Buddenbrooks Study Guide

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck to a Hanseatic family. Mann’s father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, was a senator and grain merchant. Mann had a privileged upbringing due to his family’s wealth and social standing. He attended the Technical University of Munich, intending to embark on a career in journalism upon graduation. He spent his early adulthood in Munich and worked for the South German Fire Insurance Company. Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905. The couple had six children together. Mann began his writing career publishing short stories. Buddenbrooks, his first novel, was published in 1901. His other notable works include the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig); The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg); Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus) and the four-part novel Joseph and his Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder). Mann and Katia happened to be out of the country when Hitler rose to power in 1933, and Mann’s children Erika and Klaus advised their parents against returning to Germany due to Katia’s Jewish heritage and the likelihood that Mann would be persecuted for his political views. Mann heeded their advice and emigrated with his family to Switzerland. His German citizenship was later revoked following his refusal to declare loyalty to the National Socialist government. He later relocated with his family to the United States, settling first in Princeton, New Jersey, where Mann taught at Princeton University. Mann was a vocal critic of the Nazi regime and recorded monthly anti-Nazi broadcasts for the BBC while living in the United States. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and is among the best-known German writers to write in exile from Hitler’s Nazi Germany. He died in Zurich in 1955 at age 80.

Buddenbrooks tells the story of a Lübeck Hanseatic family. The Hanseaten were a collective of elite families that constituted the ruling class of the free imperial cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. (The term “free imperial city” refers historically to a self-ruling city, meaning a city that had some degree of autonomous rule under the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Frederick II named Lübeck a free imperial city in 1226, and it effectively remained as such until Nazi Germany’s rise to power in the early 20th century.) Lübeck’s Hanseatic families were granted special hereditary status akin to that of landed nobility elsewhere in Europe. Though the Hamburg and Lubeck of the era during which Buddenbrooks takes place were  republican cities (meaning nobility had no legal rule over the population), it was in practice an oligarchy rather than a democracy, as participation in political life was limited to the elite Hanseaten families (like the Buddenbrooks and their ilk). This is why Tony Buddenbrook’s romantic interest Morten Schwarzkopf claims that Tony and her family may as well be nobility, and it also explains the disdain many of the Buddenbrooks have for revolutionaries in Lübeck, whose demands for political participation threaten the Hanseatens’ hold on power. Readers should note that the Hanseatic bourgeoisie, to which the Buddenbrooks belong, is distinct from (but related to) the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League refers to the medieval network of North German cities that dominated trade from the late-12th century to the 16th century, while Hanseatic bourgeoisie refers broadly to the elite ruling families that lived in these cities.

Mann is best-known for his short stories and novels, though he also wrote essays and works of social criticism. Buddenbrooks was Mann’s first novel, and it remains one of his most highly regarded works. Mann’s other works of note are the novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), which tells the story of a young engineer who spends several long, meandering years at a Swiss sanatorium following a tuberculosis diagnosis. The novel is in part a coming-of-age story (bildungsroman), but it also functions as a quasi-allegory for the sociopolitical climate of Europe in the leadup to World World I. Mann wrote his novel Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus) while living in exile in the United States. The novel is a retelling of the Faust legend set in Germany in the first half of the 20th century, and it examines the fraught political atmosphere of Germany during that era. Another of Mann’s notable works is Joseph and his Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder), a four-part retelling of stories from the biblical Book of Genesis. Mann considered Joseph to be his highest accomplishment as a writer. Furthermore, there are numerous references to works of fiction and nonfiction throughout Buddenbrooks. When Grünlich first visits the Buddenbrook family, Tony is reading Seraphin Brethren, a collection of the German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffman’s novellas and stories; meanwhile Christian is reading the philosopher Cicero. Toward the end of Thomas’s life, he picks up the first volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, the philosopher’s central work, which expands on Kant’s transcendental idealism to examine how humans engage with the world around them. Finally, Buddenbrooks is a family saga, a genre of literature that follows the story of a family over a span of time. Countless such works exist, but a few notable examples include Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner; The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough; Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; White Teeth by Zadie Smith; and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.