Buddenbrooks

As regular blogistas will know the Celtic Sage’s favourite German City, particularly at this time of year with the Weihnachtsmärkte, is the Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck, a UNESCO World Heritage site and in the 13th Century the capital of the remarkable Hanseatic League and the world’s richest city at that time. (http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/08/lbeck-queen-of-hansa.html ) One of its favourite sons is the author Thomas Mann who won the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature (One of 3 Nobel Laureates’ from Lübeck in the 20th Century, the others being Gunter Grass and Willy Brandt) principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), and his numerous short stories. Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations. Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 at the age of 25. The German subtitle “Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie”, The Decline of a Family gives a clue to the book’s narrative.


Thomas Mann

His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between business and artist's worlds, respectively, 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 bourgeois atmosphere. The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Mann's hometown of Lübeck that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the author's own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the "money aristocracy", although merchandising is a central topic.



There will be renewed interest in Buddenbrooks due to a new movie which Warner Brothers are releasing in German and which is filmed on location in Lübeck unlike previous versions, one of which was filmed in Gdansk. It also uses the Mann’s own house in Lübeck which is today the museum dedicated to Thomas, Heinreich and Klaus Mann called Buddenbrook Haus. Armin Mueller-Stahl and Iris Berben head the cast of a 2008 version to be released in December.

The main scene of action of Thomas Mann's Nobel Prize winning novel "Buddenbrooks" is Lübeck. Although the name of the "mediocre trading centre on the Baltic Sea" is never mentioned in the novel, there is not one street, square or place in this novel's city that does not allow itself to be identified in Lübeck. The house at Mengstraße 4 is at the heart of this novel. Exactly on this floor and behind these very windows where the Mann family lived in the middle of the 19th century there is an exhibit about a fictitious family that sits- as described by Thomas Mann - opposite St. Mary's Church in a "landscape room" and a "dining room" with white figures of gods and goddesses.



Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. In 1937 the University of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate (restored in 1946), which aroused Mann to a famous and moving reply in which he epitomised the situation of the German writer in exile. Mann, who had anticipated and warned against the rise of fascism during the Weimar Republic (e.g., in Mario and the Magician), continued to combat it in many pamphlets and talks throughout the period of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return.

But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. A few months later he moved to the United States. He became an American citizen in 1940 and, from 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California. After the war he frequently revisited Europe: in 1949 he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany) and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled near Zürich, where he died in 1955.



He never accomplished anything which could be compared to the stature attained by his most celebrated book, which was deeply ingrained with the German bourgeois way of life of his time. Some people say that is a kind of autobiographic novel, where many of the aspects of Thomas Mann's social surroundings and family life were portrayed in the book, with an accuracy and sharpness of a genius, who lived life surrounded by all kinds of problems one could imagine (homosexuality, drugs, family disputes on genius primacy) but who, at the other hand, was, in his own ways, deeply affected by bourgeois values and family affection. When the book was written Mann had only 25 years, which adds content to some theories that mathematical and other type of geniuses minds are in their prime when one reaches 30 years of age, thus explaining the exclamation of Sir Bertrand Russell that achieved fame long after he hit his intellectual prime.

Among the chief works of Mann's later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939) [The Beloved Returns], in which the fictional account of a meeting of the lovers of Werther grown old provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious portrait of the old Goethe; Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-43) [Joseph and his Brothers], a version of the Old Testament story which interweaves myth and psychology; and Dr. Faustus (1947), the story of an artist who chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes the last days of the Third Reich; the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse der Meister (1935) [ Suffering and Greatness of the Masters]; and the essay on Schiller, Versuch über Schiller (1955). A complete edition of his works in twelve volumes was published in Berlin (1956) and in Frankfurt (1960).


Thomas Mann 1937

In his biographical note provided to the Nobel Committee in 1929 Thomas Mann describes his early life and childhood in Lübeck;

“I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven.

I was designated to take over my father's grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instil in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.

When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.

After finishing school rather ingloriously, I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father's. Later, by way of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics, art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies of it are in circulation.”


Buddenbrookhaus

His former home, now designated Buddenbrookhaus, is worth a visit both to see a restored (and after wartime bombing, reconstructed) 19th Century merchant’s house and for the permanent exhibitions on the Mann family. Both new permanent exhibitions "The Manns - a literary family" and "Buddenbrooks - Novel of the Century" are at the centre complemented by further literary experiences and literary and cultural events. Sometimes reality follows fiction. The house with the white Baroque facade has of course never been the home of the Buddenbrooks, as they were a product of Thomas Mann's literary imagination. Nevertheless, the building is known by their name today. This might be absolutely justified, since the fictitious Buddenbrook family had more than a few characteristics in common with the Manns. And the Manns really did live here - Thomas Mann described the place of his youth in his novel “Buddenbrooks”.

Today, the house is nothing but a stylish piece of scenery. The original mansion of 1758 which contained all the rooms as described in the famous book was destroyed by RAF bombs and only the facade remains. A new building was erected behind it in 1957, and a permanent exhibition on the work of Thomas and Heinrich Mann is displayed here. A number of rooms have also been decorated according to the novel.

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy.

Hopefully the movie will be released before too long in English so a wider audience can appreciate Buddenbrooks and the medieval gem which is the Hanseatic Free City of Lübeck.

See the trailer (in German) for the movie on this link;

http://www.buddenbrooks-derfilm.de.


Thomas Mann Grave - Zürich