Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  Even Christian—who had not said another word about getting married since the argument in the breakfast room and whose relationship with his brother had been re-established on the same old basis that hardly did him credit—was quite untalkative and not inclined to make jokes. His eyes roaming about the room, he made a brief attempt to awaken their sympathy for the “ache” in his left side; he left early for the Club, returning only for dinner, which consisted of the traditional dishes. And with that, the Buddenbrooks had this Christmas behind them, and were almost glad that it was.

  Their mother’s household was broken up at the beginning of 1872. The maids departed, and Frau Permaneder thanked God that Mamselle Severin, who had been insufferable and constantly questioned her authority in the house, took her leave as well, along with the silk dresses and underwear. Then the furniture vans lined up along Meng Strasse and the house was emptied out. The large carved chest, the gold-plated candelabra, and the other items that now belonged to the senator and his wife were hauled off to Fischer Grube. Christian moved his things to a three-room bachelor apartment near the Club, and the little Permaneder-Weinschenk family formally took possession of their sunny apartment on Linden Platz—and it, too, could still lay claim to some elegance. It was a pretty little apartment, and above the door was a shiny copper plate that read in dainty script: “A. Permaneder-Buddenbrook, widow.”

  The house on Meng Strasse was hardly empty before an army of workers appeared and began to tear down the back building, filling the air with the dust of old mortar. The property had passed for good and all into the hands of Consul Hagenström. He had bought it; indeed, he had apparently set his heart on it, because he had immediately outbid an offer that Siegismund Gosch had received from a party in Bremen. And now, with the same ingenuity for which he had been admired for so many years, he began to improve his property. By early spring he and his family had moved into the main house, which he left just as it was, except for a few minor repairs here and there and several modern improvements that he had promptly ordered to bring the house up to date—all the old bell ropes, for instance, had been removed and the whole house was now fitted with a system of electric bells. The back building had vanished entirely, and in its place rose a new trim, airy structure with several large, high-ceilinged storage rooms and shops that fronted on Becker Grube.

  Frau Permaneder had frequently sworn to her brother that no power on earth could ever bring her to cast so much as a glance at their old parental home. But it proved impossible for her to keep her word, because now and then her path inevitably led her either past the display windows of the shops in the back building, which had been leased almost immediately at very handsome rents, or past the venerable gabled façade itself, where now the name of Consul Hermann Hagenström stood just beneath the Dominus providebit. And then Frau Permaneder-Buddenbrook would simply begin to weep audibly there on the street in front of everyone. She laid her head back like a bird about to sing, pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, erupted in a series of little wails that mixed protest with lament, and abandoned herself to her tears, despite passersby or her daughter’s admonitions.

  These were the innocent and refreshing tears of her childhood, which had served her faithfully in all the storms and shipwrecks of life.

  PART TEN

  1

  IN HIS HOURS OF GLOOM—and they were frequent—Thomas Buddenbrook would ask himself what sort of man he really was and what could still justify his seeing himself as something better than any of his simplehearted, plodding, and small-minded fellow citizens. The imaginative élan and cheerful idealism of youth were gone. To play at work, to work at play, to strive, to direct one’s half-serious, half-whimsical ambition toward goals to which one ascribes only symbolic value—that requires a great deal of vigor, humor, and a breezy kind of courage for debonair, skeptical compromises and ingenious half-measures; but Thomas Buddenbrook felt indescribably weary and listless.

  He had achieved whatever he would achieve, and he knew quite well that he had long ago passed the highpoint of his life—if, as he told himself, one could speak of a highpoint at all in such a mediocre and shabby life.

  Purely in terms of business, it was generally acknowledged that his fortunes were greatly reduced and that the firm was on the decline. And yet, if one included his inheritance from his mother and his share from the sale of the house and lot on Meng Strasse, he was worth more than six hundred thousand marks courant. The firm’s capital, however, had been lying fallow for years. It was the same small-scale, pennywise operation that the senator had complained of back in the days when he was considering buying the Pöppenrade harvest; in fact, matters had only grown worse after that setback. Ever since the town had joined the Customs Union, the general business climate had been robust and triumphantly optimistic—little retail shops were able to grow into prestigious wholesale operations within a very few years. But the firm of Johann Buddenbrook slept, unable to profit from the achievements of modern times, and when someone asked its owner how business was doing, he would answer with a tired, dismissive gesture, “Oh, not much pleasure in it these days.” An energetic competitor, a close friend of the Hagenströms, was heard to say that Thomas Buddenbrook’s only function on the market was purely decorative; and the joke, playing as it did off the senator’s neatly groomed appearance, evoked the laughter and admiration of the locals, who regarded it as an unprecedented rhetorical achievement.

