Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

Therese Weichbrodt was a well-read—indeed, almost learned—spinster, whose life was a series of small, earnest battles to maintain the faith of her childhood, her optimistic piety, and the conviction that she would one day be recompensed in the great beyond for her hard and lackluster life.

Madame Kethelsen, however, was uneducated, a woman of innocent and simple temperament. “Sweet Nelly,” Sesame would say, “my God, what a child she is, has never had a doubt in her life, has never known the struggle of faith—she’s so happy.” Such words betrayed equal portions of contempt and envy—a definite, though forgivable, weakness in Sesame’s character.

ISN’T IT REMARKABLE, Morten, how you can’t get bored at the beach? Try lying on your back for three or four hours anywhere else—not doing anything, not thinking about anything.”

Ah, the masses are ignorant, I know that. And yet my heart, this heart of mine, is with them.”

despite the snow she knelt down on the grave to pray softly; her black veil fluttered about her, and her broad skirt lay spread out beside her in soft, picturesque folds. God alone knew how much of this molded pose was grief and piety—and how much was the vanity of a pretty woman.

“There are so many ugly things in this world,” Elisabeth Buddenbrook, née Kröger, thought to herself. “Even brothers can hate or despise each other; that does happen, as awful as it may sound. But no one ever speaks of it. They gloss over it. It’s best to know nothing about it.”

As for Thomas himself, they could not find any weak points in the man, and he always regarded them with an indulgent indifference that implied, “I understand you, and I feel sorry for you.” And so they treated him with a respect tinged with venom.

The Bible passage was often replaced by a reading from a book of sermons or from one of the edifying, black-bound, gilt-edged volumes of which there were many in the house, with titles like The Jewel Box, Psaltery, Holy Hours, Morning Chimes, The Pilgrim’s Staff, and whose unrelenting tender affection for the sweet Baby Jesus tended to be somewhat cloying.

Finally he turned to his poor cousin, sitting there amid all these happy people—a silent, skinny old maid, still hungry despite dinner and dessert—and in the voice of Marcellus Stengel he said, “Well, Thilda. Let’s get married right away, too; separately, I mean.”

She had a deep dislike of the kind of undertaking ahead of them today, especially in summer, and most especially on a Sunday. She lived in the twilight of her curtained rooms, seldom went out, and dreaded the sun, the dust, the common people in their Sunday best, the smell of coffee, beer, and tobacco. And most of all she loathed the dérangement, the heat, and the confusion.

For in the salon is a table decorated with flowers to serve as an altar and, behind it, a young clergyman in black vestments with a starched snow-white ruff like a millstone around his neck;

he devoted the same deadly earnest to planning a business maneuver or outlining a speech as he did to contemplating a complete refurbishing of his supply of underwear—to do it at last in one fell swoop, so that at least in that regard everything would be in perfect order for a while.

And between two wars, little Johann, with his soft wavy hair and his pleated pinafores, quietly and innocently plays beside the fountain in his garden or up on the “balcony,” created especially for him by the addition of a little row of columns on the third-floor landing—a four-year-old at play. His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world’s demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.

This was his musician’s gaze, which looked vague and empty, but only because it was caught up in a logic that was deeper, purer, more unsullied and uncompromised than the logic that shapes the ideas and thoughts embodied in language.

Pastor Pringsheim would lift up his voice from beneath the canopy of the pulpit; and at that point, it was not unusual for Herr Pfühl to start mocking the sermon and to laugh at Pastor Pringsheim’s stylized Franconian accent, his long and dark or sharply accented vowels, his sighs, and the abrupt shifts of darkness and transfiguration passing over his face. Then Hanno would laugh, too, in quiet, deep amusement; for, without even looking at one another or saying a word as they sat there high above it all, they were united in the opinion that his sermons were rather foolish babble and that the real worship service was something that the pastor and his congregation probably thought of as a mere adjunct for elevating the mood of devotion—and that something was music.

But there comes a moment when the hope of relatives is somehow artificial and dishonest. Some major change occurs in the patient, some alternation in his or her demeanor quite alien to the person we have known in life. Certain odd words come from her mouth, for which we know no reply, which cut off any retreat, as it were, which are themselves a covenant with death. She may be the dearest person on earth, but after all that has happened we can no longer wish for her to rise and walk. And if she should, it would somehow be as horrifying as if she had crawled out of her coffin.

