Buddenbrooks
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Image:Buddenbrooks.jpg Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty six years old. It was a 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 from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic ironic and detailed style, and it was mainly this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.
Thomas Mann started writing the book in October 1897, when was just twenty-one years old. The novel was completed three years later, in July of 1900, and published in October 1901.
His objective was to write a social novel 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 bourgeoise atmosphere.
Image:Heinrich thomas mann.jpg 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 treatement reappears in the context of Buddenbrooks, and in different ways in some of Mann's later works.
Image:Thomas mann shopenhauer.jpg The exploration of decadence in the novel can be attributed to the profound influence of Arthur Schopenhauer (see The World as Will and Representation, 1829) on Thomas Mann during his youth. The three generations of the family depicted in the book experience a continuous and inevitable 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 the same unfortunate ends as those who do not.
The city where the Buddenbrooks family lives shares many of its street names with Mann's hometown of Lübeck. This and probably other recognisable episodes prompted many German readers and critics to attack Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, it must be said that the unfortunate fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no resemblance with the author's own family, or with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general.
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, these events play only a peripheral role and thus in this sense Buddenbrooks is not a historical novel.
Image:Thomas mann wagner.png 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 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.
Many aspects of Thomas Mann's personality are represented in the two main male representatives of the second and the third 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 the character of Hanno Buddenbrook escapes from real life worries into the realm of music, Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung in particular. (Wagner himself was of bourgeois descent and decided to dedicate himself to art.) In this sense both Buddenbrooks symbolise 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.
Thomas Mann did not intend to write an epic against the aristocratic society of his time and its conventions. In fact, to the contrary, he is often very sympathetic with their moral and Protestant ethics. Even when apparently criticizing, Mann does so with much 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).
Prior to 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 was responsible for providing him with a very large amount of information on the economics of Lübeck, corn prices, and the city's economic decline. The author himself carried out considerable financial analysis so as to present the economic information depicted in the book in an accurate manner.
All occurrences in the lives of the characters are seen by the narrator and the family members in relation to the family firm, particularly the sense of duty and destiny accompanying it as well as the economic consequences that events bring. Through births, marriages, and deaths, the firm 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 guards close resemblance to those made by the naturalistic novel writers of the 19th century (Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), but perhaps from a more ironic and less tragic point of view.
Though the influence of Buddenbrooks on later novels of the 20th century was probably less than Mann's other novels, this should probably be considered from a relative point of view. It was a 20th century author so fundamental as Faulkner who said of this novel that it was for him 'the greatest novel of the century'.de:Buddenbrooks it:I Buddenbrook: decadenza di una famiglia hu:Buddenbrook-ház nl:Buddenbrooks sv:Huset Buddenbrook