Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  Vacation began, and even the moment when Papa read the report card—which had to be issued at Christmastime, too—passed without much difficulty. The doors to the grand salon were kept closed, guarding mysteries; marzipan and gingerbread appeared on the table. And it was Christmas out on the streets, too. Snow fell, it turned cold, and the sharp, clear air was full of the cheerful and melancholy melodies of black-mustached organ-grinders, Italians who had come to town dressed in velvet jackets for the holidays. Dazzling Christmas displays appeared in the shop windows. And the gay, colorful booths of the Christmas fair had been set up around the tall Gothic fountain on the market square. Wherever you went, you could smell the sweet fragrance of fir trees being sold for the holiday.

  And then at last came the evening of December 23 and the opening of gifts in the grand salon at home on Fischer Grube, just for their little family; but that was only the beginning, a kind of dress rehearsal for Christmas Eve, which old Madame Buddenbrook still claimed as her own, when, late in the afternoon on the 24th, the whole clan gathered around the table in the landscape room—even Therese Weichbrodt and Madame Kethelsen and Jürgen Kröger, who had come from Wismar.

  Dressed in her heavy silk dress with black and gray stripes, wrapped in the gentle scent of patchouli, but with flushed cheeks and excited eyes, the old woman received her guests as they entered, one after another, and with each embrace her gold bracelets jingled softly. She was trembling with excitement and exceptionally silent this evening. “Good Lord, you’re in a dither, Mother!” the senator said when he arrived with Gerda and Hanno. “Everything will be all right, it will all be just as cozy as always,” he added.

  But as she kissed all three of them, she whispered, “For Jesus’s sake. And for my dear, departed Jean.”

  Indeed, the entire solemn ceremony instituted for the occasion by the late consul had to be carried out to the letter, and a sense of responsibility for seeing to it that the evening proceeded in a worthy fashion, drenched in an atmosphere of profound, serious, and fervent joy, drove the old woman restlessly here and there—from, the columned hall, where the choirboys from St. Mary’s had now assembled, to the dining room, where Rieke Severin was putting the final touches on the tree and the presents, then out to the corridor, where a few old people stood about looking shy and embarrassed—the “poor,” who were also supposed to share in the distribution of gifts—and back to the landscape room, where she punished every extraneous word or noise with a mute sidelong glance. It was so still that they could hear a distant barrel organ—like the sound from a tinkling music box, it drifted in from some snowy street. And although there were a good twenty people standing or sitting about the room, the silence was deeper than in a church, and the mood—as the senator very carefully whispered to his Uncle Justus—was just a little reminiscent of a funeral.

  Not that there was any real danger the mood would be broken by the noise of youthful high spirits. One look sufficed to reveal that almost all members of the assembled family were of an age when manifestations of conviviality have assumed time-honored forms. There was Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, whose alert, spirited, even humorous expression was contradicted by the pallor of his face; his wife, Gerda, leaning back in her armchair, immobile, her lovely white face turned upward, her close-set, blue-shadowed eyes glistening strangely under the spell of the flickering light of the chandelier’s crystal prisms; his sister, Frau Permaneder; his cousin Jürgen Kröger, the quiet, neatly dressed civil servant; his cousins Friederike, Henriette, and Pfiffi, the first two looking skinnier and taller than ever, the latter shorter and plumper, but all three with faces set in one standard expression—a caustic, malevolent smile disparagingly directed at all persons and things, as if they had but one constant, skeptical question: “Really? Well, for the present, we choose to doubt it.” And finally there was poor ash-gray Klothilde, whose thoughts were probably focused on dinner. They were all over forty—and the hostess, her brother Justus, his wife, and Therese Weichbrodt well over sixty. And both Gotthold’s widow—old Madame Buddenbrook, née Stüwing—and the now totally deaf Madame Kethelsen were already in their seventies.

