‘The Buddenbrooks’ by Thomas Mann

A few years ago I got a fair way into ‘The Magic Mountain’, but did not complete it. I greatly regret not doing so, and will give it another go sooner rather than later. I may well read it next year when we will have the hundredth anniversary of the first English translation.

This summer I decided to read Mann’s earlier novel ‘The Buddenbrooks’ in the new Oxford World Classics edition with its translation by Mike Mitchell. There is also an introduction by the great Ritchie Richardson which I am very pleased I did not read before the novel itself. It contains not only spoilers, but a pretty full summary of the entire plot.

I greatly enjoyed reading this. The first half is interesting and well written, but I found that the novel became increasingly compelling as it proceeded and by the end I was staying up late into the night reading away with terrific pleasure.

The book was first published in German in 1901, the first English edition not coming out until 1924. It is often described as being the ‘first great novel of the twentieth century’, and that may well be true. But I liked it primarily because it feels like a classic nineteenth century novel in many ways, with none of the modernist trickery and innovation that was soon to become the fashion.

Thomas Mann wrote it in his mid-twenties and by all accounts it draws pretty accurately on his own family history, but with plenty of added artistic license. Not everyone by any means, particularly his uncle Friedel (the model for the unstable Christian Buddenbrook), was happy about being very clearly identifiable as characters in the book.

It is essentially a family saga, tracing the fortunes of a middle class business family (living in a barely disguised version of Mann’s home town of Lubeck in Northern Germany). The narrative starts in 1835 and ends in 1877 during which time we are introduced to five generations of Buddenbrooks if you count infants. But in truth, at least until the final few chapters, the focus is largely on two central characters, Thomas and Antoine, brother and sister who we first meet as children and follow through into middle / old age. Their spouses and children also feature prominently, all being strong characters who are very well drawn.

The novel is subtitled ‘Decline and fall of a Family’, and that is indeed the broad thrust of what happens, but there are lots of ups and downs on the way. This is not a simplistically tragic tale by any means.

It is very much in the naturalistic tradition, looking to portray a strand of society entirely honestly and realistically. And for me this is what made it so enjoyable. What we have depicted here in fiction is very much the milieu that Max Weber would shortly afterwards discuss as being key to the relative economic success of Northern Europe in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’.

The Buddenbrooks are an upright, respectable and well-respected family who run a very successful family business importing agricultural foodstuffs. They live in a large house, are prominent in the society of the town, are involved in local politics and are also devout Protestants. They continually look to further the family’s name, influence and wealth – this being the unquestioning purpose they see themselves as having. For Thomas that means leaving school in his late teens and joining his father in business. He is trained up to take the company over from an early age and he sees this very much as his duty. For Antoine, the expectation is that she will make an advantageous marriage, pairing up with a man who will help benefit the business rather than someone she loves. Thomas too is expected to marry appropriately, gaining a big dowry in the process. The story in essence is about how these dutiful actions go on to disappoint in practice, in different ways over time serving to have the opposite effect to that intended.

As the story proceeds though, another theme develops, and it was at this stage that for me the story got really engaging. Thomas, in particular, having achieved what is expected of him, becoming a senator (some kind of deputy mayor it would seem), building a big new house and generally being perceived as an enviable success, starts to regret the life choices he has made:

Oh yes, that was the question; that had been his question ever since he could think. Life was hard, and the ruthless and unsentimental course of business life was a reflection of life as a whole. In this tough, practical life did Thomas Buddenbrook have both feet firmly on the ground like his fathers? From way back he had often enough had cause to doubt it. From his youth he had often enough had to correct his feelings about this life … To be hard towards others and to suffer their hardness, yet to feel it not as hardness but as a matter of course – would he never properly learn that?

His wife has a somewhat different set of values, being very gifted musically and much more intellectually inclined, and it is her that their son takes after, creating the tensions that inform the narrative in the second half of the novel:

‘Just let me tell you once and for all, Thomas: you will never understand anything about music as art and, intelligent as you may be, you will never see that it is more than a postprandial amusement that is easy on the ear. In music you lack a sense of what is banal, which you do not have in other matters … and that is the criterion for understanding art.’

The writing throughout is, of course, magnificent. Thomas Mann had a great gift for presenting nifty pen portraits describing what characters looked like - their faces particularly - and their dress. There are some outstanding passages describing music and others that give a superb evocation from a child’s perspective of what it was like to celebrate Christmas as a member of a big, prosperous business family like the Buddenbrooks, to take a summer holiday at the coast and, particularly memorably, to attend a rather strictly run secondary school in which ‘the ability to hold one’s drink and smoke was highly regarded, as were bodily strength and gymnastic prowess’ and at which ‘the most contemptible failings were to be regarded as a softy or dandy’.

I completely sank into this once I got going. Seriously interesting, thoughtful and enjoyable to read.