  And just as the senator’s former enthusiasm and effectiveness in serving the old firm had been lamed by misfortune and his own inner exhaustion, so, too, his aspirations in community affairs had been thwarted by the limits of external circumstance. Years ago now—indeed, perhaps on the very day he was first voted into the senate—he had accomplished whatever could be accomplished. There were the various offices and honorary posts to which he was appointed, but no new realms left to conquer. There was the present and its petty reality, but no future ahead, no field for ambitious plans. Granted, he had known how to expand the scope of his power in local politics better than others in the same position might have done, and it was difficult for his foes to deny that he was “the mayor’s right hand.” But Thomas Buddenbrook would never be mayor himself, because he was a merchant and not a professional man—he hadn’t even completed high school, wasn’t a lawyer, had never pursued any academic degree. Because he had occupied his leisure time with reading works of literature and history, he had always felt that, compared with those around him, he was superior in intelligence, common sense, personal development, and cultural refinement; and so he could not get over his annoyance that his lack of conventional qualifications made it impossible for him to achieve the highest position available in the little world into which he had been born. “We were so stupid,” he told his friend and admirer Stephan Kistenmaker—although by “we” he really meant only himself—“to have run off to work in an office so soon, instead of finishing school.” And Stephan Kistenmaker replied, “Yes, you’re absolutely right. But how do you mean?”

  Most of the time the senator worked alone, sitting behind his large mahogany desk in his private office—in part because no one could see him when he would close his eyes and brood, his head held in one hand, but primarily because he had been chased from his place at the window in the outer office by the nerve-racking pedantry of his partner, Herr Friedrich Wilhelm Marcus, by the way he was constantly rearranging his writing utensils or stroking his mustache. Over the years, old Herr Marcus’s meticulous, fussy habits had gone beyond eccentricity—they were a mania. But what Thomas Buddenbrook had found so unbearable about such annoyances and affronts of late was the fact that, to his horror, he had begun to observe something similar in himself. Yes, even he, to whom all pettiness had once been so alien, had developed his own kind of pedantry, although it grew out of a different personality structure and emotional makeup.

  He was empty inside, and he could see no exciting project or absorbing task into which he could throw himself with joy and sati
sfaction. But he had a need to keep busy, and his mind never stopped working. He was consumed by his own restless energy, which for him had always been something different from his father’s natural and solid joy in work, something artificial, more like a nervous itch, practically a drug—like the pungent little Russian cigarettes he constantly smoked. That energy had never left him, he was less its master than ever; it had gained the upper hand, had become such a torment that he wasted his time with a host of trivialities. He was harried by five hundred pointless trifles, things having mainly to do with keeping up the house and his own appearance; he would become so fed up with them that he would procrastinate and then find that he could not keep them sorted out in his mind and was more disorganized than before—all because he wasted such a disproportionate amount of time worrying about them.

  What people around town called his “vanity” had long ago increased to the point where he himself was ashamed of it and yet unable to cast off the habits that had developed around it. From the moment he awoke from a night of, if not uneasy, at least logy, unrefreshing sleep, put on his robe, and entered his dressing room where his old barber, Herr Wenzel, was waiting—at nine o’clock nowadays, and he used to rise much earlier—he needed a full hour and a half to finish dressing and feel resolute enough to begin the day by going downstairs for his morning tea. He was so fussy about dressing, and so inflexible and rigid about the sequence of its details—from the cold shower in the bathroom to the moment when he flicked the last speck of dust from his coat and ran the tips of his mustache through the curling iron one last time—that the daily repetition of all these countless little tasks and rituals almost drove him to despair. Nevertheless, he would have been unable to leave his dressing room if he knew he had left something undone or had done it a little too hastily, for fear of forfeiting that sense of freshness, calm, and wholeness—which he would lose in any case within an hour and would then have to patch and cobble as best he could.

  He was as parsimonious as possible about anything that would not expose him to gossip—except for his own wardrobe, every bit of which he had made by a tailor in Hamburg; he spared no expense in replenishing it and keeping it in repair. A door, which looked as if it led to a separate room, opened instead on a spacious closet built into one wall of his dressing room; inside were long rows of wooden hangers, each on its own hook, and hanging from them were coats, smoking jackets, frock coats, and evening clothes for every season and social occasion, from informal to formal, plus several chairs with piles of carefully folded trousers. The top of his dresser, with a massive mirror towering above it, was covered with combs, brushes, hair tonics, and mustache waxes, and inside was his large supply of underclothes, which, because he changed them frequently, were constantly being laundered, worn out, and replenished.

