Buddenbrooks

Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required, and most are. The decline needs four generations to be shown as a decline rather than a misfortune, and its pace is the slow pace of a family’s time: dinners, christenings, funerals and entries in the family book. Tony’s two failed marriages, to Grünlich and to Permaneder, are required twice over, as comedy and as the firm’s losses, since each costs the family a dowry and its name. Against the figure: the middle of the book is generous with set pieces that repeat a point already made; the lesser relations, the Gerhardt ladies, the cousins at Tony’s table, Clothilde’s appetite, are kept on a running joke; Christian’s afflictions are returned to more often than the argument requires; and some of the business with Hagenström and the senate election could lose a third without loss. Necessity is high and not complete.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a family, a class and a way of life decline at the very moment they refine, and the refinement is the decline. Thomas sees it himself, telling Tony that the outward signs of a family’s rise appear only when the rise is already over, as the light of a star reaches us after the star is gone. The book uncovers the cost of duty performed as appearance: Thomas’s later life is the upkeep of a mask, dressing three times a day, and the mask outlasts the man. It uncovers what the founder’s rule in the family book cannot survive, that business be done only so “daß wir bei Nacht ruhig schlafen können”
“that we can sleep peacefully at night”. Held below the top because the thesis is partly the period’s, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the theory of degeneration, and the book sometimes illustrates it where Anna Karenina discovers.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation here is mostly dreadful and ironic, and it rises often in the second half. The Consul’s widow’s death agony in the ninth part, long, physical and without consolation, is among the most terrible deathbeds in the novel’s literature. Thomas’s night with Schopenhauer in the tenth, the one moment of transport in his life, “Ich werde leben!”
“I shall live!”, is forgotten within days. Thomas’s own death, face down in the slush of a winter street after a botched tooth extraction, his good gloves soiled, is the sublime of the absurd; Hanno’s improvisations at the piano work a single motif to ecstasy and exhaustion. The warm heights are few and early: Travemünde, the sea and Morten Schwarzkopf, Tony’s one summer of being herself. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.2 because the irony that is the book’s strength lowers its warm registers, and the first half rises rarely.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, and built from household goods. The family book with its gilt edges, in which each generation enters births, marriages and deaths, is the line of descent made an object; Hanno, a small boy, draws a double line under his own name, and says, when caught, “Ich glaubte … es käme nichts mehr”
“I thought … nothing more would come”. The house in the Mengstraße, bought at the start and sold to the Hagenströms near the end, is the house of Atreus in a grain merchant’s register. Teeth rot down the line; blue shadows gather under eyes; the music comes in with Gerda’s Stradivarius and kills. The pattern is the fall of a house, and it is load-bearing: every scene is a step on that one descent. Held below 8.9 because the myth has one direction only, and the realist surface and the period’s theory of degeneration keep it nearer a case history than a myth that opens more ways than one.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is the European realist and naturalist family novel: Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, the Goncourts, Fontane. The departures are real: an ironic narrator who is neither naturalist recorder nor moralist; the Wagnerian leitmotif carried into prose as a structural device; a philosophical interior, Schopenhauer, set inside the commercial chronicle; and the chapter on typhus, which removes Hanno’s death from the scene and gives it as a medical account, “Mit dem Typhus ist es folgendermaßen bestellt”
“With typhoid fever, matters proceed as follows”. The stake was real for a first novel of two volumes by an unknown, set in its author’s own town, which took offence. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the turn is within the form it inherits, not against it. The chronicle stays a chronicle, and the larger swerves of the decade and of Mann’s own career, The Magic Mountain among them, came after.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The chronicle, the slow and even tempo of a family’s dated occasions, is the instrument of the decline: because the book keeps the family’s own time, its dinners, its anniversaries, the hundredth jubilee of the firm in the seventh part, the reader feels the time running down with them. The narrative contracts from the crowded table of 1835 to the few women in Gerda’s drawing room at the end, and the focus narrows from a household to Thomas’s mind to Hanno’s single day at school in the eleventh part, told hour by hour: the form shrinks as the family does. The leitmotifs carry the inheritance itself, since a recurring trait is what a family is, and the typhus chapter’s turn to clinical prose makes the last Buddenbrook a case. Held off the top because for long stretches the form is a capacious container for episodes, not the knowledge itself.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: a hundred and twenty five years of reading have not exhausted it. Mann returned to it in his essays and lectures; Lukács read it as the type of the bourgeois novel at its turning; it is read and taught in Germany as the book of its class, and in comparative literature as the hinge between nineteenth century realism and Mann’s modernism. Its questions stay open: whether decline is loss or the price of art and consciousness, since Hanno’s music is both his gift and his death; whether Thomas’s Schopenhauer night is a revelation or a symptom; whether the irony saves the Buddenbrooks or condemns them; what Hanno’s friendship with Kai means; whether Tony, the comic figure, is the one Buddenbrook who wins, since she survives with her faith in the family whole. Held below the top because the central pattern is plain on first reading, and the depth is in the variations more than in the theme.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the German novel of its century and, through it, the European. The intrinsic force is large: the book gave the German language a social novel of European rank, which German realism, Fontane apart, had not quite produced, and it made the family chronicle a novel of ideas without leaving the chronicle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Mann, and the Nobel committee of 1929 named it as the reason for his prize; it became the type of the generational novel of decline, the book later family sagas are measured against; and its leitmotif method passed into Mann’s later work, where the larger reorganisation was made. What holds it here: its force is consummation more than redirection. It completed the nineteenth century family novel rather than changing how novels are made, and the claims of direct descent in other literatures are comparison, not proved acknowledgement.

