Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  Slowly, slowly, and hiding his tears, little Johann learned to miss the sea again, learned to be both afraid and unbearably bored, all the while keeping a lookout for the Hagenströms and finding solace in Kai, Herr Pfühl, and his music.

  The moment they saw him, the Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse and Aunt Klothilde made sure to ask him how he felt about school now that vacation was over—adding a teasing wink that pretended to say that they had great understanding for his situation, but it was really only that strange arrogance of adults that treats everything important to children superficially and, if possible, as a joke.

  Three or four days after Hanno returned to town, Dr. Langhals, the family physician, paid a call on Fischer Grube to determine the effect of Hanno’s stay at the shore. After a lengthy conference with Gerda Buddenbrook, he had Hanno brought in to conduct a thorough examination of his status praesens, as Dr. Langhals called it, inspecting his own fingernails. Hanno stood there half undressed, and the doctor felt his inadequate muscles, listened to his chest and the beating of his heart, had him describe the state of all his bodily functions, and finally, taking out a syringe, pricked Hanno’s thin arm and drew blood, which he would analyze later at home—and, once again, on the whole seemed less than satisfied.

  “We’ve got nice and tanned,” he said, giving Hanno a hug as he stood there before him, and then, placing a hand—a little hand with black hair—on Hanno’s shoulder, he looked up at Gerda Buddenbrook and Fräulein Jungmann and said, “but we’re still pulling much too long a face.”

  “He’s homesick for the sea,” Gerda Buddenbrook remarked.

  “Oh, so that’s it. So you like being at the shore, do you?” Dr. Langhals asked, searching little Johann’s face with his conceited eyes. Hanno blushed. What did Dr. Langhals mean by the question? He obviously expected an answer. And a crazy, preposterous idea rose up inside him, a wild hope based in his fanciful belief that with God nothing was impossible, despite all the men in worsted suits in the world.

  “Yes,” he managed to say, his wide eyes fixed on the doctor. But Dr. Langhals had not meant anything in particular by his question.

  “Well, the effects of the swimming and good sea air are bound to show themselves in due time,” he said, first clapping little Johann on the shoulder and then shoving him away; with a nod to Madame Buddenbrook and Ida Jungmann—the arrogant, benevolent, and encouraging nod of a wise physician, on whose every word his patients hang—he got to his feet. The examination was over.

  It was Aunt Tony who showed the most ready understanding for Hanno’s yearning for the sea, which was like a wound that slowly scabbed over but would begin to sting and bleed again at the least touch of the rigors of everyday life. She obviously enjoyed listening to his descriptions of life in Travemünde and joined in enthusiastically whenever he wistfully sang its praises.

  “Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the true things in life will always be true, and Travemünde is a beautiful spot. Until they lower me into my grave, I will always have happy memories, you know, of the weeks I spent there one summer when I was just a silly young goose. I lived with a family that I liked so much, and they were fond of me, too, it seemed. I was a pretty young thing back then—I’m allowed to say that now that I’m an old lady—and almost always cheerful and lively. They were fine people, let me tell you, honest, goodhearted, and straight-thinking, and so clever and well read and enthusiastic—I’ve never met anyone like them in all my life. Yes, what a wonderfully exciting time I spent with them. I learned so much there, you see, views and opinions and facts that have stood me in good stead all my life, and if other things had not interfered, all sorts of things that just happened—the way they do in life—I could have profited from it even more, even though I was a silly young goose. Do you want to know how stupid I was back then? I wanted some of those pretty colored stars that jellyfish have inside them. So I wrapped a whole bunch of them in my handkerchief and took them home and laid them out neatly in the sun on the balcony, so they would dry up. That way, I thought, only the stars would be left. Right … and when I went back to look, there was just a big wet spot. And it smelled a little like rotting seaweed.”

  4

  EARLY IN 1873, Hugo Weinschenk’s petition for pardon was granted by the senate, and the former insurance director was released six months before his sentence was up.

