Category: German Literature

The Birth of Romanticism – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

I always love these books that try to recreate the world out of which an idea arose. No matter how significant I am told a thought is, it seems unimportant until I can see the people who came up with it, how it affected them and why they needed it in their lives. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I read last year, or Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, are all such books. Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which deals with the thinkers surrounding the University of Jena in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, is yet another. What distinguishes Wulf’s contribution is that it also has a lot in common with the works of Richard Holmes, whose “Glorious” naturally adorns the dustjacket. By this, I mean that Wulf’s book is as much a story as it is an engagement with the ideas. Yet Wulf’s attempt to craft all this into a story is both Magnificent Rebels’ strength and its weakness.

The story takes us from 1794 to 1806, with a prologue and an epilogue to tidy things up. A short time period, but veritable anni mirabiles for the arts, philosophy, and world. In the tiny town of Jena, almost everyone worth knowing in German culture was gathered together, at a time when the German people were about to make earth-shattering contributions to the world after so many centuries of doing very little (the exception being Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who helped set the stage). Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Tieck represented poetry and prose, then there were the Schlegel brothers and Fichte and Schelling and finally Hegel for philosophy and theory. Wulf also draws our attention to the women – in particular, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. They were every bit as important in theorising – and writing – as their husbands, and Magnificent Rebels helps put them back in the intellectual arena.

These names listed above are the foundational figures in Romanticism. Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but here we have the heavy stuff, the theory and the ideas that gave German – and later European Romanticism – its intellectual heft. (Coleridge, we learn, never made it to Jena, but he still stole verbatim an awful lot of Schelling and was instrumental, alongside Carlyle, in popularising German thought in the Anglophone world). We have the idealisation of love, the obsession with the infinite, nature, experience and the importance of the self which all came ultimately to characterise Romanticism, such as any of us may be able to put our fingers on what it actually means.

Wulf’s primary intellectual contention is that these guys helped place the individual at the centre of the world for the first time. The philosopher Fichte, in particular, declared that you must “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.” Wulf uses the historical context to explain how revolutionary this was. At the time, in the German states one needed permission from the ruler to divorce, and often to travel too. Not just women, but even men were heavily restricted in their individual autonomy. The philosophers of Magnificent Rebels, so we learn, set off a chain reaction of self-centredness (in good ways and bad) whose ramifications are still being felt to this day.

So why Jena? Jena was a small town, but its university became famous in this brief period because it was perhaps the best place in Germany for freethinkers. The reason for this was that it was a prime example of the dysfunctional governance that characterised much of “Voltaire’s Nightmare” – the Holy Roman Empire. Jena’s university was governed, at the same time, by the rulers of the four Saxon states – Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Meiningen. As you can imagine, this meant that nobody could agree on the rules and those that were agreed upon were practically impossible to enforce. This was one factor.

The second factor was friendship. Magnificent Rebels is to a large extent a paean to the power of friendship to achieve massive leaps forward in any area where friends strive together. Everyone invited their friends and relatives so that even if someone did not have a teaching position at the university at Jena, they still had plenty of good reasons to be there. In the evenings all these clever people got together and drank and thought and read – what Novalis called “symphilosophising” because, like a symphony, it was a group activity. Everyone built atop the other. Fichte built atop Kant’s philosophy, then Schelling atop Fichte, and Hegel atop them both, so that by the time the book ends it is no longer possible for any of the philosophy described to be comprehended by a normal human being such as your humble reviewer.

Friendship builds a wonderful thing, and then the ideal begins to fall apart for the same reason. Where we could perhaps have had twenty or thirty years of greatness, personalities get in the way. Fichte gets himself kicked out of the university for not knowing when to shut up, Schiller gets offended the entire time and loses all his friends but Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel is unable to do anything that would make him money and is far too combative for his own good. Novalis and then Schiller are killed by disease, and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline divorce. Everything and everyone break up, and then the French invade and ransack the town and that really puts the nail in Jena’s coffin.

Wulf’s story takes us through all of these characters’ lives, although with so many of them to meet, we cannot get too close to them. We get a rough idea of what they were each about, but not as much as I would have liked. I got the impression that Wulf was herself defeated by some of Schelling and Fichte’s notorious twaddle, which is fair enough. I learned that Goethe was fat and Schiller was always ill. The main thing that Wulf does in Magnificent Rebels is deal with their interconnections. How their relationships with one another changed over the years, through feuds and fights. We feel ourselves caught up in this whirlwind of creativity, and that’s probably the book’s best quality.

