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Folks

• First generation: old Johann Buddenbrooks and Frau Consul Buddenbrooks
• Second generation: Consul Johann Buddenbrooks and wife Betsy; brother Gotthold; poet Hoffstede; Dr. Grabow; Pastor Wunderlich
• Third generation: Senator Tom (worried that he will seem eccentric, trying to swallow his emotions and do the right thing for the family) and musical wife Gerda; Christian and eventual marriage to peasant line, ending up in asylum; Antonie (Tony) and her marriages that fail, first to Grunlich and second to Parmaneder; Clara and preacher husband Tiburtius; Pastor Kolling
• Fourth generation: Erica Parmaneder and husband Weinschenk (daughter Elisabeth); Johann Buddenbrooks (of Tom and Gerda); Dr. Langhals; Pastor Pringsheim
• Cousins the Krogers (family breaks apart too: one brother is useless and becomes mailman, while other disappears and mother ruins fortune to keep him in gambling money)
• Others: Ida Jungmann, faithful governess; upstart merchants Hagenstrom and Kristenmaker; the Schwartzkopf family (with dreamy revolutionary Morten); example ruined family Ratenkampfs

Themes

• Downfall of the family
  • 352: the outward signs of happiness only show once the decline has already begun
  • Decayed, degenerate (opinion of Dr. Langhals) (sickness and weakliness of young Hanno; insanity of Christian, who is a dandy)
  • Married into musical family, not into merchant family
  • Shady business deals that involve usury (modern business styles)
    • 364: Tony herself “failed in business” when can’t marry her daughter of reliably
  • Importing: clothes from Hamburg, husbands from Munich, wives from Netherlands
  • Democratic principles (they are near-aristocracy)
  • Can’t adjust to transition from mercantilism to finance capitalism
• New Business
  • Cutthroat
  • Not content on just keeping yourself in business, but have to make so much more money
  • Risk-taking instead of “sure thing”
  • No personal touch, no personal relations with the workers anymore
• Generationality
  • The Family Book; the Children’s Thursdays; the Christmas traditions
  • Dialectical repetition
  • Old: secular, classical, cynical; new: romantic, religious, idealistic
  • “Preoccupation with a glorious historical continuity” (527)
  • “We are not free, separate, and independent entities, but links in a chain,” her father tells Tony
  • 184: unreliability of credit
• Revolution
  • Participation in blocking 1848 Revolution from succeeding (Consul Buddenbrooks used personal pressure to make them back down)
  • Antonie’s love Morten had republican principles, and she would spout off his ideals
  • Echoes of Marx and Feuerbach on mediation and religion
  • Some people fear of Socialist Democracy at the end
• New Germany
  • Unified Germany is romantic and Kantian

Style

• Style is still realist: clear sentences, legible characters, linear progress of plot
• However, it shows a growth of consciousness, from the cynicism of generation 1 to the simple morality of generation 2 (go to church and be nice to people) to the conflicted idealism (that eventually collapses, cannot reconcile philosophy and eccentrism with the practical world) of generation 3 to the collapse of generation 4 (not many children; and Hanno dies, showing the artistic consciousness at the end, which is here decadent and unfruitful, the product of an upset mind, not mature sense of strength and beauty)
• Critique of decadence: it is weak and ineffective (Christian and Hanno) although sympathetic
• Also, it departs from realism because it does try to carve out a place for ideas (Morten’s progressive stuff, Thomas’ philosophy, Christian’s hatred for business, Hanno’s art)

Notes

• Crazy technologies: the speaking tube, the vox humana in the organ, artificial hearth, and electric buzzers
• Watering place Travemunde works wonders for Tony and Hanno, but cannot help Senator Buddenbrook relax (first is one 97, with Morten, beloved)
• Work as virtue:
  • Christian’s joke that justifies his laziness: perpetually repeating it
  • Work “isn’t a virtue” Christian yells at brother Tom
  • Kistenmaker always pretending to be drowning in work
• Tony’s love affair gives her a strange habit to yammering about honey being something “that you know where it came from” (very organic!) and about the equality of the people…the only traces she has of Morten! Strange how far away she let him become.