German Literature ~ 1900 - 1945 Archives

Wittgenstein’s Vienna and the Approach to his Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born British philosopher, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” (Bertrand Russell), was a master logician who studied under Frege and Russell before, like any great apprentice, overcoming them in one fell linguistic swoop with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

In that work he put to bed all the codswallop about metaphysics and morals, ethics and eschatology, which had bedevilled philosophy for centuries, nay, millennia, with his canonical “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and his dismissal of all the above as nonsense. Wittgenstein was a knife that cut away all the gristle. All that mattered was logic, cold and hard.

But is that what he was really about? Is that what the Tractatus was really about?

This slender book, first published in 1921 and now out of copyright, has started recently reappearing in a flurry of new translations in English, one of which has prompted me to write to you today. But much more than the book, the main subject is the approach to the book. Is it really, with its crystalline numbered tree structure, a structured work of logic alone, or is there reason to think there is more to it?

The introduction to my edition, and what it passes over

I first wrote about Wittgenstein the man after reading Ray Monk’s biography, but could not make my way through any of his actual works. It was all too alien to me. Now I have finally gone through the Tractatus in the new OUP translation made by Michael Beaney, who to judge from his various distinguished positions is extremely successful in his field of study. In fact, the book is more introduction than Wittgenstein, with a long traditional introduction and then a long note on the text, explaining the publication history of the work, and finally the seventy pages of the Tractatus itself, followed by an annex with simplified “tree-structure” of the propositions, notes and glossary.

Beaney talks a lot about logic and the influence on Wittgenstein of Russell and Frege, two titans of funny letters and mathematical squiggles. He mentions contemporary scientists Boltzmann and Hertz and the philosopher Schopenhauer as other influences, whilst giving an indication of in what this influence consisted, at least in his opinion. But there is something funny in this, even to one little versed in philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example, this arch pessimist, is reduced to a reaction to Kant and his understanding of sensory and rational experience. Pessimism, in Beaney’s reading of influence, or the ethics which followed on from Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, does not get a look in.

This is the first hint of dissatisfaction, but there is more to come. The account of the sixth section of the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein wrote after the experience front line action in the First World War, is merely the part that “gave Wittgenstein the most trouble.” The trouble, however, is logical for Beaney. The statements on ethics and the meaning of life and human happiness, are given a single paragraph in his account. They do not appear to be important, more aberrations to be passed over in relative silence.

Yet is this man just a genius of logic?

Bertrand Russell, finally meeting Wittgenstein after the war where he had fought bravely before ending up in Italian prisoner-of-war camp, wrote home to complain of him: “He has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and [German mystic religious writer] Angelus Silesius, he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.” The remark is quoted by Beaney, but only in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempts to get the Tractatus published. Another famous letter, to Ludwig von Ficker, a publisher, is also introduced in a way that suggests we must assume it is of no importance at all to understanding the book:

“it will probably be a help to you if I write a few words about my book. You see, I am quite sure that you won’t get all that much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; it’s subject matter will seem quite alien to you. But it isn’t really alien to you, because the book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits”

During the war, Wittgenstein carried around a copy of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he said “saved” his life. His fellow soldiers even took to calling him “the man with the Gospels.” He disliked Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, which was necessary for the work to be published in English, saying that Russell had misunderstood him. This misunderstanding seemed only to increase with time. Russell thought the later Wittgenstein had squandered his talents completely.

Other things about Wittgenstein’s behaviour seem odd. I remember from Monk’s biography how Wittgenstein would go into Russell’s chambers at Cambridge late at night and pace around, saying that he would kill himself once he left, thinking and pacing for hours at a time until he resolved whatever was bothering him. And when he met the men who became the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he shocked them by reading them poetry and recommending someone as “illogical” as Heidegger. In short, Wittgenstein himself, in his living, seemed anything but a merely logical genius. He seemed animated by another force. And if the man was animated by another force, is it not likely that his first work was animated by another force too?