  If Frau Permaneder had been truthful, she would have admitted that she was not exactly elated by this event and that she would have preferred if everything had remained just as it was for good and all. She lived a peaceful life with her daughter and granddaughter there on Linden Platz; she was in constant contact with the house on Fischer Grube and with her former boarding-school friend Armgard von Maiboom, née Schilling, who had moved to town after her husband’s death. She had long known that there was no suitable, dignified place for her outside the walls of her hometown; given her memories of Munich, her increasingly weak and nervous digestion, and her growing desire for peace and quiet, she felt no need whatever at her age to move to a big city in her now united Fatherland, let alone to some foreign country.

  “My dear child,” she said to her daughter, “I must ask you something, something very serious. You do love your husband with all your heart, don’t you? You love him so much that you would take your child and follow him wherever he may choose to go now? He can’t remain here, unfortunately.”

  And in response Frau Erika Weinschenk, née Grünlich, broke into tears that could have meant almost anything and provided a dutiful answer—just like the one Tony had provided her father under similar circumstances in her villa near Hamburg—giving rise to the assumption that a separation was imminent.

  The day on which Frau Permaneder drove to the prison in a closed carriage to pick up her son-in-law was almost as dreadful as the day on which Hugo Weinschenk had been arrested. She brought him to their apartment on Linden Platz; after greeting his wife and child in a dazed, helpless sort of way, he retreated to the room made ready for him. And there he stayed, smoking cigars from morning till night, never daring to go out in public, usually not even joining his family for meals—a skittish, gray-haired man.

  Life in prison had not affected Hugo Weinschenk’s physical health—he had always been a man of rugged constitution. But he was in a very sad state nonetheless. The man had probably done nothing worse than what most of his colleagues blithely did every day; and if he had not been caught at it, he would doubtless have gone his way with head held high and a perfectly easy conscience. But disgrace in the eyes of his fellow citizens, a guilty verdict in a court of law, and three years in prison had left him a morally broken man. With heartfelt conviction, he had assured the court that the clever measures he had undertaken for the benefit of his insurance company had been to its advantage as well as his own, that it was no more than usage in the world of business—and expert witnesses had confirmed this. The lawyers, however, were gentlemen who, in his opinion, understood nothing about such matters, they lived in a different world; and, proceeding from a totally different perspective, they judged him guilty of fraud—a verdict backed up by the power of the state. All of which had so shattered his self-confidence that he now dared not look anyone in the eye. The spring in his step, the enterprising swing in his stride as he walked along in his frock coat, fists balanced in front of him, eyes roving, the enormous vigor with which he asked questions and told anecdotes from the heights of unschooled ignorance—it was all gone now. And his family shuddered at the despondency, cowardice, and lack of self-respect that had replaced it.

  After eight to ten days spent doing nothing but smoking cigars, Hugo Weinschenk began to read newspapers and write letters. After another eight or ten days, he declared in a roundabout way that there appeared to be a new position open for him in London, that he would be going there to arrange matters—traveling alone for now, but once everything was in order he would send for his wife and child.

  Erika rode with him in a closed carriage to the train stat
ion, and he departed, without ever once having seen any of his other in-laws.

  Several days later a letter arrived from Hamburg addressed to his wife; in it he explained that he had decided not to have his wife and child join him—or so much as hear from him—until he could offer them a home worthy of them. And that was the last sign of life from Hugo Weinschenk. From that day on, nothing, absolutely nothing more was heard of him. Frau Permaneder, who was well versed in such matters and both energetic and circumspect, made several attempts to locate him, her intention being, as she explained with a grave look on her face, to provide proof of willful desertion as grounds for divorce. But Hugo was and remained a missing person. And so Erika Weinschenk and little Elisabeth continued to make their home with Erika’s mother in the bright apartment on Linden Platz.