More than the reorientation towards the individual, Magnificent Rebels details the ideas that the early Romantics threw down that taken together hint towards what Romanticism as a whole might mean. We get Fichte’s self-centredness, “My will alone… shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”, Friedrich Schlegel’s emphasis on the importance of words, “the letter is the true magic word”, and Novalis’s legendary definition: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise”.

Nowadays we tend to think of Romanticism as slightly dangerous in its irrational tendencies. This isn’t entirely borne out in the book. It is holistic rather than anti-rational, though often its thinkers’ desire to make everything pulsing and interconnected went up against what the scientists were telling them. It was only growing old and the French armies that turned many of these theorists from dreamy, passionate believers in a new world into much darker figures of reaction and nationalism. If Wulf’s book has a message for us today, it is that the Romantics of Jena changed our world, but their gifts are ours to use or misuse. They liberated us by freeing our sense of self from being the exclusive possession of a monarch. But they also made possible the terrible self-centeredness and materialism that are destroying this liberated world. Reflection, the turn inwards, is a thing that needs to be learned again and again, by successive generations, and Magnificent Rebels is of clear value beyond teaching us history because it helps us do just that.

For me, the main thing I got out of the book was this sense of collaboration and its power. This year I held a little gathering of my own at my family’s home in Switzerland. For just over a week, I and several friends were treated, under the watchful eyes and extremely talented housekeeping of my girlfriend, to brilliant food and equally sparkling conversation. Each day we walked upon the forested mountains, or bathed in mountain lakes, or reached the foot of the glaciers. It was, in a word, divine. One evening I stood outside with a friend and discussed the intricacies of interpreting ancient biblical texts – he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel – on another day, we discussed the development of atonal music in a mountain restaurant. I can think of nothing better.

What is obvious to me is just how much I grow when I am surrounded by good company. However much I am grateful to books like this, and the voices of the dead that they contain, the real world is all that much more rewarding. There is no passion that fully withstands the cooling of its ink upon the page. Yet where could I find another Jena? I was at Cambridge, of course. There are quite a lot of clever people there. But now I am no longer there; the world has swallowed me up. Still, one mustn’t lose heart. Many of the figures who flit through Magnificent Rebels spent only a few years in Jena before having to leave, and still they left their mark upon their friends and the world. Life is long, making friends is hard, but one day, we may hope, we shall each of us have our Jena. 

Malina – Ingeborg Bachmann

It’s always hard to write about a book which you finish with a feeling that you have not understood anything. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s one and only novel Malina is not only awesome and exhilarating, but also pretty hard to make sense of. Taking as its subject the disintegration of a certain female artist’s mind, I spent most of the novel trying to determine what was real and what was not. I have now finished the novel and I am none the wiser. I have tried looking at the secondary criticism and am even less wise than before. It appears the main topic for the critics to discuss is whether half the characters even exist outside of the heroine’s head. You see what kind of fish we are dealing with here.

Malina is a weird book. It is probably the story of a woman whose attention is divided between two men, a Hungarian named Ivan and the eponymous Malina. My edition’s back cover calls it “part detective novel, part love story, part psychoanalytic case study”. Just that alone ought to grab our attention – we are not dealing with a novel that fits into the standard genres we might be used to. The narrator spends the first half of the book mostly with Ivan, then she has a breakdown and spends most of the second half of the book with Malina. Or we might say, in his power. One of Bachmann’s most famous utterances is that “fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman”.

Fascism, fascism, fascism. Can we ever escape it, except by retreating cowardly into a past where it hasn’t been born yet? In Malina it lurks throughout the first act, only coming out into the open in the second. Malina is post-war German literature, but relatively subtle in its treatments of the past when compared to authors like Günter Grass. In fact, it reminded me a little bit of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters. I later discovered that Bachmann had been a kind of mentor to Bernhard. He, in turn, had given her some of his distinctly offensive praise: “I loved Bachmann a great deal. She was a very intelligent woman. A strange combination, no? Most women are stupid but bearable, possibly even agreeable; intelligent too, but rarely.”

