Category: German Lit from ~ 1832 – 1900

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas – Paul Heyse

During the nineteenth century the great prestige form of prose literature in German-speaking Europe was not the novel, but the novella. The best writers of the time were hard at work crafting powerful, rich, narrative prose at lengths that allowed works to be read in a single sitting, works which were of at times incredible quality. Polished, focused, though they often were, the Novelle-tradition was also incredibly varied, ranging from the ecologically-minded ghost story of Theodor Storm’s Rider on the White Horse to the murder mystery of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Jew Beech Tree, from the moral tales of Gottfried Keller to the modernist-inspiring intensity of Georg Büchner’s story of madness, Lenz.  

With so much writing in a specific form, there soon came attempts to theorise, classify, exclude and include. Goethe called novellas a “sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (an unprecedented, extraordinary event that has nevertheless occurred), which, like his own novella (called Novella) confused as much as it clarified things. For Ludwig Tieck, it was all about the Wendepunkt – the turning point. Theodor Storm, in my favourite definition, called novellas “the sister of the drama and the severest form of prose fiction.” None of these is suitable for every novella, but each gives a sense of how at least some of these stories worked. They were mainly short-to-medium length narratives with a high symbolic charge, focusing on an important event in the life of a single individual.  

One other writer whose theory is known to students of the Novelle-tradition is Paul Heyse, one of Germany’s first Nobel Laureates and creator of the “Falkentheorie”. As described by Idara Crespi in the introduction to a new edition of four of Heyse’s novellas translated by Renata Lenz, L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas, this is “a pivot. The point where all the accumulated pressure of the narrative tilts and pours in one direction.” It is also something specific which sets the story apart from all others – a particular thing, or even just a moment that seems utterly unique. In the title story a girl bites the man who tries to seduce her, in another what is special is a work of embroidery.

I had not read Heyse before, so when Crespi’s Espresso publishing house, which aims to focus on furnishing unjustly-forgotten European works with new translations, asked me whether I would like a copy, I agreed without difficulty. This blog’s own focus is similar, after all. The review, however, comes only from me.  

The Stories 

Paul Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, but he spent most of his long life in Munich, where he passed away in 1914, after winning the Nobel Prize two years earlier. The time when Heyse was not in Munich he largely spent in Italy. Like many German artists, most famously Goethe, Heyse found in the southern country a wellspring of inspiration. The four novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas showcase the extent of that inspiration. The title story is a drama set in a coastal fishing village. The Embroiderer of Treviso is a historical tale from north Italy, while The Wedding on Capri is a kind of comedy of manners where German tourists come up against Italian mores. The last, Nerina, is a dramatization of a key moment from the life of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Each is entirely unlike the others, which does mean that the enjoyment of such a collection is bound to be a matter of personal taste.  

For me, my favourites were the first story, L’Arrabbiata, and the last one, Nerina. I liked the The Embroiderer of Treviso as well, while I felt The Wedding on Capri was more like a weak version of the kind of tale Stefan Zweig (or even Henry James) would later perfect. 

L’Arrabbiata  

Laurella, a poor young woman in Sorrento across from the island of Capri, is “L’Arrabbiata” – the angry one. Her father is dead, her mother ill and unable to survive without her daughter’s support. One day Laurella crosses over to Capri, intending to sell some materials to two women there. The boatman is a young man, Antonino. They avoid one another’s eyes. The only other passenger is a priest. After chatting about her mother’s health, the priest chides her for her reputation as one who will not dance or sing with others, and mentions a suitor who was rejected in the past by her. She explains that she has a private reason for her actions and decision “to be subject to no man who would ill-use me and then caress me”. It is the abuse she witnessed her mother receive at the hands of her father which makes her determined to defend herself as her mother could not.  

The priest is to stay the night on Capri to tend to a sufferer there, leaving Antonino to take Laurella back on her own later that day. During the journey they sit “like the bitterest enemies”, before eventually an argument breaks out. The boatman declares “that here you are in my power, and must do what I will” and seizes her, only to find his hand bitten and bloodied. “Must I do what you will?” Laurella asks, then leaps into the open sea. But when Antonino recovers himself and tells her she is too far from land to survive she climbs back in and rows with him back to the shore in silence. Later that night, however, she comes to him with healing herbs and apologises, even breaks into tears. Love, at least of a sort, is admitted, and with that the story draws to a close. 

L’Arrabbiata was one of the first novellas Heyse wrote and remains his most famous. That bite is strange and unforgettable. But that does not quite answer what makes it interesting. One way to look at that, as it often is with novellas, is through the idea of determinism. Fate, in other words. 