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

I bought this book, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, back when I first thought I would read Wittgenstein. It has proven the work which has most helped me to engage with the Tractatus, far more than Beaney’s introduction or any other which I have read, which is funny given that the Tractatus is scarcely quoted here, and Wittgenstein is part of the shadows, certainly not the main act like the title might imply. But the arguments in the work are convincing. Wittgenstein, as part of his journey to the Tractatus, contacted the eminent philosophers Frege and Russell. But why did he do this? Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein was already engaged with some problems – for why else would he reach out? And that after meeting the logicians, he was given a set of tools that let him resolve them. But logic was never the main thing. It was just the means to another end.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is an attempt, circumstantially we might say, to consider what these problems were. Vienna was an extraordinary place in the early 1900s, with Freud and Schoenberg and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, to name just a few of the leading literary and cultural lights. To their number Janik and Toulmin add others of whom I was less aware, like the architect Adolf Loos, and most importantly to their argument, the firebrand writer Karl Kraus. Through depicting the state of intellectual upheaval in Vienna at this time, and all its components, they lead us to see that the Tractatus was not a link in a logical chain, but rather a response to a problem that was at the time particularly Viennese.

They have, perhaps, some good reason for this. Professor von Wright, Wittgenstein’s literary executor, said to them that the two most important facts about Wittgenstein were that he was Viennese, and that he was an engineer with a thorough knowledge of physics. Both of these flow into Janik and Toulmin’s analysis, and both lead to a very different picture of the Tractatus to the one we might be used to.

Context: The Proving Ground for World Destruction

It was the Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, who called the city the “Proving Ground for World Destruction”. And it is he who looms large as one of the central influences on the milieu that a young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in. Vienna, towards the end of the Habsburg Empire, was a place that produced some of the most brilliant art and philosophy that we have – and for its time, some of the most experimental, most modernist. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, are just some of these names which have in one way or another made their mark on culture, and often been featured here on the blog. But as so often happens with great art, much of that was produced in response to its environment, rather than thanks to it, as the hostile forces artists experienced in their daily lives were rejected and transformed in works of art.

Vienna at this time was a place where the gulf between appearance and reality was as great as it has perhaps ever been anywhere. The “City of Dreams” shone with palaces and parks, it seethed with its rapidly growing population – it quadrupled in size over about fifty years, without growing its city limits nearly so much – and its multinational, multiethnic population, led by a benevolent sovereign, lived according to the great values of that land: reason, order, disciplined conformity to good taste. Some families had done well, like the Wittgensteins, who through canny business decisions had risen to become some of the richest people in Europe. But many more people found themselves trapped in accommodation far too small for them, unable to feed themselves on puny wages.

Ethnic harmony was a lie that was increasingly hard to paper over, and antisemitism was shifting from an unfortunately common personal conviction to a political programme. The lights that the city shone with were not often electric, because the Emperor Franz Joseph plugged any hole that modernity might seep through, keeping the toilets in the palaces without modern plumbing, and the lights running on gas. Like the Russian Empire at that time, society was rigid to the extreme and taboos were rigorously enforced. It seems no surprise that Freud should have his first successes here, working with women who felt things they were not allowed to feel, and had no way of managing those feelings. For a literary response to female sexuality, we need look no further than Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, one of my favourite works of the period.

What was said and what wasn’t, what was unimportant and what was, were completely out of order. If in people’s personal lives this led to the rise of psychoanalysis and associated topics – Alfred Adler discovered the “inferiority complex” while in Vienna – in the arts this led to what we might call a crisis of representation. Perhaps this was most obvious in the case of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, some of whose poetry I’ve previously translated here. The enfant terrible of Austrian letters suddenly discovered, after a few years of effortless brilliant poems, that he had “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently”. This much he wrote in his fictional Letter of Lord Chandos, where he talks about words failing him. It is not that he cannot write, it is that words cannot express what he wishes they could. In short, he can only write – now in prose – of his inability to write and other things. But not of what is higher.

This inability or unwillingness to express things was not just the case with Hofmannsthal. In architecture, Adolf Loos created buildings that were extremely stripped down, with a huge shift away from ornamentation. Schoenberg in music was doing something similar, as were the first non-representational, abstract painters. All of them took inspiration from Kraus, who had a strong sense of mission and morality. In his works he was constantly taking to task politicians and intellectuals for using language badly, often by simply repeating their words back to them. One of the pranks he used to play was sending in fictitious letters to newspapers, claiming to be an expert in a given field (e.g. metallurgy) and watching as they included his deliberate fantasy, without daring to challenge it.

Kraus saw a person’s language as reflecting her morality. In other words, he adopted a holistic view of a human being, where everything can and must be judged together. We can see this in an aphorism of his: “Worthy opinions are valueless; it depends on whose opinions they are.” Kraus was well aware of the emptiness – or in some sense, performativeness – of many of the words and speeches his contemporaries made out of social decorum. His ideal, meanwhile, was a kind of authenticity, where action and speech and person were united. In this he reflected a growing interest in the works of Kierkegaard, and the intellectual dominance of Schopenhauer during this time.

