Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life’s capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not me, if this outward appearance that is me did not encase me, separating my consciousness from that of others who are not me? An organism—a blind, rash, pitiful eruption of the insistent assertion of the will. Far better, really, if that will were to drift free in a night without time or space, than to languish in a prison cell lit only by the flickering, uncertain flame of the intellect.

  And I hoped to live on in my son? In another personality, even weaker, more fearful, more wavering than my own? What childish, misguided nonsense! What good does a son do me? I don’t need a son. And where will I be once I am dead? It’s so dazzlingly clear, so overwhelmingly simple. I will be a part of all those who say, who have ever said, or will say “I”: and, most especially, a part of those who say it more forcibly, joyfully, powerfully.

  A boy is growing up somewhere in the world, and he is well equipped and well formed, capable of developing his talents, tall and straight and untroubled, pure and fierce and vigorous—just to look at him increases the joy of the joyful and drives the unhappy to despair. That boy is my son. He is me—or will be soon, soon, as soon as death frees me from this wretched delusion that I am not both him and me.

  Have I hated life—this pure, fierce, and vital thing called life? What folly, what a misconception! I have only hated myself, because I could not bear life. But I love you all, I love you all, you happy joyous ones, and I shall soon cease to be excluded from you by this narrow cell; soon the part of me that loves you, my love for you, will be freed and be with you, become a part of you, be with and in you all.

  He wept; he pressed his face into the pillow and wept. An intoxicating joy ran through him, lifted him up, and it was incomparably sweeter than the world’s sweetest pain. This was it, this was the drunken darkness that had filled him since the afternoon, this was what had stirred in his heart in the middle of the night, awakening him, quickening like first love within him. And in being granted this understanding and realization—not in words and sequential thoughts, but in the sudden bliss of internal illumination—he was already free, was truly liberated from all natural and artificial bonds and barriers. The walls of his hometown, inside of which he had willingly, consciously locked himself, broke open now and he could gaze out into the world, the whole world, pieces of which he had seen in his youth, but which death now promised to give him whole and complete. The deceptive perceptions of space and time, and thus of history, his preoccupation with finding honorable historical continuity in his own descendants, the fear of some sort of ultimate, historical dissolution and disintegration—his mind let go of them all, and he was no longer hindered from understanding the constant flow of eternity. Nothing began and nothing ceased. There was only the endless present, and the energy within him, which loved life with such a painfully sweet, urgent, yearning love, and of which his own person was no more than an abortive expression—that energy would now know how to find access to the endless present.

  “I am going to live,” he whispered to his pillow. And he wept … and in the next moment he no longer knew why he wept. His brain stood still, his hard-won knowledge vanished, and suddenly there was nothing around him but darkness turned mute. “But it will come back,” he assured himself. “Didn’t I possess it?” And, sensing around him the irresistible shadows of sleep and numbness, he swore an oath never to let go of that immense joy, to gather all his energies, and to learn, to read, and to study, until he had made that view of the world—the source of all that he had felt—firmly and inalienably his own.

  Except that it was not to be, and the next morning, when he awakened feeling slightly embarrassed by the intellectual extravagances of the night, he had an inkling of how impossible it would be to carry out his fine intentions.

  He got up late and had to leave at once for a debate in the assembly. The public, political, and business affairs of life out in the gabled, narrow streets of this medium-size commercial town took hold again of his mind and energies. Still fully intending to read further from that wonderful book, he nevertheless began to ask himself whether his experiences of the previous night were truly something for him and of lasting value and whether, if death were to arrive, they would stand up to the practical test. His middle-class instincts were roused now—and his vanity as well: the fear of being seen as eccentric and ridiculous. Would such ideas really look good on him? Were they proper ideas for him, Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, head of the firm of Johann Buddenbrook?

