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Buddenbrooks. Sonderausgabe. Verfall einer Familie.

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Don't be offended, my German friends, by the title of this review. I intend to sing the praises of Thomas Mann's first novel, published when he was twenty-five. It's not just a peak, it's a whole mountain range of brilliant writing. It's a finely polished as German prose can be. Published at age 25! Gott in Himmel, most of us couldn't write a novel this long (to say nothing of its depth) if we started at birth and worked night and day for twenty-five years!

English readers, please erase from your mind any notion you have of Buddenbrooks as a "difficult" novel, a heavy intellectual struggle! It's anything but difficult. It really is a soap opera, a serial of crises in the life of a proud bourgeoise family in quaint old Lubeck, through four generations covering most of the 19th Century. For the first three-quarters of the book, each short chapter is the equivalent of a TV episode of "As The World Turns": a marriage, a divorce, a sickness, a scandal, a crisis with the servants, a blessed event, etc. As the Buddenbrook family evolves from robust simplicity to awakening self-conscious complexity -- I use the word "evolve' quite purposefully -- the episodes get longer, less objective, more psychological. The soap opera, one might say, moves from the half-hour mid-afternoon slot to a full-hour of prime time. Meanwhile, characters appear and disappear and are replaced by others, just as if the actors' contracts expired. I can understand now why people get addicted to serial dramas - telenovelas - and balk at the idea of missing a single chapter. Life, it turns out, is its own soap opera. Each of our lives, I mean, and who'd want to miss a chapter of one's own life? Honestly, by the end of tale, I could swear that my own great-great-grandfather was a Buddenbrook.

"But what's it all about?" Who cares! It's just life. Just an entertainment between the curtain rise and curtain fall of infinities of nothingness. Did Thomas Mann have a "lesson" in mind when writing it? Why should I spoil any intellectual surprises in the novel if I refuse to spoil the narrative? Most critiques of Buddenbrooks hastily announce that it's a depiction of the "decline" of a powerful family. That's simplistic. It could just as well be regarded as a portrayal of the "rise" of a social unit from pre-modern innocence to aesthetic and ethical self-awareness. Presuming that Thomas Mann had his own family/community in mind as he wrote Buddenbrooks, one must realize that the heir of all those crises was ... the author himself.

It helps, admittedly, if the reader has at least a smidgen of knowledge of European history when reading Buddenbrooks. That history, for german readers, would revolve around the expansion of Prussian influence, Bismark and the unification of Germany, but such national and international events are no more than passing clouds casting dappled shadows on the lives of the three Buddenbrook siblings who are the primary subjects of the novel. If all the world is a stage, then historical events are merely the floorboards, while the "set" is composed of Mann's exquisite descriptions of houses and furnishings, dinner servings and feasts, manners and morays. If you have trouble envisioning such a "set", think of the superb film "Fanny and Alexander" by Ingmar Bergman. And if you haven't seen Fanny and Alexander, lucky you!, you have TWO wonderful treats in store for you, that film and this book.

I read this novel the first time almost 50 years ago, while studying German in college. All I really remembered was that I'd 'respected' the writing a lot. Reading it again has satisfied me that Mann deserves his acclaim. The occasional passages in Plattdeutsch are challenging, rather like the dialect passages in Mark Twain, but this second reading, without a class deadline, has been a pure pleasure. I have no recommendation to offer, of any English translation superior to others. The nature of the book is such that any proficient translation will probably capture most of the excitement.