The Buddenbrooks Family Affairs

In the summer of 1900, Thomas Mann sent a handwritten copy of Buddenbrooks to the publisher Samuel Fischer. Małgorzata Łukasiewicz takes a close look at this work and deciphers it to uncover Mann’s ideas.

August 13, 1900. Thomas Mann went to the post office with a heavy package addressed to Berlin publisher S. Fischer; he paid extra insurance, estimating the value of the package to be 1,000 Deutsch Marks. ‘The clerk in the window smiled’. The package held a manuscript – the sole copy! – of Buddenbrooks, Mann’s first novel.

Buddenbrooks – in the plural form, the name has a dynastic gravity. It suggests an unending chain of generations, a firm continuity, maintained by carefully chosen connections, private rituals, inheritance law. To become the collective protagonist of the story, a family has to endure at least a few generations, to grow and multiply, to produce a number of individual personalities. The coming generations must stand their ground – or submit – to shifting challenges and temptations, which come abundantly in a fast-paced, modern, and rapidly changing world.

The subtitle is ominous: The Decline of a Family. In the novel’s first sentences we have parents, spouses and children, generations piling high, branching lines of relatives and kinships. Every other Thursday the whole family – all the relatives live in one town – gather for lunch. Sometimes, for special occasions, old family friends arrive as well. This sort of occasion has just transpired – the Buddenbrooks are entertaining guests in their new hub on Mengstrasse. The first part of the novel, describing one afternoon in the Buddenbrooks’ lives, depicts a contented family, planted firm in the local society, with traditions and a bright outlook for the future. We soon also discover who does not attend these family meetings – the son of old Buddenbrook from his first marriage, who has been at odds with his father ever since, against his will, he married the ‘shopkeeper’, that is, a young lady from a family of far lower standing than the Buddenbrooks. And then, as in a good overture, there is mention of the Ratenkamp family, who once were such a success, but recently have fallen so low.

The family and business

The Buddenbrooks are more than a family – they are also a company. The bourgeois dynasties are bound by the double bonds of blood and business. The grain trading company was founded in 1768 by Johann, the father of ‘old Buddenbrook’, the grandfather to consul Jean, and great-grandfather to a senator, Thomas, and great-great-grandfather to Hanno. In the course of the novel, the company will celebrate its centenary. The founder left behind a warning, given to his son and passed down to the following generations: “My son, show zeal for each day’s affairs of business, but only for such that make for a peaceful night’s sleep.” That which serves to consolidate the family also strengthens the company. That which impairs the family reflects horribly on the company’s prestige. Death means the loss of a loved one: and the necessity of deciding on a will, and thus dispersing capital. The dowries acquired and paid out should more-or-less break even, the weddings, baptisms, taking a new partner on board and signing long-term contracts, birthdays and company anniversaries – these events of various natures are of equal importance to the family company and are celebrated with equal ceremony. God’s blessing is needed for personal success and good fortune in business endeavours.

Playing with pacing

The family story creates a chart for the narrative imagination, upon which we may place a variety of fates, individual types, historical incidents. It progresses in a sphere that is enclosed and limited in advance, but within these narrow confines, it gives rise to countless combinations. Mann varies these stories with constant shifts in tempo and registers. Sometimes he packs a long string of events in a few sentences, other incidents receive meticulous attention. He sometimes adopts a subversively whimsical tone about matters of grave importance, and then becomes quite serious about trifles. Some events play out in front of our eyes, about others we learn from letters exchanged by the novel’s characters, from family documents, from being mentioned in conversation. The dry chronicle of information is woven with scenes of steadily building suspense, reinforced and supported on thousands of details, packed with atmosphere. The death of old Mrs Buddenbrook is merely noted in passing, while Consul Betsy dies for many devastating pages. Sometimes subplots and people vanish before our eyes, only to resurface once again. The narrative speeds up and slows down. Having written only novellas before, in Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann found a new, sprawling, highly capacious form for his writing – he discovered time as a medium to reveal a fluctuating reality. In time we see how contradictions lose their sharp edges and how what initially seemed coherent and compact splits into hostile opposites.

Models taken from life and literature

The manuscript of The Buddenbrooks – the one valued at 1,000 Deutsche Marks at the post office – has not survived. We do, however, have notes, collected by the writer while working on the novel. Mann filled almost a whole card catalogue with details on economics, customs, and technology.
He also filled cards with the characters’ traits and curricula vitae. And above all, he drew generously from his own family tradition, from surviving documents, recollections, and reports, created on his special commission.
After the novel was printed in Lübeck, letters began circulating, working out who was who in Buddenbrooks – among the town’s citizens they discovered prototypes for the lawyer Giesecke, the consul Döhlmann, the partner, Marcus, the Hagenströms and the Möllendorpfs. The real people were indignant, the book was seen as a roman à clef, a pamphlet on Lübeck society. Twelve years later, with the appearance of Wilhelm Alberts’s book, the first to be devoted solely to Thomas Mann, Friedrich’s uncle – who had reason to suppose he had served as the model for Christian Buddenbrook – placed a classified ad in the newspaper demanding the author be condemned for “his caricatural mud-slinging at his closest relatives, scandalously exposing their lives’ hardships.” Defending himself from such accusations in the article ‘Bilse and I’, Mann denies nothing; he does not maintain that any resemblance to living people is sheer coincidence. On the contrary, he states – and here he formulates his author’s credo – that no true artist invents things out of thin air, they draw from literary models or directly from real life, because true creativity is not a matter of dreaming up characters and plots, it involves ‘infusing matter with spirit’. This issue – the substance communicated by life and literature, reprocessed, put through a recycling procedure and reanimated – will return on several occasions in his writing, and later in biographical research and interpretations. Major inspirations
In the late nineteenth century the family flourishes; clearly this is how bourgeois culture likes to view itself. The prime example of this variety was Zola’s series about the Rougon-Macquarts, with its Naturalist programme. In an essay on Lübeck of 1926, where he spoke of the sources behind Buddenbrooks, Mann rejected all affinities with Zola, attributed some significance to the Goncourts’ Renée Maupérin – ‘artistically far superior’ – and stressed the influence of the novels of Alexander Kielland and Jonas Lie. Yet among his most important inspirations were images from another family history – Wagner’s tetralogy, with its great finale, The Twilight of the Gods.

Scholars have probed and discussed both the influences the author indicated and those he denied. In 1995, Michael Maar revealed yet another continent on this map: through a detailed analysis he pointed out that a source from which Mann abundantly drew for his writing, including for Buddenbrooks, was Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales.


The text comes from the book: ‘Jak być artystą. Na przykładzie Tomasza Manna’ (Being an artist using the example of Thomas Mann). It has been abridged and edited.