Just as Tolstoy discovered Schopenhauer when writing Anna Karenina, leading him to see the world as full of frustrated desires we had little control over, so too did the Viennese around the turn of the century, where the philosopher was massively in vogue. In his rejection of the external world as controlled by will, and his emphasis on internality, he appealed to intellectuals who found Vienna more fake than real. He was joined by Kierkegaard, who also re-emerged out of obscurity in an environment where authenticity appeared to people like Kraus as the overriding ethical impulse, society be damned.

This crisis of representation and being in the world was not just limited to the arts. In the sciences and philosophy, people like Hertz, Boltzmann, and Mach were also considering questions about what could or should be said and shown. Take this statement of Hertz’s: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” He had been discussing the idea of “force”, which seems harder to pin down the more you think about it. But the conclusion he came to was remarkably similar to the one Wittgenstein himself had to the problems of life – the solution is not the answer to the question, but the end of the questioning:

6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.

(Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)

The young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in the heart of this culture. As one of the richest families in Austria, his home was filled with artists and cultural figures – as was only proper. Many of his siblings had great artistic talents, especially musically. There were also several suicides among his brothers, and as noted above Ludwig regularly spoke of such an end for himself. He hoped to become an aeronautical engineer, first studying in Manchester before being overtaken by philosophy. This led him to Frege, and thence to Bertrand Russell. Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein turned to them because he was already vexed by questions of representation that he naturally encountered, growing up in Vienna, about what could and couldn’t be said and how to think about ethics, and thought logic might help him sort all of this out. Logic was merely a means to solve that all-important (for some) question – how should I live?

The Evidence Does Not Quite Add Up

The evidence for Janik and Toulmin’s view is, they readily acknowledge, circumstantial. Their book, far better than I could, explores the way this crisis penetrated every aspect of Viennese society, so that Wittgenstein simply could not have avoided it. At the same time, we know how the Tractatus was actually written, and the chronology seems wrong. Wittgenstein’s interest in ethics and mysticism seems, or at least the point where it becomes part of the Tractatus, to have come from his experience fighting in the first World War.

Wittgenstein was already odd – for example, he had a superstitious idea that he was soon to die. But it seems that the focus on ethics and God came a little later, when death and he became closely acquainted. “What do I know of God and the purpose of my life?” He wrote in his diary, after the beginning of a particularly brutal offensive on the Eastern Front. It was then that he wrote much of the sixth section of the Tractatus, where he discusses ethics and meaning and what cannot ultimately be spoken. With that said, Russell, meeting Wittgenstein after the war for the first time and finding him a complete “mystic”, also blames William James and Wittgenstein’s experience living and working alone in Norway just before the war.

Conclusion

Yet all this is not particularly important, either way. Wittgenstein’s Vienna cannot conclusively prove that Wittgenstein was concerned with questions about the sayable and authenticity before he met Russell and Frege, but it can certainly show that these were the questions he would not have been able to avoid as a young man surrounded by the culture of his native city. It seems obvious to me, based on my knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life and the genesis of the Tractatus, that these questions of ethics and representability certainly became important to him, probably more important than the rest of the book. And they are what is most important to me, reading the book now.

One slightly mean aside in the book which I nevertheless find myself nodding to, is the suggestion that we in the UK and US undoubtedly understood Wittgenstein very poorly. The cultural shock of this man who was concerned with ethics and life with a passion that in Britain we have rarely allowed ourselves to experience, meant that we almost certainly corralled him into appearing as a figure he was not in reality. Just as in Russia, in Vienna people were taking seriously problems that we have struggled even to see as problems. And rather than see them as problems, we prefer to dismiss them as ravings and madness. Much to our discredit as human beings and inhabitants of this world.

Having read through the book in English now, I am returning to it in the German original. I expect it will take me a long time to understand the Tractatus properly. But I am not trying to understand the logic; at least that is not my primary goal. Instead, I am trying to understand the soul the work contains, and the fire that inspired it. Still, that seems a more worthy aim than merely running around in circles calling things nonsense and tautologies, thinking I am the cleverest fellow in the room.

