Title: Buddenbrooks
Author: Thomas Mann
Original language: German
Translation(s): 30 languages
Context: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901) is a translated novel by Thomas Mann. The author has based the story on his very own rich merchant family. The artistic son, Hanno is the important character who dies after a short life by not being able to fit into the family plans of making him the savior to save the family from decline and ultimately signals the fall of the dynasty. Every Buddenbrook generation experiences tough dilemmas of selection between pleasure, love, family obligations and art on one hand and personal tendencies on the other.
Synopsis:
The novel is about four generations of a rich bourgeois family living in the northern part of Germany with the latter generation ending in the 1800s. In an uncertain new world, the family was experiencing the advent of modernity leading to a gradual disintegration of traditions and bonds of the family. While the author presents the family’s decline from richness to insolvency and from psychic and moral soundness to sheer madness, artistic dissipation and sickly obedience, he takes the reader into a world of impressive spirit of recipes, funerals and births, gossip, divorces and weddings and earthy humor.
Moral ambiguity of the novel makes it one of the most important novels of the 20th century. The author with his modern perspective passes no judgment on choices made by the family, is detached, ironic and allows time to hurt or heal at its own pace, while remaining sympathetic to everyone. The novel presents no inspiring heroes, or villains, but lots of drama.
Novels
1909 – Royal Highness
1924 – The Magic Mountain
1939 – Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns
1947 – Doctor Faustus
1951 – The Holy Sinner
Short Stories
1894 – Gefallen
1896 – The Will to Happiness
1896 – Disillusionment
1897 – Death
1897 – The Dilettante
1898 – Tobias Mindernickel
1899 – The Wardrobe
1900 – Little Lizzy
1900 – The Road to the Churchyard
1903 – The Hungry
1903 – The Child Prodigy
1904 – A Gleam
1904 – At the Prophets
1905 – A Weary Hour
1907 – Railway Accident
1908 – Anecdote
1911 – The Fight between Jappe and the Do Escobar
Short Story Collections
1897 – Litte Herr Friedemann
1936 – Stories of Three Decades (23 stories written from 1896 to 1929)