  The only person in the bloom of youth was Erika Weinschenk—certainly she was younger than her husband, the insurance director with graying temples and a small gray mustache that framed the corners of his mouth, who was standing beside the sofa, his close-cropped head outlined against the idyllic tapestry landscape. But whenever her pale blue eyes—Herr Grünlich’s eyes—drifted toward him, her full bosom would rise and fall noticeably as she sighed a deep, silent sigh. It was clear that she was hard-pressed by anxious and confused thoughts about usages, accounting, witnesses, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges—indeed, there was probably no one in that room whose mind was not preoccupied with such un-Christmas like thoughts. Frau Permaneder’s son-in-law stood under indictment, and the entire family was aware that present among them was a man who had been charged with an offense against the law, against civic order and commercial rectitude, an offense that might very well result in shame and a prison sentence—and his presence gave the gathering an altogether strange and unnatural character. Christmas Eve at the Buddenbrooks’ with an indicted man in their midst! Stern and majestic, Frau Permaneder leaned back in her armchair—and the smiles of the Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse became a shade more caustic.

  And the children? The family’s rather sparse progeny? Were they, too, aware of the faintly eerie atmosphere caused by this new and unheard-of state of affairs? As far as little Elisabeth went, it was impossible to judge her mood. Dressed in a little frock so richly trimmed with satin bows that it obviously reflected Frau Permaneder’s taste, the child was sitting on her nurse’s lap, her thumbs tightly clenched in her tiny fists and her slightly bulging eyes fixed straight ahead; she sucked on her tongue and occasionally let out a squeak, and then the nurse would rock her a bit. Hanno, however, was quietly sitting on a footstool beside his mother, gazing up, like her, at a prism on the chandelier.

  Christian was missing! Where was Christian? Only at the last moment did they notice his absence. There was something even more feverish now about the way Madame Buddenbrook’s hand kept moving in a gesture peculiarly her own, from one corner of her mouth up to her coiffure, as if she were tucking back a stray hair. She quickly gave some instructions to Mamselle Severin, and the young woman made her way past the choirboys and the “poor” gathered in the columned hall and hurried down the corridor, where she knocked on Herr Buddenbrook’s door.

  Christian appeared almost at once. He entered the landscape room slowly on skinny, bowed legs—his rheumatism had left him with something of a limp—and rubbed a hand across his bald head. “Damn,” he said, “I almost forgot!”

  “You almost forgot?” his mother echoed, freezing in place.

  “Yes, almost forgot that today is Christmas Eve. I was sitting there reading a book, a travel book about South America. Good God, what Christmases we had back then,” he added, and was on the verge of launching into a story about a Christmas Eve he had spent in a fifth-rate music hall in London, when suddenly the ecclesiastical stillness in the room began to have its effect on him, too—he wrinkled his nose and tiptoed to his place.

  “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion,” the choirboys sang, and although they had just been cavorting so loudly out in the hall that the senator had stood at the door for a moment to instill some respect, they sang quite marvelously now. Their bright, pure treble, borne above the lower voices, soared in praise and rejoicing and lifted every heart, softened the smiles of the spinsters, inspired the old folks to look within and review their lives, and allowed those who still stood in the middle of life to forget their troubles for a while.

  Hanno let go of his knee, which he had been holding fast until now. He looked very pale; he played with the fringe on his footstool and rubbed his tongue against one tooth, his mouth half open and an expression on his face as if he were freezing. Every now and then he had to take a deep br
eath, because the choir that filled the air with its bell-like a-cappella carol tugged hard at his heart—he was almost painfully happy. It was Christmas. The scent of fir found its way through the cracks of the high, white-enameled folding doors, which were still closed tight; and the sweet spicy odor called up in his mind a picture of the dining room and the wonders inside—an unbelievable, unearthly splendor for which he waited each year with a pounding heart. What would be in there for him? Everything that he had asked for, of course, because you always got that—unless they had talked you out of it beforehand, saying it was simply impossible. The first thing that would spring up before his eyes, and which would show him where he was to sit, would be his theater, the puppet theater that he wanted so badly and had put right at the top of the list he had given Grandmama, underlined several times—it had been all he could think of since he had seen Fidelio.

