Buddenbrooks

The Buddenbrooks know how to preserve appearances. Their tragedy is that appearances cannot preserve them.

Wealthy, esteemed and deeply rooted in tradition, the Buddenbrook family epitomises nineteenth-century German bourgeois values.

Set chiefly in Lübeck between the 1830s and the 1870s, Thomas Mann’s family saga follows the Buddenbrooks from civic confidence and commercial success towards gradual dissolution. Across four generations, business decisions, marriages, inheritances, illness and private disappointments reveal the strain beneath the family’s public respectability.

Tony, Thomas, Christian and Hanno each carry a different part of the family’s burden: status, duty, instability, art and decline. As the world around them changes, the principles that built the Buddenbrooks’ success can no longer protect them.

What gives the novel its force is Mann’s patience. He lets decline appear not as catastrophe, but as a series of ordinary decisions, disappointments and evasions, until the Buddenbrook name has become a memory of itself.

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'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times