Score: 8.6 / 10

A hundred and twenty five years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, published complete in 1901 and carrying no substantive later revision; nothing is charged. Presence: in print without a break since 1901, translated into most of the world’s written languages, taught in German schools as a set text, and the house in the Mengstraße made a museum under the book’s name. Fabric: the Hanseatic grain trade, the customs union and the senate of a free city are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon; it has outlived its conditions. Held at the floor of its step because outside the German language its presence is narrower than that of the first rank of the century’s novels, and its reputation abroad has rested partly on Mann’s later books.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Mann’s German, in its registers and its irony; the sound of every sentence is not argued here, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. The command is complete for a first novel and nearly so for any. The opening table of 1835, Tony reciting the catechism, “Was ist das”
“What is that” (first part), places the whole family and its guests in a few pages. Dialect is used as character, Permaneder’s Bavarian against the Low German of the city and the Consul’s French. The leitmotif is managed across forty years without becoming a tic: Grünlich’s golden whiskers, Sesemi’s refrain, Tony’s echo of Morten’s phrases decades later. Scene after scene is built to a single detail: Thomas’s soiled gloves, the Pöppenrade harvest bought on the stalk and lost to hail. The school chapter and the typhus chapter show a range of method few first novels possess. Charged: the narrator’s irony sometimes condescends, and the middle parts lean on comic repetition. Two tenths below The Great Gatsby’s 9.3, which is the more compressed.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Tony’s comedy, the outraged name of Grünlich and her flight from Munich over Permaneder’s word in the night in the sixth part, and the typhus chapter’s cold account of a boy’s death. One law governs both: the family’s will to appear, to keep its name and its form, and what that will costs those who carry it. Tony is its comic servant and Hanno its victim, and both are measured by the family book. The range is wide and held: commercial chronicle; political scene, the revolution of 1848 dispersed by the Consul’s speech in Low German, and old Kröger dying of the chill; pietist satire; the philosophical night; school satire; the music. Charged: the satire of the pastors and of the school is broader than the book elsewhere allows itself, and Christian sometimes plays as farce in a book whose law is tragic irony.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Held, not listed. Consciousness: Thomas’s mask and his night, Hanno’s music, Christian’s hypochondria as a mind watching its own body. The family: four generations, marriages arranged for the firm, divorce, children, the quarrels over the inheritance after the Consul’s widow dies. Labour and commerce: the grain trade, credit, dowries, speculation, bankruptcy. The state: the free city’s senate, its elections, 1848, the city’s joining the customs union. History: the Hanseatic order giving way to the Hagenströms’ new money. The sacred: the pietism of the Consul and his widow, the pastors at table, Clara’s marriage to a pastor. Philosophy and art: Schopenhauer, Wagner. The natural order: the sea at Travemünde, teeth and digestion, typhoid. All of it bound by one law of decline. Held a step below the top because history and the state are ground more than agent, and the poor and the servants stand at the margin.

Score: 8.9 / 10