Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann.

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
Thomas Mann
Trans. John E. Woods. Introd. TJ Reed
New York, London, Toronto: Everyman’s Library. Alfred A Knopf
1901 (1994)

Why read it? Novel. The study of how a middle-class, prosperous family of businessmen declines in prosperity: the origin, causes and progression of decadence in the family, a transformation of the male heirs from the hard-headed spirit of business and reality to the spirit of escape from the world into beauty through art. The Novel begins with the sumptuous dinner at the Buddenbrooks’ elegant and substantial house that illustrates the prosperousness of the family and ends with the death by typhoid of the last male heir, the sickly fifteen-year-old Hanno whose sole love was music: “…to produce an artist is the end [meaning “finish”] of a bourgeois [business] family….”

Thomas Buddenbrook traces the history of everyman, from youthful energy, to hard-working, community servant, to enervated, dejected, dispirited, conscious of failure in life, old age. The Buddenbrooks are hard-headed businessmen and while they are not shown to be mean and pitiless to businessmen down on their luck, other businessmen display the brutality that is characteristic of the successful man against the failure.

The code of the Buddenbrooks is to do one’s duty to the family and to sacrifice one’s individual happiness to the prosperity of the family. Tony Buddenbrook begins as a teen-age romantic who marries, against her wishes, a man she despises, who is physically repulsive to her, but who is her father’s desired suitor because of his business prospects. She becomes the unmarried aunt who is thrice divorced.

Gerda, Thomas’s wife, is very un-Buddenbrook-like. She loves music and passes her passion for it to Thomas’s only son, Johann, “Hanno.” The enemy of the hard-headed, duty-bound, prosperous business family is the artistic temperament, which includes Gerda, Tom’s wife, Tom’s brother Christian, and, finally, Thomas’s son, Hanno, who dies of typhoid at age fifteen—the end of the Buddenbrook line. The failure of the disciplined life and adoption of the code of art and beauty leads to the end of the Buddenbrook business and family.

Sample ideas from the novel.
Nietzsche: “Every good book that is written against life is still an enticement to life.” “The novel is a study of the psychology of decadence.” “…playing at the corners of her mouth was the mocking and totally merciless smile with which a young lady measures a man and finds him wanting. …how should she reply? Ah, it had to be something that would cast this Bendix Grunlich off for good and all, annihilate him—but it also had to be a deft, witty phrase that would both impress him and cut like a knife.” “ ‘The feeling is not mutual,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on Herr Grunlich’s chest: and, having shot her poisoned dart, she left him standing there, simply walked on, her head setback and flushed with pride at her sarcastic rhetorical powers.” “Yes, this was certainly the right kind of match; but Herr Grunlich, of all people. She pictured him and his tawny whiskers, his pink, smiling face, that wart beside his nose, his mincing steps; she thought she could feel his wool suit, hear his bland voice.” “I was constantly making fun of him with sarcastic comments. I can’t imagine how he can even stand me. He must have some pride.”

“She is a child, a chickadee, a flighty young thing. If she would say yes, she could take her place in the world, set herself up quite nicely, which is what she really wants, and within a matter of days she would love her husband.” “My Christian convictions, dear daughter, tell me it is our duty to have regard for the feelings of others, for we do not know whether one day you may not be held answerable before the highest judge because the man you have stubbornly and coldly scorned has been guilty of the sin of taking his own life.” “We are not born, my dear daughter, to pursue our own small personal happiness, for we are not separate, independent, self-subsisting individuals, but links in a chain; and it is inconceivable that we would be what we are without those who have preceded us and shown us the path that they themselves have scrupulously trod, looking neither to the left, nor to the right, but, rather, following a venerable and trustworthy tradition.”

“God bless you, my son. Work, pray and save.” “She believed…that absolutely every character trait was a family heirloom, a piece of tradition, and therefore something venerable and worthy of her respect, no matter what.” “I know all I need to know about you, my good man. I already have an inventory right here in my pocket. Aha! I’ll make very sure that no little silver breadbaskets and dressing gowns are stashed away.” “Tony had the lovely knack of being able to adapt readily to any situation in life simply by tackling its new possibilities.” Tom: “And for me the important thing is control and balance. There will always be people for whom this sort of interest in oneself, this probing observation of one’s own sensibilities, is appropriate—poets, for instance, who are capable of expressing the inner life, which they prize so much, with assurance and beauty, thereby enriching the emotional life of other people. but we are just simple merchants, my dear; our self-observations are dreadfully petty.” “But what we should do, damn it, is to sit ourselves down and accomplish something, just as our forebears did.”

“And Gerda has her share of high spirits, too—she surely proves that when she plays her violin. But she can be a little cold sometimes. In short, she can’t be measured by ordinary standards. She’s an artist by nature—a unique, puzzling, ravishing creature.” “And she doesn’t understand when I say ‘croquettes’ because they call them ‘patties’ here; and when she says ‘snappers’ it isn’t easy for an ordinary Christian to realize that she means ‘green beans’; and if I say ‘fried potatoes,’ she keeps yelling ‘Huh?’ until I say ‘home fries,’ which is what they call them here, and ‘Huh?’ means ‘Beg your pardon?’ ” “Later on…various members of the family learned what the ‘name’ was, the name that Herr Permander had so imprudently let slip. And what had he said? ‘Go to hell, you filthy sow, you slut!’ And so Tony Buddenbrook’s second marriage came to an end.”

“...and in a thousand meetings of administrative and supervisory commissions over which he now presided as a result of his election, it took all his tact, charm and flexibility constantly to make allowances for the sensitivities of men much older than he to appear to defer to their long years of experience, while in fact retaining power in his own hands.” “But was this child, the heir for whom he had waited in vain so long and who bore many physical traits of his father’s family—was this child to be so completely his mother’s son?” “Until now, Gerda’s violin playing had been just another charming adjunct to her charming character….” “But he was forced to watch as her passion for music—which he had always found rather odd—took possession of the child at such an early age.” “Thomas regarded music as a hostile force that had come between him and his child—after all, he had hoped to make a genuine Buddenbrook of him, a strong and practical man with a powerful drive to master and take control of the world outside him but in his present irritable mood, it seemed to him as if that hostile force was making him a stranger in his own house.”

Hanno scrawls a hodge podge of lines at the end of the “family document” with the family tree recorded on it. His father is enraged at this defacement and angrily asks why Hanno had done it. Hanno says that he thought there would be no more names—prophetic. There were none after Hanno. “…he could not look at an open window without being overcome, for no reason, whatever, by the urge to leap out of it….a kind of mad and desperate foolhardiness that he found almost impossible to suppress…; he described how it had taken all the moral energies at his disposal for him to creep on all fours to the open window and close it.”

Quote: “But a man chooses to rest beside the wide simplicity of external things [the ocean] because he is weary from the chaos within.”

Quote” “You can’t believe how he looked when they brought him in. No one has ever seen even a speck of dust on him, he never allowed that, his whole life long. What a vile, insulting mockery for it to end like this.”

Quote: “God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness, I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith.”