Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks
First edition book cover
Author(s)	Thomas Mann
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin
Publication date	1901
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA
OCLC Number	16705387

Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. The publication of the 2nd edition in 1903 confirmed that Buddenbrooks was a major literary success in Germany.

It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a Family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society throughout several decades of the 19th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic detailed style, and it was this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, although according to Mann's wife this achievement would not have occurred without the publication of The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann started writing the book in October 1897, when he was twenty-two years old. The novel was completed three years later, in July 1900, and published in October 1901.

His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between businessman and artist's worlds, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere.

Buddenbrooks is a transition novel, involving both the transition between the 19th century realistic style and 20th century symbolism; it is also a novel of personal transition for the author, starting his departure from 19th century influences to the more essayistic, symbolic and intertextual modern tone of his later works. That said, Buddenbrooks already presents in full style the perfection of narrative, the subtle irony of tone, and the complex and obsessively detailed character descriptions that characterize Mann's work.

Up to the time of writing Buddenbrooks, Mann had concentrated on smaller stories, almost all of which referred to his own difficult decision to live the life of an artist instead of continuing the commercial and otherwise bourgeois duties expected by his family. These stories had been already published under the title Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898, Little Herr Friedmann). They treated spiritually and physically weak figures in an ambivalent way and demonstrated their fight against the moral and social constraints of bourgeois society. This same treatment reappears in the context of Buddenbrooks, and in different ways in some of Mann's later works.

The exploration of decadence in the novel can be attributed to the profound influence of Arthur Schopenhauer (see The World as Will and Representation also translated as The World as Will and Idea, 1829) on Thomas Mann during his youth. The three generations of the family depicted in the book experience a continuous economical, physical, and spiritual decline, with true happiness becoming increasingly unavailable to all the members of the family. The characters who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the family firm meet unfortunate ends, just as those who do not.

The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Mann's hometown of Lübeck that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the author's own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the "money aristocracy", although merchandizing is a central topic.

The main period of time considered covers 1835 to 1877, and thus includes some of the most dramatic episodes of 19th-century German history: the Revolutions of 1848, the Austro-Prussian War, the North German Confederation, and the establishment of the German Empire). However, in agreement with the above-mentioned remarks, these events play only a peripheral role and thus in this sense Buddenbrooks is also not a historical novel.

Major themes

One of the most famous aspects of Thomas Mann's prose style can be seen in the use of leitmotifs. Derived from his admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner, in the case of Buddenbrooks an example can be found in the description of the color - blue and yellow, respectively - of the skin and the teeth of the characters. Each such description alludes to different states of health, personality and even the destiny of the characters. Rotting teeth are also a symbol of decay and decadence because it implies indulging in too many cavity causing foods. An example of this would be Hanno's cup of hot chocolate at breakfast.

Many aspects of Thomas Mann's personality are represented in the two main male representatives of the third and the fourth generations of the fictional family: Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno Buddenbrook. It should not be considered a coincidence that Mann shared the same first name with one of them. Thomas Buddenbrook reads a chapter of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and the character of Hanno Buddenbrook escapes from real-life worries into the realm of music, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in particular. (Wagner himself was of bourgeois descent and decided to dedicate himself to art.) In this sense both Buddenbrook persons symbolize the conflict lived by the author: the evasion of a productive bourgeois life to pursue an artistic one, though never turning his back on bourgeois ethics.

In any case, the main theme of Thomas Mann's novels, the conflict between art and business, already governs this work. Also the music plays a major role: Hanno Buddenbrook, like his mother, tends to be an artist and musician, and not a person of commerce like his father.

Literary significance and criticism

Thomas Mann did not intend to write an epic against contemporary aristocratic society and its conventions. On the contrary, Mann often sympathizes with their Protestant ethics. Mann criticizes with irony and detachment. When Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus (1905, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) by Max Weber was published, Thomas Mann himself recognised the affinities with his own novel. The same happened with Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) by R.H. Tawney. (See Hugh Ridley's Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks - Cambridge, 1987).