  He never managed to give the book another glance, despite the treasures buried inside—let alone to buy the other volumes of that magnum opus. The nervous pedantry that had taken control of him over the years devoured each new day. Harried by five hundred pointless, workaday trifles—just tending to them and keeping them all in order was a torment—he found himself too weak-willed to arrange his time reasonably and productively. And about two weeks after that remarkable afternoon, he had arrived at the point where he abandoned the whole idea and told the maid to fetch a book that for some reason was lying in the drawer of the garden table and put it back in the bookcase.

  And so Thomas Buddenbrook, who had stretched his hands out imploringly for high and final truths, sank back now into the ideas, images, and customary beliefs in which he had been drilled as a child. He went about his day trying to remember the personal God, the Father of humankind, who had sent a part of Himself to earth so that He could suffer and bleed for us, who on the Last Day would call men to judgment and at whose feet the just would enter into eternity in recompense for their trials in this vale of woe—the whole rather vague and rather absurd story, which did not require that you understood it, but only obediently believed its abiding, childlike tenets, which would be there close at hand whenever the ultimate fear came over you.—Really?

  Oh, he could find no peace in that, either. This man with his gnawing worries about the honor of his house, about his wife, his son, his good name, his family, this exhausted man, who with only the most painful, meticulous effort kept his body held erect and elegant—this same man tormented himself for several days with the question of how it actually worked: did the soul ascend to heaven immediately after death, or did eternal bliss first begin with the resurrection of the flesh? And where did the soul go until then? Had anyone ever said anything about it at school or in church? How could they justify leaving people in such uncertainty? And he was close to paying Pastor Pringsheim a visit and asking him for advice and consolation, until at the last moment he decided against it for fear of looking ridiculous.

  Finally he gave up and left it all to God. But since he was so dissatisfied with his attempt to give some order to matters eternal, he decided at least he ought conscientiously to arrange his earthly affairs, in particular to take care of something he had long been planning to do.

  As they were sitting in the living room one day, where they took their after-dinner coffee, little Johann heard his father tell his mother that he was expecting Dr. So-and-so, a lawyer, so that he could make his will—he really could not keep putting it off any longer. Later that afternoon, Hanno practiced his piano in the salon for an hour. Just as he was leaving and crossing the corridor, he met his father and a gentleman in a long black coat coming up the stairs.

  “Hanno,” the senator said curtly.

  And little Johann stopped in his tracks, swallowed hard, and hastily answered softly, “Yes, Papa.”

  “I have some important work to do with this gentleman,” his father continued. “Would you please stand just outside the door, here”—and he pointed to the smoking-room door—“and make sure that no one disturbs us? Do you hear? Absolutely no one.”

  “Yes, Papa,” little Johann said and took his place outside the door after the two men closed it behind them.

  He stood there, one hand holding the knot of his sailor’s tie against his chest, his tongue scouring a tooth that he
did not trust, and listened to the earnest, subdued voices coming from the room. His head was tilted to one side, and his light brown hair fell in curls over his temples; from beneath scowling eyebrows, he looked off to one side, frequently blinking his golden-brown eyes ringed with bluish shadows; and his face wore almost the same brooding, disgruntled expression it had worn the day he had stood beside his grandmother’s casket and breathed in the fragrance of the flowers and that other, strange, and yet oddly familiar odor.

  Ida Jungmann came by and said, “Hanno, my boy, where have you been? Why are you standing around here?”

  The hunchbacked apprentice came up from the office, a telegram in hand, and asked for the senator.

  And both times, little Johann stuck out his arm, so that his blue sailor sleeve with the embroidered anchors was a horizontal bar across the door. Both times, he shook his head and after a moment of silence said softly but firmly, “No one is allowed in. Papa is making his will.”

  6

  AUTUMN CAME. And, rolling his beautiful eyes like a woman, Dr. Langhals said, “It’s your nerves, Senator Buddenbrook—your nerves are the whole problem. And now and then your circulation leaves a little something to be desired. Might I make a suggestion? You should relax a little for the rest of the year. Those few Sundays in summer at the shore haven’t been much help, of course. It’s the end of September, and Travemünde is still operating. It hasn’t emptied out entirely yet. You should go there, Senator, and sit on the beach for a while. Two or three weeks can set a great many things to rights.”

