Buddenbrooks: A Little Cultural Context

Now that we've gotten acquainted with Buddenbrooks' major characters and their arcs, I thought it would be good to pull back a little bit and look at some of the social and historical forces that Buddenbrooks is playing out against.

The Buddenbrooks themselves are something of a bridge between two major components of society that co-existed in Austria-Hungary and the Germanic lands during the 19th century. On the one hand was the landed aristocracy, conservative and still ridiculously rich but in decline as the cities gained prominence; on the other hand was the business class, liberal and on the way up. Together, they formed kind of an "X," with the aristocracy going down and the business class going up.

The Buddenbrooks are definitely businessmen–they live in the city, they own a firm, they even have offices (still something of a novelty at the time). But, they are not that far removed from the landed aristocracy: as the family of Johann Sr.'s wife, Elisabeth Buddenbrook (nee Kroger) lives out in the country and represents the disgustingly filthy rich:

As impressed as young Tony was, families like the Krogers were becoming less and less relevant as liberalism took hold during the middle and latter 1800s. Carl Schorske, in his excellent Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, provides the schematic of the changes that would occur during the 19th century:

[And right on cue we see none other than Johann Jr (with Sr in the wings) play the decisive role in turning back the proletarian masses in the Buddenbrooks' hometown in 1848. (Perhaps a bit too pointedly, Johann Sr expires later than night.) But to continue:]

And thus on to the eventual unraveling of the liberal order and Viennese culture, to World War I, and then to the rather dark places described in Doctor Faustus.

But those are other books. To return to Buddenbrooks and the 19th century: Although Buddenbrooks is a flawed novel, it is striking how much of this history Mann got exactly right in 1901 at 26 years of age. (Imagine a contemporary 26-year-old writing a 700-page novel that sums up America's 20th century.) And Mann did know what he was doing, for right after describing the Krogers, our standard bearers of the landed aristocracy, only but a page later we are introduced to the Hagenstroms, who are precisely the opposite:

And guess who ends up moving into the Buddenbrook family mansion.

I think also, for those interested in a little more, you can make a fairly reasonable argument that Tom Buddenbrook is a kind of rational everyman of the 19th century. He likes pretty Mozart and Haydn, but if you play some of that crazy Wagner he'll run screaming. Toward the end when things start to get unbearably grim, he dabbles in Schopenhauer, but then he gives it up because it's just a little too weird for him. At heart, Tom's simply a hardworking organization man, and he fundamentally can't understand why, despite living his life according to the rules of business and polite society, his family is dying.

Brother Christian, with his inexplicable melancholia, his nerves, and his strange issues about swallowing things, seems to be a sort of precursor to the person who will take Tom's place as the 20th century gets started: the psychological man. These currents were, of course, very much present as Mann was writing Buddenbrooks. Freud had just published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, even if he hadn't yet reached the level of professional success and stardom that he would later enjoy.