Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
By Peter on Apr 29, 2009 in Award winner, Classical novel, Crime Books, Excellent book, Fiction Books, Historical Fiction, The World of Books, Thomas Mann, World literature, book review
Some works of art are almost logically impossible. Often literature and art capture and present phenomena in ways that contribute to their understanding. This most certainly is the case with the wonderful novel Buddenbrooks. If it is at all possible to convey 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere 
In the tragic year 1929, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And the primary reason was this novel, which he started to write at the impossible age of 22, and published in October 1901, when he was only 26 years old. As the Nobel committee says, “principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature”. And herein lies almost a logical impossibility: That an author, less than 25 years old, writes a novel which is not only stunning in its literary beauty and composition, tells an important and entertaining tale, and also contains a precise and correct description of the “zeit geist” of a class.
Mann wanted to write a book on the vast differences between the world of business on one side and art on the other, and present it as a family saga. He was, supposedly, inspired by the Grand Master of European literature, Stendhal’s (1830) Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics)
However, Buddenbrooks ended up being something else. It became a novel that reflects and illustrates the transition between the 19th century realistic style and 20th century symbolism in European literature, and which is, in fact, a little of each. A rich descriptive work, a saga mapping the lives of four generations of a wealthy Hanseatic family with complex and detailed character descriptions, intriguing in its use of symbols, with a subtle irony in its tone. It is – as evidenced in the subtitle of the book – The Decline of a Family – a tale of strength, decline, degradation and decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno, dies of a typhoid infection and with him, the family. Was it the negative influences of the artistic strain in the genes of the Buddenbrooks that explained the decline of the family business? Do art and business require vastly different abilities? What is the relationship of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben)?
Buddenbrooks was controversial at the time of its publication. When it was published, the book outraged the citizens of Lübeck. They viewed the book as a thinly veiled account of local incidents and figures, even though Thomas Mann never mentions the name of the city in the book. But the book, as we read it today, is much more than a vicious report about the decadence of bourgeois life in Leipzig – it is a many-sided, almost ambiguous work of art that also contains a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.
A true literary masterpiece that still shines in its richness and beauty.
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