  5

  THE MARRIAGE of which little Johann was the issue had never lost its appeal as a topic of conversation among the town’s citizens. Just as both spouses had something extravagant and enigmatic about them, so, too, the marriage itself was considered unusual and problematical. And so the difficult task of getting behind mere appearances and of probing the bedrock of the relationship that lay beneath the few external facts, might very well have its rewards. And, the less people knew about Gerda and Thomas Buddenbrook, the more they spoke about them in parlors, bedrooms, clubs, and casinos—even on the exchange.

  How had these two found one another, and what kind of rapport did they have with one another? People could remember with what firm, sudden resolve Thomas Buddenbrook had gone about wooing her. “This woman or none,” he had said, and it must have been more or less the same for Gerda, too, because, until she was twenty-seven, she had rebuffed every suitor in Amsterdam—and then suddenly had accepted this one. A marriage of love, people were forced to conclude, for although they admitted that Gerda’s three hundred thousand had played a role, they knew it was merely secondary. But when it came to love, to what people understood as love, there had been very few indications of that in their marriage. Instead, from the very beginning, people had noticed only a kind of courtesy in the way they treated one another, a very correct and respectful courtesy quite uncommon between man and wife, which seemed to have its origins not in emotional distance and estrangement but, rather, in a most peculiar, silent, and profound mutual trust in and knowledge of one another, in never-failing consideration and tolerance. And the passing years had not changed that in the least. The only change that time had brought could be found in the difference in their ages, which, although it was quite small when measured in years, had began to show itself in obvious ways.

  People looked at them and saw a rather stout man who was aging quickly and a young woman at his side. People thought that Thomas Buddenbrook looked, as they said, rather tumbledown. Indeed, although his vanity—which had become almost comical by now—kept him propped up, “tumbledown” was the only word for him. Whereas Gerda had scarcely changed at all in the last eighteen years. The nervous chill that radiated from her personality seemed somehow to have preserved her. Her chestnut hair had kept its color, her lovely white face its symmetry, her figure its slender, tall elegance. And, as always, bluish shadows lingered in the corners of her somewhat too small and somewhat too close-set brown eyes. People did not trust those eyes. They had a strange look about them, and something was written there that people were unable to decipher. This woman, who was by nature so cool, so private, so closed, reserved, and aloof, and who seemed to release a little warmth only for her music, aroused vague suspicions. People rummaged in their limited knowledge of human nature and found dusty clichés by which to measure Senator Buddenbrook’s wife: still waters run deep, or butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And because they wanted so much to get a little closer to the heart of the matter, to learn and understand even something of what made her tick, their limited imaginations led them to assume—how could it be otherwise?—that beautiful Gerda was cheating on her aging husband.

  They kept their ears and eyes open, and it was not long before they were unanimous in the opinion that Gerda Buddenbrook had, to put it mildly, overstepped the bounds of propriety in her relation to Lieutenant von Throta.

  René Maria von Throta, a Rhinelander by birth, was a second lieutenant in one of the infantry battalions stationed in the town. His red collar looked very handsome with his black hair, which he parted on the left and combed back from his white forehead in a high, thick wave. And although he was a tall and strong man, the general effect he made, by his gestures and the way he talked and the way he kept silent, was that of a most unmilitary man. He loved to stick one hand between the buttons of his half-open undress jacket or to sit with one cheek resting against the back of his hand; his bows lacked any hint of stiffness, one did not even hear his heels click together; and he draped his uniform on his unmuscular body as casually and capriciously as if it were a civilian suit. Even his youthful mustache, trimmed on a slant to the corners of his mouth, was so spare that it could never have been shaped to a handlebar or extended to points, and that only added to his less-than-martial appearance. The strangest thing about him, however, was his eyes: large, extraordinarily keen eyes, so black that they seemed to glow somewhere in bottomless depths, eyes that rested on everything and everyone with a shimmering, enraptured seriousness.

