Thomas Mann - A Buddenbrook house (2022)

Caution! Contains plot description.

Thomas Mann's first major novel, The Buddenbrook House, was published in 1901 and quickly made the then twenty-five-year-old writer world famous. The novel is about the world of the bourgeoisie, its internal crisis, with many autobiographical aspects. The Buddenbrook house is a novel of the twilight of a merchant family from Lübeck. "I styled my personal family experiences into a novel, although with the feeling that there was something literary, i.e. spiritual, i.e. universal, but not realizing that while I was writing a novel about the disintegration of a middle-class house, I was announcing the great disintegration, the end of an era, a about a cultural and social historical caesura," Thomas Mann later said about this book.

The decline of the era is reflected in the fate of four generations. The energetic and undoubted ability to act in the last owner of the company, Thomas Buddenbrook, is replaced by inner insecurity and a tendency to self-analysis - he increasingly plays his role as an actor in his business and public life activities. And his son, little Hanno, in whom the biological weakening of the family and his simultaneously increasing artistic sensibility are fulfilled, is no longer suitable not only for the role intended for him, for the new prosperity of the company, but also for the mere endurance of ordinary life - his death ends the story of the Buddenbrooks, which at the same time it is indeed the history of an era, a great but doomed era of the bourgeoisie.