“Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann (translated by John E. Woods)

This epic, along with “The Magic Mountain”, won Mann the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. It details four generations of an upperclass merchant family, the Buddenbrooks. The novel’s subtitle is “The Decline of a Family” and the story details the slow withering of a once proud family. Throughout the course of the book there are births, christenings, marriages, affairs, divorces, and deaths, ups and downs in business and politics, both happiness and tears, but the general mood is one of a gradual, yet inevitable, degeneration of the family. The backdrop is a small town near Hamburg, close to the Baltic Sea. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this family witnesses the militarism of Napoleon, the European Revolutions of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian War. Its members witness the unification of Germany, through Bismarck, along with the democratization and liberalization of the town, as the lower classes strive for their rights and dues. As wealthy grain merchants, the family’s fortunes ebb and flow with the times, but they are always amongst the upper crust of the town. The original pater familias was a simple businessman, the next generation’s became the consul to Holland, and the last was elected as a town senator. Throughout there are family disputes, rivalries with other business families, illnesses, deaths, along with loves gained, lost, and forlorn. The story is distinctly German. Religion and the Protestant ethic play prime parts in the tale, as duty, faith, and honor crop up over and over again. The book is, at heart, a tragedy about a family that lives by a code that has become a relic with the new Enlightened commercial age. Proud and wealthy, still, the Buddenbrooks cannot adapt with the times and become resigned to be swept into the dustbin of history as an irrelevancy- a family rotting with decay.