In a nameless Hanseatic city in northern Germany in 1835, the Buddenbrook family has gathered in the salon of their brand new and fairly ostentatious home. There are the grandparents, parents Johann and Elizabeth, sons Thomas and Christian and daughter Antonie (Tony). They are proud, up and coming members of the local upper middle class. They aspire to greatness. And by the end of the novel, it is 1877 and the family has fallen to ruin. In short: Buddenbrooks is about as sunny as you’d expect from German literature.
This is Thomas Mann’s first novel and, according to the committee tasked with these things, the one that won him the Nobel prize. He wrote it from the enviably young age of 22; he wrote most, if not all of the work he’s famous for at the start of his career, which is interesting to say the least.
Buddenbrooks paints a host of characters and mostly focuses on the grandchildren. Thomas is intelligent, dutiful and driven. Christian, on the other hand, is a lazy pleasure seeker. Pretty Tony is a bit of a coquette. As children, they do well enough: Thomas is marked as the heir apparent, the one to take over the business, leaving Christian to do as he pleases. Tony is set to make a good match and marry up, bringing the family even more status, but things go awry fairly quickly. Tony is forced to marry a man whom she does not like or trust, and soon her feelings are justified. Thomas does well as head of the business: he has the acumen and drive to make things work, but a rapidly industrialising nation complicates things and he experiences setback after setback, leaving him feeling drained and anxious and resentful towards Christian, who does as he pleases but suffers from vague medical conditions and a hankering for the wrong sort of woman. Thomas’s son Hanno is a week, feeble child without any discernible talents, save for music, which his father despises and does not understand; he’s also quite probably gay, inasmuch as Mann could write about homosexuality in those days (Mann himself struggled with his sexuality all his life).
Life is disappointing, seems to be the central message of the book: the Buddenbrooks fail at life, whether they do things out of duty or just because they feel like it. If that seems acerbic, it isn’t: Mann has a lot of heart for his characters, and his descriptions of these characters are amazing and almost grotesque; they seem to leap off the page. The Buddenbrooks want nothing more than money and status; the fact that they can’t seem to have either infuriates them, but they suffer through it with the decorum that the repressed society in which they live demands of them.
I majored in English and read a lot of literature, and sometimes I like to remind myself of that. Mann was not part of the curriculum for obvious reasons, but I figured I’d give him a go. I won’t lie that sometimes, that felt like a bit of a struggle, but ultimately I was surprised at how fast I read the book. The writing is dense and that took some getting used to, but it’s the characters that make the novel worthwhile, especially because their struggle to live up to the expectations they and society have of themselves is, I think, something most people nowadays can relate to. In that sense it’s still highly relevant. At the same time, it offers a fascinating look at the gossiping and backstabbing going on in society at that time; Johann has an older half-brother, long since estranged from the family and his three spinster daughters are there for every bit of misfortune, relishing in the downfall of their family members with glee, like a coked-up Greek chorus.
All in all, Buddenbrooks is a deeply sad novel, and not an easy read. But it’s also vivid and rich and at the same time, surprisingly respectful towards its imperfect characters who aim for the stars and end up in the gutter.