristics?

Upon Hans’s arrival to the sanatorium, Hans evinces an extraordinary curiosity about everything, even a morbid cough from down the hall. Does this curiosity serve him well in the end?

How do the competing intellectual positions of Settembrini and Naphta within the sanatorium reflect European ideologies of the early 20th century?