  There was no doubt that he had enlisted reluctantly and without any love of the military, for despite his physical strength he was neither a good officer nor loved by his comrades-in-arms; and he shared few interests and pleasures with other young officers, who had just returned from a brief, victorious campaign. He was considered a disagreeable and extravagant eccentric, who went for long walks by himself, who did not love horses, hunting, gambling, or women, and whose sole interest was music. He played several instruments and could be seen at every opera or concert, sitting there, eyes aglow, in an unmilitary, relaxed pose that was rather theatrical at the same time. He despised clubs and casinos.

  He paid his obligatory social calls, with mixed success, on the town’s most important families; but he refused almost all their invitations and spent time really only with the Buddenbrooks—much too much time, so people said; much too much time, so the senator thought.

  No one knew what Thomas Buddenbrook was thinking, no one was allowed to know—and that was what was so terribly difficult: keeping the rest of the world ignorant of his sorrow, his hate, his helplessness. People began to find him a little ridiculous; but perhaps they would have curbed such feelings and felt some sympathy for him if they had even dimly suspected how he fretted, how hard he tried not to be thought ridiculous, how he feared it—and he had seen it coming, looming ahead, long before they had ever thought of the possibility. Even his vanity, his much-derided “vanity,” proceeded largely from this same worry. He had been the first to cast a mistrustful eye at the growing discrepancy between his own appearance and Gerda’s strange flawless beauty, which the years had left untouched; and now that Herr von Throta had entered his house, he had to combat and hide his worries with what little energy he still had. If he was to avoid becoming a laughing-stock, he had to keep his worries from becoming known.

  Gerda Buddenbrook and the young, eccentric officer had become acquainted, naturally, by way of music. Herr von Throta played the piano, violin, viola, cello, and flute—all exceedingly well—and often the senator did not realize a visit was impending until he saw Herr von Throta’s aide, a cello case on his back, pass by the green windowsill outside his private office and vanish into the house. Then Thomas Buddenbrook would sit at his desk and wait until he saw the man himself, his wife’s friend, enter the house, until he heard the harmonious strains swell in the salon above him—lilting, lamenting melodies or superhuman exultations raised heavenward like clasped hands. After wandering in confusion and vague ecstasy, the sounds would then sink back down, sobbing and fainting, into night and stillness. But no matter, let them surge and bluster, weep and exult, sparkle and embrace in supernatural pantomime. The worst thing, the truly
tormenting part, was the silence afterward, which reigned above him in the salon for such a long, long time and was too profound and inert not to fill him with dread. There were no footsteps to shake the ceiling, not even a chair scraped as it moved; it was a sordid, insidious, hushed, secret silence. Then Thomas Buddenbrook would sit there so terrified that he sometimes moaned softly.

  What was he afraid of? People had seen Herr von Throta enter his house again, and with their eyes, so to speak, he saw the scene they pictured to themselves: he was sitting downstairs by the window in his office, an aging, worn-out, peevish man, and upstairs his beautiful wife was making music with her lover—and not just music. Yes, that’s how it looked to them, he knew it. And nevertheless he knew that “beau” was not really the word to describe Herr von Throta. Oh, he would almost have been happy if he could have called him that, thought of him as that, if he had been able to despise him as a shallow, empty-headed, and vulgar young man who was working off a normal dose of youthful energy with a little music in order to win ladies’ hearts. He made every conceivable attempt to transform him into such a creature. For that sole purpose, he tried to awaken within himself his forefathers’ old prejudices: the established and frugal merchant’s intransigent mistrust of the frivolous, adventurous, and socially unreliable military caste. In his thoughts, even in conversation, he made a patronizing point of calling Herr von Throta “the lieutenant”; and yet he knew only too well that this was the least applicable term for describing the young man’s character.

  What was Thomas Buddenbrook afraid of? Nothing—nothing he could put a name to. Oh, if only he could have defended himself with simple, tangible, brutal facts. He envied those people out there for being able to picture the affair so naively. But as he sat there, his head in his hands, listening in agony, he knew all too well that “cheating” and “adultery” were not the right words for the melodious and abysmally silent events happening above him.