But we must get to the novel, there’s no hiding from it. What there is, is hiding from is our narrator’s past. “I don’t want to talk, it all upsets me, in my remembering.” From the moment Malina begins our narrator is three things – creative, intelligent, and mentally unwell. Unlike with Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, which Malina has plenty in common with, here we don’t even start with a narrator we can trust. The opening section gives us “the cast” and descriptions of the narrator, Malina, and Ivan. But already we get a nudge that identity is a bit more complicated (a mess) than what we can easily write down. In the case of our narrator, “Official Austrian I.D. Eyes—br., Hair—blond; born in Klagenfurt”, is really not enough for us to go on.  We then hear that “the experts” have deemed her “still functional”, which the rest of our novel will test our credulity of.

And so, and so. The first section of the novel is entitled “Happy with Ivan”, which I believe to be a joke. For our narrator, Ivan appears a kind of saviour: “Against the decay and order, against life and against death, against accident, constant threats from the radio, the newspaper headlines all spreading the plague, against perfidy seeping down from upstairs or up from downstairs,”, she has Ivan. Ivan “is beginning to cure me”. But does Ivan care about our narrator? “How sad I am, and why doesn’t Ivan do anything about it?” Probably not. We are treated over the course of the novel to examples of “sentences”, shared between the two characters, as if they are reading off limited scripts. But our narrator notes that “we don’t have a single sentence about feelings.”

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan.

The narrator’s mood swings between joy and terrible sadness, from paragraphed section to paragraphed section. At one point she gets excited about “infecting” the world with positive feelings – it always comes back to disease – but soon she is depressed again. Such mood swings do not make for fun reading. Nor does the disorientation that comes from these and other abrupt changes. The first time the narrator meets Ivan’s two young children, she is cold to them and they to her. The second time we hear that they meet, the situation is much changed, and they are more talkative. What are we missing? We ask in vain for some signposting, some sense even of time. It is not forthcoming.   

Malina is made up of short sections, often only a page or two long. Dialogue is hard to differentiate. Sometimes we get phone calls, which are jumbled up and with the ends of sentences missing. Our narrator spends a lot of time waiting for Ivan, and less time with him. In the first section, we have a fairy tale, we have snippets of stories or else reworkings of them, we have letters written and unwritten, we have an interview. All of this is inventive, and every new approach throws new light on the problem we are facing in Malina, of making sense of things and working out what’s what.

After a trip out of Vienna to see friends the narrator collapses, and the first section ends. Malina’s second part is one of the most horrific sequences I have ever read. In it, our narrator falls into her own mind, and we with her. Where the first part of the book kept her past hidden, with only the odd veiled references (she was put up against a wall and almost shot as a child), the second part introduces “my father”. A family, the thing we had missed before. But this is not her real family, or at least not necessarily so. The second part is a nightmarish hellscape of torture scenes and mental anguish, interspersed with dialogue (now clearly signposted, as in a play), between the narrator and Malina. The closest thing I imagine it compares to is being waterboarded. We go under the water and feel like we are drowning, and then our head is dragged out again for a brief gasp of air, only for the cycle to repeat.

Gas chambers, barbed wire, Siberian prison camps, incest, murder, child rape. I, not one for squeamishness, thought that this is one of the few books that could have done with a content warning. The narrator possibly has a real sister, Eleonore. She has possibly betrayed her father. She has possibly been raped by her father. She dies repeatedly, horribly. In the nightmares a constant feeling is one of exposure – she is filmed without her consent, or forced to stand on stage, or forced to strip naked. Her powerlessness is the overwhelming impression. At the same time, her powerlessness is also reflected in Malina’s growing influence over her “waking” life. These dialogue sections, which feel just as unhelpful as the dream sequences (Malina: What happened to her? Me: She died in a foreign land”), convey a transferring of agency. “Leave it to me”, Malina says. And what he means is – control over her whole life.

In the third section, we might think that things are back to normal. At least the dream sequences have ended. But my initial impression of the narrator, who says of herself that she’s always in a “state of disintegration or recomposition”, is that she has been lobotomised. Something is missing. Even less than before do we have a grasp on what time it is. She is interested in mailmen (as a concept). Her relationship with Ivan begins to crumble, and the snatches of phone conversations become still less informative. The narrator notices that signs of Ivan’s presence in her life are also disappearing, such as the pack of cigarettes he would leave on the table. Everything is falling apart; only Malina remains.