L’Arrabbiata as Tale of Fate 

All but the most inventive fiction is determinist by its very form, as the words are fixed upon the page long before we open up the book. But with novellas this feeling is particularly stark. They are simply not long enough even to give the illusion of an alternative, of branching paths. Instead, we often have a sense of characters hurtling towards their doom. So it is, in a way, in L’Arrabbiata. Laurella knows what fate wants for her – a marriage – and fears the violence, the “look in his eyes” that men have when they alternate between abuse and tender words. Her rejection, before the novella begins, of another suitor, seems to indicate her victory in the struggle with her fate. In becoming “the angry one”, she has let herself be defined in a way that makes her safe at a cost of partial isolation from her community.  

But she is not safe. Antonino loves her and does not resist his own feelings. At first, he tries to use the weight of society’s judgement to force her into his arms – “one day you’ll grow lonely, and then, wild as you are, you’ll take the first man who comes”. When that does not work, he turns to force. Laurella’s bite seems at first glance like her successfully resisting him, but I read it much more negatively. She gains a moment, but soon enough she has to return to the boat. Like trains in 19th century fiction, the boat of L’Arrabbiata is ultimately a symbol of the limited choices people, but especially women, had in life. Laurella can drown, or she can get back in. She chooses life over principles. But also, I think, because those principles have already been damaged beyond repair.  

In reacting with force herself, by drawing blood, Laurella essentially discovers to herself that she is no better than the men. (Though, perhaps she had no choice.) This is reflected too by the tears (another liquid) that pour down her cheeks when she meets Antonino later in the evening. Her surrender to him is, on the one hand, an acknowledgement of her own repressed romantic feelings. On the other, it’s a surrender to the idea that she is, like the men, at base capable of cruelty and violence. That, in a way, they deserve one another. L’Arrabbiata is a love story with a happy ending, but it’s also a kind of tragedy, as Laurella’s idea of herself is crushed by the reality of her feelings and actions. The end result is that the forces of patriarchal society, emphasised by the priest – who gets the final word – are victorious.  

Freedom was mere illusion, the woman who tried to be an individual was crushed. But as often happens with novellas, it made for a good story.   

Nerina  

My second favourite of the novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas was Nerina. This is a tale of a moment from the life of the marvellous pessimist Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the early 19th century beloved by Schopenhauer. As with L’Arrabbiata, indeed with all the stories here, it’s a love story. Leopardi, returned to his family home in Recanati, meets his neighbours’ daughter, Nerina, much older now than when last he saw her, and like Laurella, an independent spirit. She has even read Leopardi’s poems, even though they have been censured by the Church. Her youthful spirit makes an impression on Leopardi, whose gloom is the overriding characterisation Heyse gives us of him besides his well-known ill-health. At the same time, Leopardi is shocked by the effect he has had on her – “forget the premature and mournful wisdom you have learned from my poems!” 

That night, they exchange, from window to window, his latest poem for a bouquet of carnations and some of her hair. But like a miserable figure in a work of Dostoevsky’s, Leopardi is confused and unnerved by his own feelings and resolves to avoid her thereafter. It does not work. Her father wants to enlist Leopardi to convince Nerina to marry a suitor she does not wish to, turning him into the agent of the forces of society he has little respect for. Nevertheless, he agrees, telling her off for “hav[ing] nothing to do with the happiness [the suitor] has chosen for you”. She listens, responds by reciting his own poetry to him with its “bitter joys”, and the two of them end in an embrace. Yet still he goes, encouraging her to ignore his poetry and its messages: 

“Promise me – when I am gone – that you will try to find your way into life as thousands do. I am not asking you to do violence to your heart. But you are young, Nerina, and life transforms us in wondrous ways.” Leopardi leaves and, perhaps predictably, a few months later learns of her death. She did not, it seems, find her way into life after all. 

Ways into Poetry 

As with L’Arrabbiata, we can read Nerina through the lens of fatalism, but here it is less interesting. The novella is trapped not by its form, but by the facticity of at least one of its central figures. (Nerina’s identity and reality remain debated by scholars). The story here can only end one way. Nerina will become a poem; Leopardi will continue being a poet.  

Instead, what I liked about Nerina was the how it worked in Leopardi’s poetry. Many 19th century novellas took artists as their subjects, from Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician to Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague, but Nerina, taking as it does a poet as the artist, is able to achieve a better integration of creation into itself. The story begins shortly after Leopardi has finished writing his most famous poem, “L’infinito”, in 1819, and finishes with him considering the lines to Nerina he placed within his later poem, “Le Ricordanze” (Memories), written in 1829 while at home again. But Nerina takes Leopardi’s ideas and tries to integrate them into her own barred, limited life at home. She poeticises her life.  