For the sake of the family, they were required under all circumstances to preserve this life as long as possible, and a narcotic would have meant the immediate loss of all resistance, the surrender of life. Doctors were not placed on this earth to bring death, but to preserve life at any price. And there were certain religious and moral reasons as well—they had heard all about them at the university, although they might not be able to recall them precisely at the moment.

When he came to speak of the Jerusalem Evenings, the old women who had been friends of the deceased began to sob—except for Madame Kethelsen, who could hear nothing and stared straight ahead with the secretive look of the deaf, and the Gerhardt twins, the descendants of Paul Gerhardt, who stood holding hands in one corner; their eyes were clear and dry, for they were happy for their dead friend and would have envied her, if envy and jealousy had not been totally foreign to their nature.

Hermann Hagenström was the sort of imposing fellow familiar on the stock market of any great city; he was dressed in a thick, heavy fur coat that reached to his shoes and hung open to reveal a greenish yellow winter suit of durable English tweed. He was so extraordinarily fat that not only did he have a double-chin, but the whole lower half of his face was double as well, and his close-trimmed blond full beard could not hide the fact. When he frowned or raised his eyebrows in a certain way, thick folds appeared in the skin under his short-cropped hair. Drooping flatter than ever against his upper lip, his nose sucked air in and out of his mustache. Now and then his mouth had to lend its aid and would fall open for a copious draft of air—which was always accompanied by a soft smacking sound as his tongue gradually freed itself from his upper jaw and gullet.

“Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature.”

The World As Will And Idea Arthur Schopenhauer

And so Thomas Buddenbrook, who had stretched his hands out imploringly for high and final truths, sank back now into the ideas, images, and customary beliefs in which he had been drilled as a child. He went about his day trying to remember the personal God, the Father of humankind, who had sent a part of Himself to earth so that He could suffer and bleed for us, who on the Last Day would call men to judgment and at whose feet the just would enter into eternity in recompense for their trials in this vale of woe—the whole rather vague and rather absurd story, which did not require that you understood it, but only obediently believed its abiding, childlike tenets, which would be there close at hand whenever the ultimate fear came over you.—Really? Oh, he could find no peace in that, either.

Adolf Todtenhaupt, the head of the class, knew everything; he had never given a wrong answer in all his life. This was due partly to quiet, passionate hard work, and partly to the fact that his teachers avoided asking him anything he might not know. It would have pained and embarrassed them, would have shaken their belief in human perfectibility, to have met with silence from Adolf Todtenhaupt.

If only my grade was already in his book, and I’d failed the class, and it would all be behind me. I’m not afraid of failing, I’m afraid of the whole brouhaha that goes with it.”

Hanno Buddenbrook was almost the only student whom Herr Modersohn knew by name, and he used that knowledge against him—constantly calling him to order, assigning him extra homework as punishment, and tyrannizing him in general. He only knew Buddenbrook’s name because Hanno was so quiet that he stood out from the rest of the class; and he took advantage of Hanno’s gentleness by exercising his authority over him, because he would not have dared do it with the loud, impudent boys. “People are so mean that they even make it impossible for you to pity them,” Hanno thought. “I don’t join the others in tormenting and bullying you, Herr Modersohn, because I think it’s brutal, ugly, and cheap. And how do you repay me? But that’s how it is, always will be, everywhere on earth,” he thought, and felt fear and nausea rising up within him again. “And to think that I can see right through you with such revolting clarity.”

They strolled across the courtyard, and Hanno listened with delight to Kai’s banter, which was intended to help him forget his demerit. “You see, here is a door, a courtyard door, it is open, beyond it lies the street. What would happen if we were to step out there and stroll up and down the sidewalk for a while? It’s still recess; we have another six minutes, and we could be back in time. But the fact is: it’s impossible. Do you understand? Here is the door, it is open, there are no bars, no barriers, nothing—just a threshold. And nevertheless it is impossible, the very idea of leaving for just one second is impossible. Well, let’s disregard that and take another example. It would be quite absurd to say, if asked the time, that it is now about eleven-thirty. No, it is time for geography. That’s reality. But now my question, for one and all, is: Is this life? With everything totally warped out of shape. Oh, good God, if only the institution would release us from its loving embrace.”

“We shall see them again,” Friederike Buddenbrook said, folding her hands firmly in her lap; she lowered her eyes and thrust her nose in the air. “Yes, that’s what they say. Oh, there are times, Friederike, when that is no comfort. God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness, I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith. See them again—if only it were so.”