In “the theatre of my thoughts”, which may or may not be the outside world, the narrator tries to live. At a restaurant with Malina, she is decapitated. Malina goes from a slightly concerning controlling presence to an outright evil one when he begins urging the narrator to murder Ivan. “Kill him! Kill him!” But is this real? (“But am I really saying something?”). It is impossible to say. As the narrator’s mind continues its final losses of everything that allowed it to make sense of things, we are treated to no additional clarity.

And yet, the lack of clarity is itself a reality. If we say that the narrator simply went mad, then where does that leave Malina, who early on we learn “was destined to be my doom?” Madness can be aided and abetted by dark agents, and perhaps Malina’s suggestion that our narrator murders Ivan is not a figment of her imagination, but in fact him pushing her further and further into passivity and his control. All through the novel, our narrator is a passive being. She is desperate to control Ivan, but she has no power over him. Her dream sequences, like Kafka’s, show her being submissive to an entirely dominant father. The final sections have Malina be ascendent. Violence is a thread running through the novel. Whether it is the slap given to her as a schoolgirl by a boy as a prank, her father’s dream violence, to Malina’s real violence, our narrator is the victim of physical force.

Malina might be read as an attempt, a doomed one, to break out of this domination by others. And it is an attempt made using language. The fairy tale we are treated to early on in Malina is one of woman’s emancipation. Our narrator, who is an author like Bachmann, also reads in a way that leads her to a kind of freedom, or hope of it. She twice quotes Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “He who has a Why to live for will bear almost any How”. The constructed-ness of Malina itself is a kind of scattergun attempt at finding a way of self-expression that works. We have letters, we have telephone calls, we have dialogues.

But with each of these, we have difficulties. The phone calls don’t go anywhere. The letters, whose recipients (yet again) may not actually exist, are not posted. Perhaps most intriguing is an interview with a journalist, where the narrator begins to express her thoughts on language.

“I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it, all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt”.

This is an important statement. Germanists will be thinking about Arendt and Adorno and Celan and all the other thinkers and artists who struggled with what to do with German after the Second World War and who made similar pronouncements. And yet, “(signs of exhaustion in Herr Mühlbauer. Signs of my own exhaustion.)”. There is no engagement, the man shuts her down. The truth, which is a victim’s and a woman’s truth, has no place here. As is the case elsewhere in the novel, our narrator (ironically, good at writing), cannot express herself externally because the men do not allow her to.

Austria during the sixties was a bit of a mess with regards to its Nazi past. Bernhard’s Woodcutters deals with it obliquely, and Elfriede Jelinek’s horrid (but also impressive) Wonderful, Wonderful Times does so a little more directly. The interview is one example of an unwillingness to think about the past among certain members of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Another example comes at the end of the first part where the narrator goes on holiday to the Tyrol with some friends, where we have some Bernhard-esque social satire (albeit less funny). Here we have no “discussions,” “talking,” or “get-togethers,” but conversation, a dying species of weightless speaking at cross purposes, which permits proper digestion and maintains the good spirits of all.” Language itself, as in a Chekhov story, is manipulated by the controllers of discourse into being a tool for preventing discourse, leaving our narrator poised for her breakdown.

Malina is one of those novels that rewards reading carefully. It also frustrates, with its lack of clarity. Does Ivan exist, does Malina exist, or are they merely alter egos, facets of the narrator’s imagination let loose upon the world? We have to wean ourselves off the plot to enjoy the book. Instead, carried by Bachmann’s command of language, we need to focus on the ideas here instead. Why is it that our narrator cannot speak? Why are her relationships with the outside world always characterised by domination and submission?

Once we start asking these questions, the novel provides plenty of answers. It is the tortured and at times torturous account of the breakdown of a psyche, but that breakdown is not without its external factors. To go away thinking that this is just another novel about a psychotic woman is offensive and misses the point. This woman is trapped within a world that destroys her ability to speak and define herself and deprives her of any kind of authentic expression except her writing. Given all of that, how could she do anything other than go insane?

I really enjoyed Malina’s intelligence and inventiveness. It is not an easy book to read, and I can’t pretend I liked getting to the end not knowing what I had just read. But at the same time, here is a book that still has mysteries to unravel, and that demands I one day return to it. That can only be a good thing.

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.