An Incomplete Education

Did you study the works of an author by the name of Thomas Mann when you were in school?  I certainly didn't, neither in high school nor at the University of Missouri. 

My German pen pal, a woman I've corresponded with since I was twelve and she was thirteen, sent me one of his books, Buddenbrooks, for Christmas.  I was reading another book when I picked it up just to peek and got so engrossed I couldn't quit until I'd finished all 604 pages.  This was an English translation in paperback so I don't know how the length compared to the original.

According to Wikipedia, Mann "was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize Laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...."  Mann was born in 1875  in Lubeck, Germany, the son of a senator and a grain merchant, who died in 1891.

Photo from the official Lubeck web site.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann, his Jewish wife and children fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, taught at Princeton, lived in California until the end of the war then returned to Switzerland in 1952 where he died in 1955.

The novel Buddenbrooks, subtitled The Decline of a Family, is based on Mann's family.  The synopsis on the back of the paperback I received as a gift says, "...his story of a prosperous Hanseatic merchant family and their gradual disintegration is also an extraordinary portrayal of the transition from the stable bourgeois life of the nineteenth century to a modern uncertainty."

I decided to do some additional research.  First, I didn't know what "Hanseatic" was and learned, again on Wikipedia, that "Hansa" were guilds and the "Hanseatic League...was an economic alliance of trading cities and their merchant guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the North Sea.....

 
The towns raised their own armies...coming  to each other's aid, and commercial ships often had to be used to carry soldiers and their arms."  Lubeck became a central city for this seaborne trade that took timber, furs, resin, flax, honey, wheat, and rye to Flanders and England with cloth and manufactured goods going in the other direction and copper and iron and herring south from Sweden. The League, according to Wikipedia, had imploded by the late 16th century . "Only nine members attended the last formal meeting in 1669 and only three (Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen) remained as members until its final demise in 1862." 


After a few preliminaries, during which we meet the primary female character, Antonia (Tony) Buddenbrooks, as a small child, the novel starts at a sumptuous dinner party  in 1835.  I thought it would be interesting to confirm the images Mann's wonderful descriptions of the clothing had conjured in my mind's eye.  Here are some costumes from the period.

 
The character Tony reminds me a bit of Scarlet O'Hara because she perseveres even though she is pushed into one bad marriage of convenience by her father and then, as a divorcee, marries again to overcome the stigma even though she isn't in love, then divorces a second time.  Can you imagine making those decisions in that time period?

I kept thinking through the whole book what a wonderful movie it would make and then discovered it apparently was on PBS (where was I?) and is available as a DVD.

 
Have you ever further researched topics in a novel you've enjoyed?  Teddee