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain

What an extraordinary book this is. What a novel. The Magic Mountain is so easy to criticise – so fun to, even. It’s a ridiculous book. Even in John Woods’ translation, which is a great improvement on Helen Lowe-Porter’s, the characters sometimes sound as if they are still getting accustomed to human flesh, especially at the beginning. Of particular note is our main character, Hans Castorp, who laughs so much at things that are manifestly not funny that it seems as if he has perhaps swallowed too much laughing gas. Beyond that, we are constantly treated to such sentences as: “there was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit.” This is incredibly dull stuff, the kind of detail we are pleased to be rid of in our more modern novels.

And yet, and yet. The Magic Mountain deserves the name. Thomas Mann’s novel takes us into another world, a world where I can be interested in the fact that the characters are having pineapple with their five-course dinner, because in this world the rules are different from our own. I have descended from the mountain every bit an evangelist. But another could quite easily descend, fed up and exhausted from the trip. The problem is that we come down and try to explain something that is to those below quite incomprehensible – even if we are criticising it we have to speak a different language, one it itself dictates. The Magic Mountain is its own world, for better or worse. We have to enter into it in order to work out what it is about.

Here is our plot. Early in the 20^th century Hans Castorp, a young man who intends to work on a shipyard as an engineer, goes up a mountain to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium near Davos, where the latter is attempting to fight off his tuberculosis infection. Castorp himself comes down with something and spends seven years at the sanatorium, where he meets various characters – of note the Russian Madame Chauchat, the Dutchman with an imposing personality Peeperkorn, the Italian Settembrini, the Jewish Jesuit Naphta.

This is one of those books that contain multitudes. It is a desperately intellectual book. Virginia Woolf’s comment on Middlemarch, that it is a novel written for grownups, is very much true here. I cannot think how disappointed I would have been, trying to read this when I was younger. There is no action to entertain us. The emotions we and our characters feel are all intellectual, even the love that runs through the pages has something cerebral about it. And yet, the greatest complement we can make of this book is that it makes those intellectual emotions feel every bit as valid and as important as the kind of passions that make us want to abandon our families or murder somewhat innocent people.

The Magic Mountain is a book of learning. One of the most exhilarating chapters is entitled “Research”, and in it we sit through the night with Hans Castorp as he engages deeply with that most important of questions, “what is life?”. It is a question that seems to have less impact on our existence than those more common cursed queries, like “what shall I do?”, or “who is to blame?”. And yet, in ways “lyric, medical, and technical”, Mann throws us into the world of this other question. We hurtle, as if in the presence of a great magician, from the smallest atoms to the greatest of stars, as we and Hans Castorp seek the answers. The world seems to rush past us, brilliant and bright:

“The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike centre, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor – any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells”. A city, a state, a social community organised around the division of labour was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade.”

If this is too much for you, turn away now. In “Research” alone there are pages and pages of long, dense, blocky paragraphs. In other chapters we learn of things like music or botany. The chapter “Snow” has one of the most extraordinary descriptions of snowfall you will ever read, but it does go on and on. You must commit yourself to reading The Magic Mountain, just as Hans Castorp commits himself to treatment at the sanatorium. Any haste, any desire to get on with reading something else or getting to some action, will spoil the book completely. To invert a metaphor, in the same way that a beloved food can lose all of its taste when we are ill, when we do not have the constitution for it The Magic Mountain it will appear a hill of boredom. I know there were definitely chapters I rushed and shouldn’t have.

The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman – it is about education, yes, but also about cultivation, that other idea of Bildung. It is about Hans Castorp growing from a relatively simple young man who is unable to participate in philosophical debates except as a witness to a man of respectable complexity, well-read, passionate about music, and willing and able to hold his own in any discussion. Just as the novel does not hide its engagement with learning, so too does it not conceal its engagement with teaching. “Pedagogy” is one of its watchwords.

Two characters are above all concerned with this – Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. These two, who literally live next to each other, are the most obvious teachers for Hans Castorp in the novel. Their debates and discourses go on for pages, often without any kind of interruption or riposte. In any other work of fiction this would be horribly bad form, but again, The Magic Mountain is no normal work of fiction. It dazzles us with its ideas, so why should it be obliged to conceal them from us by chopping them up into manageable little phrases or numbing them with retorts before they have first demonstrated their full power? Put another way, if we are to take the ideas seriously, they must be expressed properly. And since, unlike a Russian novel, the characters here do not act their ideas out (with a few exceptions), we must make do with characters speaking their ideas out.

