A review by jpegben
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann, John E. Woods, T.J. Reed

5.0

Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.

Few writers know how to turn the screw in the way Thomas Mann does. The build up is slow, the gradations of tension subtle and nuanced. The moment of denouement brutal to the degree it occurs with a ruthless efficiency. Mann dissects the characters he masterfully constructs with surgical, unyielding precision. He is a master of characterisation in the tradition of the great writers of personality and psychology within the canon: Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Eliot, Melville. And Buddenbrooks, as a work, stands out as one of the greatest character studies and family sagas of the twentieth century.

I've always had mixed feelings about Mann as a writer. His novels are superb narratives which strive for profound emotional depth, but are fundamentally works of grand ideas and constant ironic reproach . There is always a degree of experimentation, of probing philosophical enquiry, in Mann's work which seeks to answer the deepest questions about the role and obligations of the individual and his place in society along with broader questions regarding the nature and function of art and the cyclicality of history and processes of decline. In this respect, Buddenbrooks is a work of vast depth and complexity which poses as many questions as it offers answers.

To read Mann, is to enter a world that no longer exists in the most absolute sense; a world of European high culture and erudition which is utterly alien to contemporary sensibilities. Mann is, in many ways, a reluctant modernist. Buddenbrooks straddles the realist fiction of the nineteenth century and the modernist explosion of the early twentieth. Buddenbrooks is labyrinthine in a way many works of European High Modernism are, but its intricacy, unlike Joyce or Woolf, is derived from the imposing intellectual and cultural tradition it is constant conversation with. Mann is deeply referential - to Nietzsche, to Kant, to Schopenhauer, to Wagner, to Freud, to Goethe - in what is a conflicting and in many ways desperate attempt to make sense of generational change.

Above all, Buddenbrooks is a book about "decline, dissolution, and termination". It's a work about decadence and decay, about people trapped in what Max Weber famously described as "the iron cage of modernity". The Buddenbrooks family are neither the agents of their own demise nor innocent victims cast aside by history's relentless march. In Mann's characteristically ironic and ambiguous style, they lie somewhere in the middle. For Thomas, Antonie, and Christian, the decline in their fortunes is not sequential or inevitable, but a fitful, deeply contingent process. Tectonic social and political shifts shifts occur, but how they respond to them lies at the very core of their demise. It is tempting, as a reader, to see them as archaic relics, displaced by the younger, hungrier Hägenstroms in the classic frame of a narrative of decline, but Mann hints, I believe, at something much more.

Antonie's brief period of bliss with Morten at Travemünde is a highlight of the book. What Tony experiences, that age-old dichotomy between social expectation and burning passion, is one of the book's central conceits. She glimpses transcendence, that "great, vague, yearning, intuitive understanding of what freedom [means]". Yet, it remains that, a fleeting moment which nonetheless endures in her mind. The notion of "sitting on the stones" - a brilliant leitmotif for the despondency and detachment which will eventually infect the entire Buddenbrooks family - does not stem from this moment, but is indicative of a familial ethos, so deeply internalised, in which obligation subsumes emotion. Expectations way heavily, money is on the line, reputations are at stake. The Buddenbrooks family is a little, self-contained system without a pressure valve in which resentment will come to fester.

The notion of "sitting on the stones", the despondency it connotes, also has another side to it: hysteria. Wagner and Nietzsche are important points of reference here. These thinkers who railed against what they perceived to be decadence. It is not just the material prosperity of the Buddenbrooks family, but the very values which constitute the architecture of their worldview, their little system, which are placed in the crosshairs. The very concept of decorum, of probity, of success, of financial and spiritual health is ironically deconstructed with persistent, pitiless intent. Thomas, a man who personifies the family's values is gradually chewed up and spat out. His life revolves around putting on masks and executing plans, but what lies beneath the surface:

How almost unrecognizable his face became when he was alone. The muscles of his mouth and cheeks, usually so disciplined and obedient to his will, relaxed and slackened; the alert, prudent, kind, energetic look, which he had preserved for so long now only with great effort, fell away like a mask and reverted to a state of anguished weariness; his dull, somber eyes would fix on some object without seeing it, would redden and begin to water—and, lacking the courage to deceive even himself, he could hold fast to only one of the many heavy, confused, restless thoughts that filled his mind.

"Feckless" Christian is considered a disgrace, utterly unfit to be a merchant and dandified to his family's shame. Tony never shakes off the humiliation of her marital failures. Her life is spent apologising and justifying - the perpetual "silly goose" - to her mother and father, to Thomas, to Thomas' wife Gerda. Senstivity, illness, the failure to work hard in both the public and private sphere are signs of degeneration. Deviating from the established family ideal is not merely taboo, but denotes moral failure and a weak soul. Decadence does not produce, in this case, the sensitive prodigy, but in Hanno an effete, mediocre artist with bad teeth who cannot consume and swallow, both literally and metaphorically, with the efficacy of previous generations.

Yet, what is so enthralling and likely explains this works overwhelming longevity is that Mann doesn't offer an alternative. What it valorises remains hazy and unclear. The many-faced nature of the human character is on full display. Mann could be accused of leaving readers at an impasse, but his prescriptive reticence, his unwillingness to offer an alternative vision, can be explained by his deep distrust of the preoccupation with grand ideas that prevailed in German society. This is, of course, ironic in Mannian terms as almost all of his books are about grand ideas. Yet, what we are left with at the end, a group of disillusioned and diminished women, is perhaps a concession that we can only understand so much about how and why historical processes unfold in the way they do.

The final lines of the book are enigmatic, but also troubling:

There she stood, victorious in the good fight that she had waged all her life against the onslaughts of reason. There she stood, hunchbacked and tiny, trembling with certainty—an inspired, scolding little prophet.

Theresa, that loyal friend of the family, imagined as a prophet. Certainty, inspiration, and of course scolding rage. There is something eerie about this particular characterisation that echoes into Germany's near future, evoking the sort of forces which Mann, in one way or another, already detected that will come to destroy the very fabric of the society the Buddenbrook family cherished.