Buddenbrooks

The Decline of a Dynasty

Thomas Mann was twenty-five years old when Buddenbrooks appeared in 1901, and he had written the great German novel of the nineteenth century. Not a young man’s novel — the kind of energetic, self-dramatizing debut that announces a talent — but a comprehensive, ironic, architecturally magnificent account of four generations of a merchant family in Lübeck, traced from their commercial confidence in 1835 to their extinction at the turn of the century. The Nobel Committee, in 1929, cited Buddenbrooks specifically as the basis for the prize.

The Buddenbrook family are grain merchants, pillars of Lübeck’s civic and commercial life, Protestant, prosperous, and certain of their world. The novel opens at a housewarming party for their new mansion on the Mengstrasse — a moment of visible triumph — and Mann begins immediately to document the forces that will undo it. Johann Buddenbrook the elder is still of the type that built the firm: practical, religious in a business-like way, genuinely comfortable in the world of contracts and ledgers. His son Jean is already slightly more refined, slightly more given to sentiment. By the third generation, Thomas Buddenbrook is a study in the exertion it now costs to be what his grandfather was naturally: a businessman. And Thomas’s son, little Hanno, cannot be a businessman at all — he is all music, all interiority, all fragility.

This is Mann’s central argument, and it is an argument of extraordinary depth: that the refining of a family across generations is simultaneously its ennobling and its destruction. The qualities that make Hanno capable of musical expression of genuine beauty are the very qualities that make him unfit for the mercantile world the family was built on. Sensitivity, introspection, the preference for the internal over the external — these are, in Mann’s vision, both the mark of culture and a kind of illness. The family’s story is not a tragedy of external reversal but of internal evolution: they become too good for what sustained them.

The Artist Against the Bourgeoisie

Buddenbrooks establishes the great theme that would occupy Mann throughout his career: the tension between the artist and the burgher, between Geist and Leben, between the refined sensitivity that creates art and the practical energy that creates commerce. In this first novel the argument is rendered through family history rather than through individual psychology, which gives it a different kind of force — not the intensity of a single consciousness but the slowness of a biological process, the gradual predominance of one trait over another across generations.

Tony Buddenbrook, Thomas’s sister, is one of the novel’s great creations: practical where her brother is reflective, resilient where Hanno is fragile, willing to sacrifice herself for the family’s dignity when the family itself no longer quite believes in that dignity. Her two disastrous marriages — both contracted partly in service of the firm, both failures — give the novel some of its most vivid and painful scenes. Tony survives everything; it is precisely her kind of vitality, Mann implies, that the family is losing.

The irony that runs through the novel is never cruel. Mann regards these people — their marriages, their business anxieties, their civic pride, their religious consolations — with a detachment that is also a form of affection. He was writing about his own family, about Lübeck, about the world he came from and had already, by the age of twenty-five, half-escaped. The result is a novel that is simultaneously a satire, a family chronicle, and a meditation on what is lost when culture supersedes commerce — and whether the loss was worth it.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the great European family novels, and the work that established Mann as a literary force of the first order at an age when most novelists are still finding their subject.