This is a long family saga, set in the North German town of Lubeck. Lübeck was one of the Hanseatic League, an alliance of trading cities and states along the north coats of Europe that established and maintained trade monopoly along the coast of Northern Europe and had their own law.
The book follows four generations of a mercantile family, the Buddenbrooks. At the beginning of the book, the family is at the height of its power – the patriarch of the family has a thriving business, two sons who will follow him into the business and a beautiful daughter, he is a member of the Town Senate and a highly respected and wealthy man. But as as the subtitle suggests, the family’s fortunes are waning, and by the end of the book, only a rump of the family remains, 5 old women sitting the twilight with no money, no status, and only their memories to keep them warm. In between are disastrous marriages, love affairs, bad business deals, building projects, good marriages, children, and a relentless progression of others’ fortunes that eclipse the Buddenbrooks’ status and wealth. You can read a full description of the book in Wikipedia.
So why does the family decline? It seems that the Buddenbrooks get too indulgent and soft – they don’t have the mongrel streak of hard work in them that their ancestors did. They don’t want success badly enough. And yet they are still propelled by a strong sense of duty towards the family firm and the Buddenbrook name, even as the firm begins to go downhill and the name loses status. At the same time, the younger Buddenbrooks are yearning for something more, something to do with art and higher culture rather than buying and selling commodities. This tensions hampers their ability to cope, as they remain obsessed with status and but unable to maintain it, less able to arrest their decline, a circle which feeds itself.
Despite the action taking place at a time of great social change in Germany and wider Europe, external affairs almost never show up in the book. There is no mention of revolution, Bismarck, the formation of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, or anything else that was going on in the period 1835 to 1875. This heightens the obsession of the Buddenbrooks with their own little world in Lübeck and shows that they are fast becoming relics of an older time.
It’s interesting to compare this book to The Forsyte Saga, another book about a family that declines at a time of great social change because the younger generations lack the moral fibre of the older. The Forsyte Saga seems more concerned with the idea that nineteenth century Englishness, the sort that built the empire, declined after the Edwardian period and would never recover. Buddenbrooks is perhaps looking for a slightly more scientific and philosophical explanation.
One thing that I really liked about the book was how well Thomas Mann develops the characters. The third generation of Buddenbrooks, Thomas, Toni and Christian, genuinely grow and change from childhood to adulthood, but retain certain markers from childhood into adulthood. Not many authors manage to do that realistically. My sympathies for these characters changed over the course of the book.
Thomas Mann also uses some slightly odd motifs as symbols of different characters. One of these is teeth. He will note the strong white teeth of the older generation and of the other merchant families of the town (and the common people) who begin to eclipse the Buddenbrooks, while the last generation of Buddenbrooks, Thomas’s son Hanno, is in constant pain from rotting and fragile teeth. It is a visit to the dentist that kills off Thomas Buddenbrook in the end.
Mann also inserts a lot of variety into the book by varying the time span and length of the chapters. This is very effective in conveying both the mood of the characters and of the times. For example, when Thomas Buddenbrook suspects his wife is having an affair, a long chapter covers a single afternoon that he spends alternately listening at the door of a room as she entertains a visitor, and sneaking away to his study to fume and broods. In contrast in other places he will skip over several weeks, months or even years, in a few pages, using a distant passive voice, which creates the impression of looking at the family from a long distance away.
One last thing that struck me: This book is very much a 19th century book, in style, setting, and content. It was first published in 1901. Thomas Mann died in 1955. The social changes that he would have seen in his lifetime, especially in Germany, would have been phenomenal. He survived, it seems, much better than the Buddenbrooks. Perhaps because, as he said in accepting the Nobel Prize, “The value and significance of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously.”
Buddenbrooks is a long book, but well worth reading, especially if you like 19th century novels and/or family sagas. I enjoyed it very much.
Buddenbrooks: decline of a family
Thomas Mann
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