  And Thomas Buddenbrook said amen to that. But when he shared his decision with his family, Christian offered to accompany him.

  “I’m coming along, Thomas,” he said flatly. “I’m sure you have no objection.” And although the senator actually had a great many, he once again said amen.

  The fact was that Christian was now master of his own time more than ever; because of his precarious health, he had felt it necessary to give up his last commercial venture as an agent for champagne and cognac. The phantom gentleman who had sat on his sofa in the twilight and nodded to him had, fortunately, not returned. But that periodic “ache” in his left side had grown even worse, if that was possible—along with a great many other infirmities that Christian kept under careful observation and would describe with a wrinkled-up nose wherever he went. As in the past, the muscles that helped him swallow frequently did not work, and he would often sit there with his mouth full and let his little, round, deep-set eyes roam about. As in the past, he often suffered from the vague but unconquerable fear of a sudden paralysis of his tongue, throat, and extremities—even of his intellectual powers. Nothing, of course, ever became paralyzed. But was not the fear of such an event almost worse than the thing itself? He reported at length how one day he had been making tea and had held the lighted match over the open bottle of methylated alcohol instead of under the burner and had come close to sending not only himself to a ghastly death, but also the rest of the residents in his building—and perhaps a few in neighboring buildings as well. That was going too far. Making use of exhaustive and graphic detail in an effort to be understood, he was able to describe, however, a horrible anomaly which he had noticed of late, the nature of which was that on certain days—depending on the weather and his mood—he could not look at an open window without being overcome, for no reason whatever, by the urge to leap out of it—a savage instinct, a kind of mad and desperate foolhardiness that he found almost impossible to suppress. One Sunday, at dinner with his family on Fischer Grube, he described how it had taken all the moral energies at his disposal for him to creep on all fours to the open window and close it. General shrieks—and no one was willing to listen to any more.

  He voiced these and similar symptoms with a certain horrified satisfaction. What he did not see—never noticed, because it was quite unconscious and therefore grew constantly worse—was the lack of tact that had come to characterize him with the passing years. It was bad enough that the anecdotes he told to his assembled family ought, at best, to have been restricted to the Club. But there were unmistakable signs that his sense of personal modesty was beginning to break down as well. For the purpose of showing his sister-in-law, Gerda, with whom he stood on friendly terms, the durable weave in his English socks and, by the way, just how skinny he had grown, he simply went ahead, with her sitting right there, and pulled his wide trouser leg clear up over his knee. “You see how skinny I am. Isn’t that odd? I find it peculiar,” he said gloomily, pointing with his wrinkled-up nose at his bony, badly bowed leg and scrawny knee, which made a woebegone knob in his white underwear.

  He had, as noted, given up his commercial ventures; but he attempted to fill the hours of the day when he was not at the Club with various activities. And he loved to make a point of noting that, despite all his disabilities, he had never ceased to work entirely. He was constantly improving his knowledge of languages; recently, purely for scientific purposes and without any practical effect, he had attempted to learn Chinese—had worked very diligently at it for two weeks. At present he was busy “supplementing” an English-German dictionary that he considered inadequate. But since he needed a little change of scenery in any case, and because surely it was desirable for the senator to have some company, that particular task was not sufficient to keep him in town.

  The two brothers drove to the shore along a road that was one vast puddle; and while rain drummed on the carriage top, they spoke scarcely a word. Christian’s eyes wandered aimlessly, as if he were listening to something suspicious; Thomas sat muffled in his coat, shivering and gazing wearily ahead with red-rimmed eyes; the long, stiff tips of his mustache stuck out beyond his pallid cheeks. It was afternoon when they pulled up to the hotel gardens, their carriage wheels crunching in the soaked gravel. Old Siegismund Gosch the broker was sitting out on the glass veranda, drinking his rum grog. He stood up, hissing something between his teeth; and while their baggage was carried up to their rooms, the brothers sat down to join him in a warm drink.

