Buddenbrooks is his most enduringly popular novel, especially in Germany, where it has been cherished for its intimate portrait of 19th-century German bourgeois life.
Similar themes appear in the Buddenbrooks, but in a fully developed style that already reflects the mastery of narrative, subtle irony of tone, and rich character descriptions of Mann's mature fiction.
The Buddenbrooks of successive generations experience a gradual decline of their finances and family ideals, finding happiness increasingly elusive as values change and old hierarchies are challenged by Germany's rapid industrialisation.
The young author was condemned for writing a scandalous, defamatory roman à clef about (supposedly) recognisable personages.
The years covered in the novel were marked by major political and military developments that reshaped Germany, such as the Revolutions of 1848, the Austro-Prussian War, and the establishment of the German Empire.
In 1835, the wealthy and respected Buddenbrooks, a family of grain merchants, invite their friends and relatives to dinner in their new home in Lübeck.
The half-brothers will never be close, though, and Gotthold's three spinster daughters continue to resent Johann's side of the family, and delight in their misfortune over the coming years.
To avoid him, she takes a vacation in Travemünde, a Baltic resort northeast of Lübeck, where she meets Morten Schwarzkopf, a medical student in whom she is interested romantically.
Later, though, it is revealed that Grünlich had been cooking his books to hide unpayable debt, and had married Tony solely on the hopes that Johann would bail him out.
He complains of bizarre illnesses and gains a reputation as a fool, a drunk, a womanizer, and a teller of tall tales.
Later, Thomas marries Gerda Arnoldsen, daughter of a wealthy Amsterdam merchant, violin virtuoso and Tony's former schoolmate.
However, once he has her dowry in hand, he invests the money and retires, intending to live off his interest and dividends, while spending his days in his local bar.
Tony is unhappy in Munich, where her family name impresses no one, where her favorite seafoods are unavailable at any price in the days before refrigeration, where even the dialect is noticeably different from her own.
Erika, now grown up, marries Hugo Weinschenk, a manager at a fire insurance company, and delivers a daughter, Elizabeth.
His only friend, Kai Mölln, is a dishevelled young count, a remnant of the medieval aristocracy, who lives with his eccentric father outside Lübeck.
Tony, Erika, and little Elizabeth sadly move out of their old house, which is then sold, at a disappointing price, to Herman Hagenström, who is now a successful businessman himself.
Thomas, becoming increasingly depressed and exhausted by the demands of keeping up his faltering business, devotes ever more time and attention to his appearance, and begins to suspect his wife may be cheating on him.
In 1874, he takes a vacation with Christian and a few of his old friends to Travemünde during the off season, where they discuss life, religion, business and the unification of Germany.
His mother, Gerda, returns home to Amsterdam, leaving an embittered Tony, her daughter Erika and granddaughter Elizabeth (accompanied in the table by their adopted cousin Tilda and the three Gotthold's daughters) as the only remnants of the once proud Buddenbrook family, with only the elderly and increasingly infirm Therese Weichbrodt to offer any friendship or moral support.
Derived from his admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner, in the case of Buddenbrooks an example can be found in the description of the color – blue and yellow, respectively – of the skin and the teeth of the characters.
In any case, a central theme of Thomas Mann's novels, the conflict between art and business, is already a dominant force in this work.
Music also plays a major role: Hanno Buddenbrook, like his mother, tends to be an artist and musician, and not a person of commerce like his father.
When Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) by Max Weber was published, Mann recognised its affinities with his novel.
[6] Before writing the novel, Mann conducted extensive research in order to depict with precise detail the conditions of the times and even the mundane aspects of the lives of his characters.
The treatment of the female main character Tony Buddenbrook in the novel resembles the 19th-century realists (Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), but from a more ironic and less tragic point of view.
When he read the second volume of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Thomas Buddenbrook was strongly affected by chapter 41, entitled "On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature".
As a result he was comforted by the unity of all life and the idea that after death he would return to the life force whence he came and hence retain his connectedness with all living things.However, a few days after reading Schopenhauer, "his middle-class instincts" brought Thomas Buddenbrook back to his former belief in a personal Father God and in Heaven, the home of departed individual souls.
The novel ends with the surviving characters' firm consoling belief that there will be a large family reunion, in the afterlife, of all the individual Buddenbrook personalities.
Alfred Weidenmann directed the two-part television film The Buddenbrooks (1959), starring Liselotte Pulver, Nadja Tiller, Hansjörg Felmy, Hanns Lothar, Lil Dagover and Werner Hinz.