Before writing the novel, Mann conducted extensive research in order to depict with immaculate detail the conditions of the times and even the mundane aspects of the lives of his characters. In particular, his cousin Marty provided him with substantial information on the economics of Lübeck, including corn prices and the city's economic decline. The author carried out financial analysis to present the economic information depicted in the book accurately.

Accurate information through extensive research was a general topic in Thomas Mann's other novels. Some characters in the book speak in the Low German of northern Germany.

In the conversations appearing in the early parts of the book, many of the characters switch back and forth between German and French, and are seen to be effectively bilingual. The French appears in the original within Mann's German text, similar to the practice of Tolstoy in "War and Peace". The bilingual characters are of the older generation, who were already adults during the Napoleonic Wars; in later parts of the book, with the focus shifting to the family's younger generation against the background of Germany moving towards unification and assertion of its new role as a major European power, the use of French by the characters visibly diminishes.

All occurrences in the lives of the characters are seen by the narrator and the family members in relation to the family trade business: the sense of duty and destiny accompanying it as well as the economic consequences that events bring. Through births, marriages, and deaths, the business becomes almost a fetish or a religion, especially for some characters, notably Thomas and his sister Tony. The treatment of the female main character Tony Buddenbrook in the novel resembles the 19th-century Realists (Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), but from a more ironic and less tragic point of view.

The influence of Buddenbrooks on later novels of the 20th century is probably less than Mann's other novels. Nonetheless, Faulkner said of the novel that it was for him "the greatest novel of the century" and kept an edition of Buddenbrooks in his home library bearing Faulkner's own signature.^{[citation needed]}

Thomas Buddenbrook and Schopenhauer

In Part 10, chapter 5, Thomas Mann described Thomas Buddenbrook's encounter with Schopenhauer's philosophy. When he read the second volume of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Thomas Buddenbrook was strongly affected by Chapter 41, entitled "On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature." From this chapter's influence, he had such thoughts as "Where shall I be when I am dead? …I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say 'I' " …"Who, what, how could I be if I were not—if this my external self, my consciousness, did not cut me off from those who are not I?"…"soon will that in me which loves you be free and be in and with you — in and with you all." "I shall live…Blind, thoughtless, pitiful eruption of the urging will!" Schopenhauer had written that "Egoism really consists in man's restricting all reality to his own person, in that he imagines he lives in this alone, and not in others. Death teaches him something better, since it abolishes this person, so that man's true nature, that is his will, will henceforth live only in other individuals." According to this teaching, there really is no self to lose when death occurs. What is usually considered to be the self is really the same in all people and animals, at all times and everywhere. Irvin D. Yalom had a character in his novel describe it as follows:

…essentially it described a dying patriarch having an epiphany in which the boundaries dissolved between himself and others. As a result he was comforted by the unity of all life and the idea that after death he would return to the life force whence he came and hence retain his connectedness with all living things.

— The Schopenhauer Cure, Chapter 32

However, a few days after reading Schopenhauer, "his middle class instincts" brought Thomas Buddenbrook back to his former belief in a personal Father God and in Heaven, the home of departed individual souls. There could be no consolation if conscious personal identity is lost at death. The novel ends with the surviving characters' firm consoling belief that there will be a large family reunion, in the afterlife, of all the individual Buddenbrook personalities.

Film adaptations

In 1959 and 1960, German filmmaker Alfred Weidenmann directed two film adaptions of Buddenbrooks. Buddenbrooks - 1. Teil was released in 1959 and featured actors Liselotte Pulver, Nadja Tiller, Hansjörg Felmy, Hanns Lothar, Lil Dagover and Werner Hinz. The following year, Buddenbrooks - 2. Teil was released in theaters and featured the same cast.

A silent version by Gerhard Lamprecht released in 1923 still showed a pre-war Lübeck. Franz Peter Wirth directed a 10-hour TV version that premiered in 1979 and was filmed in less-damaged Gdansk.

In 2008, a film adaption was made by a German production. One of the castings is Armin Mueller-Stahl, known from several Hollywood films.

See also

Novels portal

• Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century