  As a reward, as a kind of compensation, for a visit to Herr Brecht, Hanno had recently been taken to the theater for the first time—the municipal theater, where from the first tier, right beside his mother, he had breathlessly followed the music and action of Fidelio. And since then, overcome with a passion for the stage, he had dreamed of nothing but opera scenes, had barely been able to sleep. When he met people on the street who, like his Uncle Christian, were known to be regular theater goers—Consul Döhlmann or Gosch the broker, for instance—he felt indescribably jealous. How could anyone bear the happiness of attending the theater almost every evening? If only he could go just once a week, sit there in the hall before the performance, listen to the instruments tune up, and gaze for a while at the closed curtain. Because he loved everything about the theater: the smell of gas lamps, the seats, the musicians, even the curtain.

  Would his puppet theater be a big one? Big and wide? What would the curtain be like? He would have to cut a little hole in it first thing, because the curtain at the municipal theater had a peephole. He wondered if Grandmama—or Mamselle Severin, because Grandmama could not shop for everything herself—had found the scenery he needed for Fidelio. Tomorrow morning he would shut himself up in a room somewhere and give a performance just for himself. And in his mind he could hear the figures singing—music was the link that had immediately made him feel so close to the theater.

  “Shout for joy, Jerusalem!” the choirboys sang to end their program, and after a kind of interwoven fugue, the voices arrived in joyful, peaceful harmony at the last syllable. The echoes of the chord faded away, and deep silence lay over the columned hall and the landscape room. Under the weight of the long pause, all the members of the family gazed at their feet. Only Hugo Weinschenk’s eyes roamed, bold and unperturbed, around the room. Frau Permaneder coughed an audible dry cough that she simply could not suppress. Madame Buddenbrook, however, slowly strode to the table and joined her family, taking a seat on the sofa, which no longer stood off to itself at some distance from the table, as in the old days. She adjusted the lamp and pulled the large Bible over to her—the gilt on its immense embossed cover faded with age. Then she set her glasses on her nose, undid the colossal book’s two leather clasps, opened it to the bookmark, revealing a heavy, coarse, yellowed page of huge print, took a sip of sugar-water, and began to read the Christmas story.

  She read the familiar old words slowly, stressing each in a clear, stirring voice, her joy rising above the pious hush—and all hearts were touched. “And on earth peace, good will toward men,” she said. And no sooner did she fall silent than the columned hall was filled with harmonious voices singing “Silent night, holy night,” and the family in the landscape room joined in. They went about it rather cautiously, because most of them were not musical, and now and then a deep voice would sound a note quite inappropriate to the ensemble. But that did not detract from the effect. Frau Permaneder’s lips quivered as she sang, for the carol sounded sweetest and saddest to a woman whose heart had known a troubled life and who could cast an eye back over it now in this brief, peaceful, solemn hour. Madame Kethelsen wept silent, bitter tears, although she could hear almost nothing.

  And now old Madame Buddenbrook stood up. She grasped the hands of her grandson, Johann, and her great-granddaughter, Elisabeth, and strode across the room. The older ladies and gentlemen closed ranks behind her, the younger ones followed and were joined in the columned hall by the servants and the “poor,” and they all lifted their voices in “O, Tannenbaum”—and Uncle Christian made the children laugh by lifting his legs like a funny, marching marionette and singing the silly words “Oh, Tinny Boom.” And, with every eye sparkling and a smile on every face, they marched through the wide-open folding doors into heaven.

