Over the decades, political systems everywhere, even in reluctant tsarist Russia, had adjusted to the new world of the middle classes. Yet there was also a sense in some quarters that their heyday was over by 1900. In the first year of the new century the German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955) published his great novel of upper-middle-class life, Buddenbrooks, in which a mercantile family gradually falls apart over the decades as its members abandon their core values and sink into self-indulgence and decadence in a process symbolized in the progressively worsening tooth decay suffered by the
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Thomas Mann's book buddenbrooks.
