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:

Life was good in the country, in the luxuriously furnished villa with all its barns, servants' quarters, carriage houses–and incredible orchards, vegetable gardens, and flower beds that fell away steeply toward the Trave River. The Krogers lived in grand style, and although this dazzling wealth was of a different sort from the solid if somewhat ponderous prosperity of the Buddenbrooks, it was obvious that everything at her [Tony's] grandparents' was always about two notches more splendid than at home; and that impressed young Miss Buddenbrook.

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:

Austrian Liberalism, like that of most European nations, had its heroic age in the struggle against aristocracy and baroque absolutism. This ended in the stunning defeat of 1848.

[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:]

The chastened liberals came to power and established a constitutional regime in the 1860's almost by default. Not their own internal strength, but the defeats of the old order at the hands of foreign enemies brought the liberals to the helm of state. . . . Soon new social groups raised claims to political participation: the peasantry, the urban artisans and workers, and the Slavic peoples. In the 1880s, these groups formed mass parties to challenge the liberal hegemony . . .

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:

Tony would stand and wait for a while for her neighbor Julie Hagenstrom, with whom she usually walked to school. . . . Her father, Herr Hagenstrom, whose family was rather new to town, had married a young woman from Frankfurt . . . a lady who had extraordinarily thick black hair and the largest diamond earrings in the city. Herr Hangenstrom, partner in the export firm of Strunch & Hagenstrom, took eager and ambitious interest in the affairs of the town, but his marriage had caused some astonishment among families with strickter traditions. . . . Wuite apart from that, however, and despite his active participation on committees, councils, and boards of directors, he was not particularly well liked. He appeared determined to oppose the old established families every chance he got.

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.

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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