  He spent a great deal of time in this closet, not only in the morning, but also before every dinner, every session of the senate, every public meeting—in short, whenever it was necessary for him to appear before his fellow men, even before normal meals at home, when there was no one present except himself, his wife, little Johann, and Ida Jungmann. And when he went out in public, the fresh underwear against his body, the immaculate, discreet elegance of his suit, his carefully washed face, the scent of brilliantine in his mustache, and the dry, cool taste of his mouthwash—it all contributed to making him feel at ease and ready to meet the world, much like an actor who has prepared every brushstroke of his makeup before stepping out on stage. No doubt of it—Thomas Buddenbrook’s existence was no different from that of an actor, but one whose whole life has become a single production, down to the smallest, most workaday detail—a production that, apart from a few brief hours each day, constantly engaged and devoured all his energies. He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.

  As a result, there began to surface certain peculiarities and odd whims, which even he noticed, to his own amazement and revulsion. Unlike people who play no role and prefer to remain out of view and unnoticed, so that they can then observe others, he did not like to have the light at his back, because it made him aware that he was in the shadows, watching others move about in the bright illumination before him. He could feel detachment and security—and the blind intoxication of self-production that made success possible—only if he was half blinded by light in his eyes, which turned other people, his audience, into no more than a shadowy mass in front of him, to whom he could then present himself as a genial, sociable man, an energetic man of business, the dignified head of his firm, the public speaker. In fact, he had gradually discovered that it was precisely this sense of intoxication that was the most bearable part of anything he did. He would stand at the table, wineglass in hand, an amiable expression on his face, and offer a toast replete with polite gestures and cleverly turned phrases that achieved their effect and were greeted with approval and general mirth—and at such moments he managed to look like the Thomas Buddenbrook of old, despite his pallor. It was much more difficult, however, to maintain command of himself when he sat quietly, doing nothing. Then weariness and disgust would rise up inside him, clouding his eyes, robbing him of control over his proud posture and the muscles in his face. And then just one wish would possess him: to give way to dull despair, to steal away and lay his head on a cool pillow at home.

  ONE EVENING, Frau Permaneder dined with her brother’s family on Fischer Grube—but she came alone. Her daughter, who had also been invited, had visited her husband in prison that afternoon and, as was always the case afterward, had felt tired and out of sorts and so had remained at home.

  At dinner Frau Antonie had mentioned Hugo Weinschenk and said that she had been told he was very depressed; they then had discussed how one might, with some hope of success, go about petitioning the senate to get him pardoned. The three relatives had then moved to the living room and were seated now at the round table directly under the large gas lamp. Gerda Buddenbrook and her sister-in-law were sitting opposite one another, both busy with their needlework. Gerda’s lovely white face was bent down over her silk embroidery, and in the soft light her heavy hair seemed almost to glow like dark embers; Frau Permaneder, her pince-nez set impractically awry on her nose, was carefully attaching a large, beautiful red satin bow to a tiny yellow basket. It was to be a birthday present for a friend. The senator, however, was sitting to one side of the table in a big upholstered easy chair with a slanted back, reading his newspaper; his legs were crossed and now and then he would take a puff on his Russian cigarette and exhale the smoke in a pale gray stream across his mustache.

  It was a warm Sunday evening in summer. The high window stood wide open, filling the room with mild, slightly humid air. From the table one could look out across the gray gables of the houses opposite and see stars twinkling among the slowly drifting clouds. There was still a light on in Iwersen’s little flower shop. Farther up the quiet street, someone was playing a concertina, and playing it very badly—it was probably one of the grooms down at Dankwart’s stables. Occasionally it would turn noisy outside. A group of sailors passed by arm in arm, singing and smoking, on their way back from some dubious harbor tavern and looking for one even more dubious for further celebration. Their rough voices and shuffling steps died away down one of the side streets.

  The senator laid his newspaper on the table beside him, slipped his pince-nez into his vest pocket, and rubbed his hand across his brow and eyes.

  “Feeble, very feeble, this Advertiser of ours,” he said.
“I always think of what Grandfather said about bland, insipid dishes—‘It tastes like you’ve hung your tongue out the window.’ You can read it in three boring minutes. There’s simply nothing in it.”

  “Yes, heaven knows, you can say that again, Tom,” Frau Permaneder said, dropping her handiwork and looking up at her brother over her spectacles. “But how could there be anything new there? I’ve always said, even when I was still a silly young thing: This local Advertiser is a pitiful rag, really. I read it, too, of course, because usually there’s nothing else around. But that Consul Such-and-such, wholesaler of whatever, is planning to celebrate his silver anniversary is not exactly earthshaking news. One should read other papers, the Königsberg News or the Rhine Gazette. You’d find things there.…”

  She broke off. While she had been talking, she had picked up the paper and opened it again, letting her eyes glide disparagingly across its columns. But now her gaze was fixed on one spot, a brief notice about four or five lines long. She silently reached for her pince-nez with her other hand, and as her mouth slowly opened wide, she read the notice—and then let out two cries of horror, pressing the palms of both hands to her cheeks and holding her elbows out wide from her body.