And what are those ideas? Well, we might say that Settembrini is a humanist. He is buoyed by a beautiful hope for a better world, a cosmopolitan world of peace and fairness. Even stricken by illness, he is a member of all sorts of international committees and organisations that aim to improve the world. To give an example of the sort of work he does, he is engaged with creating a volume for The Sociology of Suffering, a series of books that aims to categorise every sort of suffering in the world that it may then be eliminated through the power of reason. Settembrini is the bright light of the Enlightenment, the heroic intellectual that we never have enough of. “Order and classification are the beginning of mastery, whereas the truly dreadful enemy is the unknown,” he tells us. A hero he is, but also limited. There are only so many international organisations that seem to be doing very little other than convening which we can handle.

Leo Naphta is a Jew who became a Jesuit. It was he whom I was most excited to meet, opening The Magic Mountain for the first time. Described quite often as a proto-fascist, I wanted to make the acquaintance of this man who seemed to smell of forbidden knowledge. Naphta is every bit as incendiary as his name, with its similarity to naphtha, suggests. He is a nihilist, but as always that term is not hugely useful. What I can say is that he is in many ways the antithesis of Settembrini, even down to the ways that they decorate their respective rooms. Where Settembrini envisions are future world of progress, Naphta’s visions are all of blood and violence. The medieval church with its crude punishments dealt “to save souls from eternal damnation”, are far more valid to him than the punishments of the modern nation state, which thinks it is legitimate but is anything but. He is a destructive thinker, who at times reminded me of Nietzsche with his disregard for what we take to be “true”. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is – terror.” This is scary stuff, scary in particular because Mann articulates it so well. And Hans Castorp is taken in by Naphta, with his dark world and his hatred of everything bourgeois. So, at times, are we.

And there are other characters, each of whom, in their own way, has something to say – either by themselves, or through themselves. One of the most memorable is Mynheer Peeperkorn, an extraordinarily funny fellow introduced late in the novel. He is unable to express anything at all, his language comes in stops and starts and terrible bluster, but through his person he commands the attention of everyone – he has that thing every politician wishes they had: presence. In contrast to the two pedagogues his inability to fit together a sentence is all the more pronounced. (“What did he say? Nothing very intelligible, and even less so the more he drank”). But again, he has presence. Against the world of ideas, he seems to offer an alternative – drinking, eating, existing.

A Russian friend who has recently left their country told me recently that The Magic Mountain was their favourite book. Perhaps I should just leave this sentence here, hanging.

This is not a book for lovers of action, but for those who love contemplation. We need to be idle, even – possibly – sick to appreciate it properly. Were I stuck in bed for a month or a year, this is all I would want. It is all I would need. The Magic Mountain is the answer you want to give if you are asked what one book you would take to a desert island when you love Western culture but don’t want to look as basic as those who name the complete works of William Shakespeare. We may find it overly intellectual, but life is full of intellectual engagement for many of us, and if not intellectual then at least populated with ideas. Compared to reading a dry work about the history of ideas, we can read about Settembrini and Naphta who, even if they go on for page and page, at least feel autonomous, real, and serious in their views. They are excited in a way that a writer reporting on the views of the dead-and-buried never can be.

The Magic Mountain is a modern book. Although the “Forward” declares that a vast gulf divides it from the present (1924), it is not so. The arguments here about life and ways of looking at the world only became more relevant after the First World War. What happened, though, was that they were translated into actions – horrific, terrible actions, whose consequences we continue to feel to this day. Perhaps we can say this – The Magic Mountain reflects the last time when a bunch of Europeans could gather together on a frozen hillside to debate the nature of the world, before all of the innocence of such intellectual tomfoolery was lost.

The novel reminds me of one day, years and years ago, when together with two friends, while playing croquet on a well-maintained lawn by a trickling stream, hidden from the world by a stone wall, I debated the consequences of the People’s Budget of 1909. Thinking back on it now, there’s something sickly about the isolation that allows us to go so deeply into intellectual things. But there is something equally sickly about the attitude that never engages with any kind of ideas at all. The novel is a balancing act, well aware of itself and what it says, and the criticisms we might make of it from afar – about its lack of engagement with action and so on – are all answered within its pages. It is an encyclopaedia. It is a world. If we are able to enter it without losing our sense of the world around us, we will be rewarded with one of the most vital, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful books that we will ever read.

I just want to read it over and over again.

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 19^th-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 19^th 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 (19^th-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.