When she meets the poet there’s a shock, because he had not appreciated the impact his own words might have had. That in a way, living, she has become more of a poet than he is. Leopardi is not the hero of this work, as the title should have warned me. He tries to turn her away from the kind of poetically-charged life he allows himself, and acts as an instrument of a society he himself has no belief in. She, meanwhile, dies for beauty. Leopardi’s despairing response, the text argues, is creation. He may have failed to be true to her while alive, but at least he can be true to her in his verse. The outcome is bittersweet, but true enough to my understanding of Leopardi’s pessimism. In his failure before Nerina, we can see an example of the way that his own actions might have fed into his disappointment with life, a disappointment that runs through all his work.  

Conclusion 

The other stories are all novellas serious enough to handle a blog post’s worth of analysis, especially the The Embroiderer of Treviso, which combines the historical writing of C.F. Meyer and the bloodiness of Kleist, but space is limited and so is our time. I have been glad to get a little acquainted with Heyse even if, at this point, I am still not quite sure how far I like him or even really know who he is. A collection like L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas shows his range, but there seems no solid commonality under all these works, nothing distinctly “Heysian”, in the in the way that I think there is for Storm, Stifter, Kleist, or E.T.A. Hoffmann. This, maybe, makes the collection a good first introduction to the kind of things that were possible for the magicians who wrote novellas, even if, the title story perhaps excepted, I would not say these are the best novellas I have yet read.  

Nevertheless, I can easily recommend this book to those who are interested in the craft of writing. I think novellas in particular are incredible teaching devices for writers. More expansive than short stories, they guide us on shape, on prose, on narration, in ways that novels can do but often fail to do, with so much else going on. The inventiveness of the form has not yet been exhausted, as contemporary fiction, in German and not, has shown on this blog. (See Grass, Walser) Reading something like this collection a good introduction to just some of the possibilities on offer, and I hope that the translator, Renata Lenz, is able to translate more novellas from the original. The tradition really is wonderful and thoroughly underappreciated outside of Germany.  

Thanks to Chiara and Espresso for the copy. More details on their website, or in the usual places where books are sold online.

The book was provided without an obligation to review or link onwards attached. While I wouldn’t mind continuing to read similar new old texts from time to time as it is in line with what I write about anyway, if regular readers of the blog would much prefer this to be my only foray into Bookfluencing, feel free to reach out privately via the contact form / email.

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

Realism at Work: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann was born in 1875. Buddenbrooks, his seven-hundred-page-plus multigenerational epic depicting the decline of a merchant family in his native Lubeck, was published in 1900. Even to write such a book at that age would be a titanic achievement, but to make it good – that is something truly special. Indeed, when Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 it was Buddenbrooks, not his Magic Mountain of 1924, that was singled out by the committee as the main driving force behind their decision. I was not expecting to enjoy Buddenbrooks as much as I did, even though it had received some extremely enthusiastic praise from one of my old teachers at Cambridge. But, thanks to John E. Woods’ fantastic translation (Mann has long suffered in the English-speaking world thanks to H. T. Lowe-Porter’s somewhat dreadful efforts), I was truly able to get into Mann’s world.

Buddenbrooks is the work of a young man. There is a certain comparative lack of wisdom in it and a certain lack of sympathy, both of which mean that in the end I still find myself preferring Fontane to Mann. But Mann makes up for this by the sheer force of his intelligence. You can tell how hard he studied to write this book. When I was in Lubeck some years ago I visited the Mann Museum there, located in what we now think of as the Buddenbrooks’ house, and there was an entire room devoted to Mann’s planning for the work – pages and pages of notes, piles and piles of books. What Mann had not the experience to know, he used his mind to acquire. It’s amazing that he did as well as he did.

This piece is broken up into two halves – the first deals with the way the novel is built. What I found interesting is just the way that Mann writes with such a deliberate realism. Just as Mann studied hard to write this work, so too can any perspective writer study Buddenbrooks and discover somewhat exposed in it the wheels and cogs that any successful realist novel must have. The second part then details a few things of the plot. Buddenbrooks is a huge novel, and there is too much to say for any self-respecting blogger not to become boring. I will focus on my favourite bits, things and people that are worth thinking about.

Structure – How To Write A Realist Novel

The point of the realist novel is to be realistic, defined as containing as much of outward reality as possible. The contortions of modernist writing may better reflect our perception of the world and our own minds, but we turn to realism when we want what we think the world is actually like. But how do we build this world? It’s quite easy really – one can basically work from a recipe as if the completed novel is a dish we are trying to prepare. What is the world made up of? We have what people wear (such as Madame Buddenbrook’s gold bracelet), we have food, we have buildings (the various Buddenbrook houses), we have people. People, of course, have personalities, but they have appearances too, which are just as important, and indeed can compensate for a personality if we write them sufficiently well.