  Herr Gosch had stayed behind as a guest of the hotel, along with a few others—an English family, a Dutch maiden lady, and a bachelor from Hamburg—who were all presumably taking a nap before dinner, because the only sound breaking the deathly quiet was the splatter of rain. Let them sleep. Herr Gosch did not sleep during the day—he was glad if he could enjoy a few hours of oblivion at night. He was not doing well. He needed the curative sea air because of the trembling, the trembling in his limbs. Hell! He could barely hold on to his glass of grog, and—even worse, damn it—he could hardly write anymore, which meant that his translation of Lope de Vega’s collected dramas was proceeding at a pitifully slow pace. He was very depressed, and even his blasphemies had no real joy in them. “Blast it all!” he said; this seemed to have become a favorite expression, because he repeated it constantly, and often in no particular context.

  And the senator? How was he doing? How long were the gentlemen planning to stay?

  Oh, Dr. Langhals had sent him for his nerves, Thomas Buddenbrook replied. He had obeyed his instructions, of course, despite the abominable weather—what didn’t a man do out of fear of his physician. Actually, he was feeling rather miserable. So they would stay until he was better.

  “Yes, and I’m feeling wretched myself,” Christian said enviously, miffed that Thomas spoke only about himself; and he was just about to launch into descriptions of the man nodding on the sofa, the bottle of methylated alcohol, and the open window, when his brother stood up to go claim his room.

  The rain did not let up. It made a muddle of the grounds and danced and bounded across the sea, which shuddered before the southwest wind and drew back from the beach. Everything was cloaked in gray. The steamers passed like phantoms and ghost ships and vanished toward the murky horizon.

  Their only contact with other guests was at meals. The senator donned his mackintosh and galoshes and took long walks with Gosch the broker; Christian sat in the pastry shop with the girl who te
nded the counter and served him brandy smashes.

  On two or three afternoons, when it looked as if the sun would break through, a few acquaintances from town appeared at dinner looking for a little amusement away from their families: Senator Gieseke, Christian’s old schoolchum, and Consul Peter Döhlmann, who did not look well, either, and had been purging himself with far too much Hunyadi-Janos water. And then the gentlemen would sit in their overcoats under the pastry-shop awnings, facing the bandstand—although there was no longer any music—and drink their coffee and digest their five-course dinner as they chatted and gazed out at the autumnal gardens.

  They talked about events in town: the recent flooding, which had spilled into a great many cellars and required people to use boats to get around in the low-lying streets; a major fire in the sheds down by the harbor; a senate election. Alfred Lauritzen, from the firm of Stürmann & Lauritzen, wholesale and retail grocers, had been elected a few weeks before, and Senator Buddenbrook did not approve. He sat huddled in his caped coat, smoking cigarettes and joining in the conversation only to comment on this particular topic. He had not voted for Herr Lauritzen, he said, most definitely not. Lauritzen was an honest man and a splendid merchant, no question of that; but he was merely middle-class, solidly middle-class—why, his father had fished the pickled herring from the vat himself and wrapped them up in paper before handing them to cooks and housemaids. And so now they had the owner of a grocery shop in the senate. His, Thomas Buddenbrook’s, grandfather had fallen out with his eldest son because the boy had “married a shop”—that’s how things were in those days. “But standards are being lowered—yes, the general social niveau of the senate is on its way down. The senate is becoming democratized, my good Gieseke, and that is not good. Commercial competence isn’t quite enough. In my opinion, we should not give up demanding a little more than that. The idea of Alfred Lauritzen with his big feet and boatswain’s face sitting in the senate chambers offends me. I don’t know why, but it offends something in me. It’s a matter of decorum, it’s simply in bad taste.”