GR-B038-1982

Buddenbrooks (Part IX)

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Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty six years old. It was a literary success in Germany. It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic ironic and detailed style, and it was mainly this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Thomas Mann started writing the book in October 1897, when was just twenty-two years old. The novel was completed three years later, in July of 1900, and published in October 1901. His objective was to write a social novel presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeoise atmosphere.