All of these things together create a picture of the world. Mann’s story, which runs from 1835ish to about 1880, uses these things – clothes, cultural markers (what’s on in the theatre) – to tell us where we are in time. In addition, Mann uses various historical markers, dropped in here and there. Buddenbrooks is definitely a book that is improved by knowing a bit about Germany’s 19th-century history – whether it is the debates over Lubeck joining the German customs union, or the Revolutions of 1848, or the Wars of Unification – it’s useful to know how to place the story within German history. Especially because one thing that it might be trying to say is that Germany’s ascendency as a great power is matched by the decline of one of its great families.

Realism is a fundamentally conservative mode of writing. That is because it is constantly setting the bounds of its own topics. All of the things I’ve mentioned – what people wear, what they eat, what they talk about, where they go – establish a sense of society. And any good realist novel is engaged in a critique of society while demonstrating its pervasive influence. Characters talk about what they are supposed to, and anyone who goes against this ends up being excluded, or mocked. In Buddenbrooks Christian Buddenbrook, who has spent much of his youth in South America, is such a figure. Another is Hugo Weinschenk, a husband of one of the Buddenbrooks, who comes from a lower class. Society in the realist novel is fundamentally class-based, and these novels tend to show the difficulties that any cross-class communication comes up against. (In Fontane’s On Tangled Paths, the lovely but lower-class Lene cannot spell correctly). In Buddenbrooks, silence or censure is the fate met by characters who speak out of line:

“It’s best not to say such things out loud,” she thought, fixing her eyes firmly in the distance in order not to meet his gaze.

Unable to articulate their problems without being cast out, people discover they have nowhere to turn. Wherever they go, society demands conformity – religion, education, business, even a beach holiday (all described in Buddenbrooks) all act to crush resistance on the part of would-be freethinkers. Revolts are rare, despair more common. It’s no surprise that many of the greatest realist novels of the 19th century which attack society end with suicide or resignation on the part of the rebels.

But though these novels are conservative, in that they never advocate for revolution, they are rarely reactionary. Instead, they work upon their readers, making them ask questions, see society’s victims as society’s victims, and in doing so they cause people to reflect upon the structures around them. Progress comes slowly, but it comes.

In Buddenbrooks Mann shows the way that society exerts a crushing influence upon its members. Thomas Buddenbrook, once he has become head of the family, is so obsessed with trying to conform that he makes the life of his son Hanno a misery, even once he starts to question the foundations of the society that he is trying to fit into. Thomas’s sister Toni is ostracized after her two marriages – both undertaken not for love, but to help the family business, because she has internalised a sense of duty – end in divorce. Thomas prevents his brother from marrying his lover because it would bring shame to the family name. Altogether, the novel shows that even the victims of society end up being its willing executioners. Nobody is safe, and nobody is entirely guiltless.

Describing the world is not enough. We must also make use of symbolic objects, and here Mann’s youth is obvious. He has studied well. From Vronsky in Anna Karenina he takes the excellent symbol of teeth to show inner decay. From Fontane he understands the importance of houses as reflections of the soul. I particularly liked the way that the original Buddenbrooks house ends up decaying, so that although the façade is alright, the inner garden and courtyard is an overgrown mess. The family itself has undergone a similar decline, sustained by Thomas’s youthful vigour, while all around him everyone else begins to fail and falter.

In addition to symbols, Mann understands that the best way of creating memorable characters in a book with a great many characters – and in Buddenbrooks there are a lot – is the use of repeated phrases and ideas. Toothache is one, as is Toni’s upper lip. There is Klothilde, who is always eating but never seems to stop being scrawny, and Bendix Grünlich, with his “golden muttonchop” facial hair.

All this is good. All this makes his characters seem real, seem placed within a meaningful (because we can find symbolic significance within it) world, and seem to have genuine conflicts (individual versus society). One can study the book and go away and write a realist novel, easy as that.

Thomas Buddenbrook

I have written before about my own family, in round about terms. Novels of decline are dear to my heart – Roth’s Radetzky March, the Patrick Melrose novels, and so on. I exist at the tail end of a saga of decline, and I am sure that, were it not for the evils of modern medicine, I would quietly have gone to an early grave at the age of twenty-two, dying of consumption. Instead, I am alive, and straining under various pressures to be a certain kind of person, the one who will “restore the family fortunes” and its social standing. These pressures may be in my mind, but just as with realist novels, real life tends to convey society’s influence in ways that are not entirely obvious – through what is said and what is worn, through who is welcome to break bread at our table and who not, and so on.