  The whole room was fragrant with lightly singed evergreen boughs and glowed and sparkled with the light of countless little flames; the sky-blue wallpaper with its white statues of gods made the large room look even brighter. Set between the dark red of the curtained windows stood the mighty Christmas tree, towering almost to the ceiling—a shining angel at the top, a sculptured manger scene at the base; it was decorated with silvery tinsel and white lilies and flooded by the soft light of the candle flames that flickered like distant stars. A row of smaller trees trimmed with candy and more burning wax candles had been arranged on the table, which extended from the window almost to the door, its whole length covered with a white linen cloth and laden with gifts. The gas jets along the walls were lit, and thick candles were burning on four candelabra, one set in each corner of the room. The larger presents that did not fit on the table had been placed in a long row on the floor. At either side of the door were smaller tables, likewise covered with white linen, each ornamented by a little tree with candles aflame and laden with presents—the gifts for the servants and the “poor.”

  Dazzled by the light and feeling out of place somehow in the familiar old room, they went on singing as they filed past the manger, where a waxen baby Jesus appeared to be making the sign of the cross; and then, after a quick glance at the various decorations, they took their places and fell silent.

  Hanno was completely confused now. The moment he entered the room, he had spotted the theater that his eyes were seeking so feverishly—there on the table, a splendid theater, looking much larger and grander than he had even dared imagine. But Hanno had ended up in a different place, directly across from where he had stood the year before, and this so disconcerted him that he seriously doubted whether that marvelous theater was really meant for him. Something else bothered him, too—sitting on the floor, right below the stage, was a large, strange object, something that he had not asked for. A piece of furniture, a kind of wardrobe, perhaps? Was that for him?

  “Come here, my child, and look at this,” Madame Buddenbrook said, opening the lid. “I know how you love to play chorales. Herr Pfühl will give you whatever lessons are necessary. You have to pump with your feet the whole time, sometimes harder and sometimes not so hard. And you never lift your hands, but only change your finger positions peu à peu.”

  It was a harmonium, a pretty little harmonium of polished brown wood with metal handles on both sides, a brightly colored treadle bellows, and a graceful little revolving stool. Hanno played a chord—and a gentle organ tone was released, so that all the others in the room looked up from their own gifts. Hanno hugged his grandmother, who pressed him gently to her; then she let him go and began to receive the thanks of everyone else.

  He turned to his theater. The harmonium was like an overpowering dream, but he had no time to explore it more closely just yet. There was such a surfeit of good things that you could only pass quickly from one to the next, trying first to get some picture of the whole, but without feeling real gratitude for any single item. Oh, look, there was a prompter’s box, shaped like a seashell, and behind it was the red-and-gold curtain that rolled up majestically. The stage was set for the final act of Fidelio. The poor prisoners stood with their hands folded; Don Pizarro, with massive puffy sleeves, stood in the foreground, striking a terrifying pose; and striding hastily in from the rear cam
e the minister, who was dressed all in black and would now set everything to rights. It was just like in the municipal theater—almost even more beautiful. The jubilant chorus of the finale echoed in Hanno’s ears, and he sat down at his harmonium, intending to play the part of it that he remembered. But then he stood up again and reached for the book of Greek mythology that he had asked for—it was bound all in red, with a golden Pallas Athena on the cover. He first sampled some candy, marzipan, and gingerbread from his plate, then inspected the smaller items—writing utensils and notebooks—and forgot everything else when he saw the penholder, topped by a tiny glass sphere. It was like magic—if you held it up to your eye, you suddenly saw a whole Swiss landscape.

  Mamselle Severin and the housemaid now moved about the room with refreshments, and Hanno found time to look about him as he sat dunking a cookie in his tea. Chatting and laughing, people stood beside the table or walked up and down alongside it, showing off their own gifts or admiring those of others. There were objects of every sort—made of porcelain, nickel, silver and gold, of wood, silk, and linen. On the table was a long row of gingerbread cakes, glazed and sprinkled with almonds, alternating with loaves of marzipan bread, so fresh they were still moist inside. The presents that Frau Permaneder had wrapped or decorated—a needlework bag, a doily to put under a potted plant, a hassock—were trimmed with large satin bows.