Thomas Buddenbrook comes to head the family at a young age after the unexpected death of his father. He achieves early success. He quotes Heine and has a feel for culture that was lacking in his ancestors, who looked upon the arts with amusement or contempt. But this feel for culture sows the seeds for his downfall. For what Tom has, that his ancestors did not, is a certain interiority. He feels. And what does he feel? At first he feels ambition, he consciously chooses the role of the upper-middle-class business, which fits him like a glove. He succeeds in local politics, in business: “Didn’t you know that one can be a great man in a small town? … That takes a little imagination, I’ll grant, a little idealism – and that’s what you lacked, whatever you may have believed about yourself.”

Convinced of his own potential greatness, he lives to “keep up appearances”. He abandons his true love, as does Tony, and makes a marriage that brings the family a lot of money in her dowry (and Mann never shies away from showing figures, because they prove the thoroughness of his research). He goes about his business, he grows older, and at some point he realises that something is going wrong: “all the while he was wrestling in vain to find comfort in order and routine, because, to his despair, he found himself forever falling behind his own active imagination”. A true bourgeois, he tries to order his life to avoid any introspection. But it fails.

“A man who stands firmly in his profession, unshaken by doubts, knows only one thing, understands only one thing, values only one thing – his profession.”

Yes, this is the problem. A profession is not a life. It may be “pleasant to remember your forefathers when you know that you are of one mind with them and are sure that you have always acted as they would have had you act”, but when that is not the case…  Tom displaces his own anxieties onto his son, Hanno, demanding that he be “a genuine Buddenbrook”, whatever that means. He does what he can. But ultimately everything falls apart.

What is extraordinary is the fragility of the (19th-century) bourgeois family. We rest our hopes upon one or two males, and if they fail – then all the rest collapses. The women are simply chattel for improving the family name. Buddenbrooks is not a story of continual decline. Instead, it is a decline that is punctuated by great moments of hope. But in a sense, from the moment Hanno Buddenbrook is born – a sickly, unhealthy child who likes music more than making money – we know that the family is doomed, however hard Thomas works. No amount of religious faith, no dominus providebit (God will provide) above the door, can compensate for the wrong child being born at the wrong time. And therein lies the tragedy.

All of us in Thomas’s position are faced with pressure to lead a certain life, and often with competing pressures. Is one to make money or to be oneself? Our parents may want one thing and our schooling demand something completely different. In such situations, the sensible thing may be to compromise, but I am too young to know. At the end of On Tangled Paths Baron Botho, having broken off his relationship to the poor Lene to marry the rich and silly Käthe, tells a friend in a similar situation that he must “beware of this middle course, beware of half-measures.” Either he must submit to his society in full, or take his love away – to America, perhaps. But to go for the middle course is only to destroy yourself: “Many things are permissible, but not what does violence to the soul or entangles the heart, even if it’s only your own.”

Conclusion

I am not in danger of being anything other than a disappointment for choosing the wrong girl (or boy) to marry. But disappointment need not come from others and nor is a marriage the only thing worth judging. I know how well I have internalised my own idea of society, and how it watches over me, whip in hand, every day of my life. I must make money, I must follow my heart, I must heed the calling of my soul – and yet how few hours there are in the day! We are doomed to despair, whichever route we take. Thomas’s Uncle Gotthold marries his childhood sweetheart and is disinherited. His three daughters have no money to marry, and end up growing to be old and lonely spinsters. Thomas himself makes the “right decision”, and his earthly reward is a terrible punishment.

The world is made up of so many tangled paths along which we stumble blindly. It is better to have no internality, to believe confidently in the world as it stands as any good Hanseatic merchant or office-bound lawyer does. But like Mann, I am cursed with a voice and a questioning gaze. He made something of his, even if he did not lead the family business to great glory. I can only hope that I will do the same. Though I am still young, and there is much stumbling for me left to do…

Anyway, Buddenbrooks is a complex, fascinating, at times touching portrayal of the declining fortunes of a family of Lubeck-based merchants. Although there is a certain coolness to it that means I ultimately prefer the Fontane of Effi Briest, there’s no denying Mann’s phenomenal talents. He provides a guidebook on how to write a great realist novel, and that’s incredibly inspiring. The fact that I did not even attempt to analyse it properly is more a reflection of its quality, than anything else. There is too much to say. The conflict between duty and the heart is already enough to show the depth of the book’s treatment of its various themes. For English readers, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Woods translation. It’s very readable. And that’s good, because this is a book that needs to be read.