Enter the high-gabled house on Meng Street in Lübeck and watch a family rise, flourish, and decline across four generations. Read Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece completely free online.
Published in 1901, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family was Thomas Mann’s first novel. He was twenty-five years old. He had written a book of more than seven hundred pages tracing the century-long trajectory of a prosperous merchant family, from its confident ascendancy in the 1830s to its exhausted extinction in the 1870s. It was, by any standard, an astonishing achievement. When Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, the committee specifically cited Buddenbrooks as the work that had earned him the award.
The novel is a chronicle, a family saga, a social history of the German bourgeoisie, a study in the psychology of decline. It follows the Buddenbrooks through four generations of increasing refinement and decreasing vitality. Old Johann Buddenbrook, the founder, is robust, pragmatic, secure in his faith and his fortune. His son, Consul Jean Buddenbrook, is pious, conscientious, slightly diminished. His grandson, Thomas Buddenbrook, is elegant, ambitious, haunted by the sense that something essential has been lost. His great-grandson, Hanno Buddenbrook, is frail, artistic, incapable of the commercial vigor that built the family fortune. He dies at fifteen. The line ends.
On this page, you can experience the novel that established Thomas Mann as the preeminent German novelist of his generation. We offer the complete 1901 text in English translation for online reading.
Book Info
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family |
| Author | Thomas Mann |
| Year of Publication | 1901 |
| Genre | Novel, Family Saga, Social Realism |
| Language | English Translation (Original: German) |
| Legal Status | Public Domain in the U.S. (Published pre-1928) |
| Format | Online Reading |
Read Buddenbrooks Online
Smell the coffee and the cigar smoke, hear the clatter of ledgers and the whisper of gossip. Begin this monumental chronicle by entering the Buddenbrook house interactively below.
This preview introduces the housewarming dinner of 1835 and the family assembled around the table. However, the full, expansive narrative—the commercial triumphs and disasters, the marriages and funerals, the philosophical meditations of the consul and the senator, and the final, fragile music of little Hanno—is available in the complete text for our subscribers.
A subscription unlocks this cornerstone of modern German literature and the complete works of Thomas Mann. Discover the novel that proved decline can be as compelling as ascent.
About the Novel Buddenbrooks
Buddenbrooks is a novel about decline, but it is not a gloomy novel. It is too rich, too various, too full of life to be merely depressing. Mann’s tone is not elegiac but diagnostic; he is not mourning the Buddenbrooks but dissecting them, tracing the biological and spiritual mechanisms of their extinction.
The Structure of Decline
The novel is organized around a central thesis, explicitly stated by one of its characters: that families, like organisms, pass through predictable stages of development and decay. The first generation accumulates wealth; the second consolidates it; the third spends it; the fourth is incapable of preserving it. This pattern is not merely economic; it is psychological and spiritual. The Buddenbrooks become increasingly sensitive, increasingly refined, increasingly incapable of the robust self-assertion that commercial success requires. Their virtues are also their vices.
Johann Buddenbrook the Elder
Old Johann is the patriarch, the founder. He is a child of the Enlightenment, skeptical of religion, confident in reason, comfortable in his prosperity. He speaks in the broad Low German dialect of the common people; he has no pretensions to gentility. He represents the solid, unreflective vigor of the commercial class at its moment of ascendancy. His death, early in the novel, marks the beginning of the family’s transformation.
Consul Jean Buddenbrook
Jean is the second generation, the consolidator. He is pious where his father was skeptical, conscientious where his father was easygoing. He feels the weight of the family’s history and reputation; he is burdened by the awareness that he must preserve what he did not create. His faith is genuine but anxious, a source of comfort and a source of guilt. He is the transitional figure, the bridge between the old world of confident commerce and the new world of anxious introspection.
Thomas Buddenbrook
Thomas is the novel’s central consciousness and its most fully realized character. He is elegant, cultivated, self-conscious. He knows that he is declining; he can feel the vitality draining from his blood. He marries Gerda, a beautiful, remote woman from Amsterdam, attracted by her otherness, her artistry, her distance from the commercial values he has inherited. Their marriage is passionate but sterile; their only child, Hanno, is too fragile to continue the line. Thomas dies, appropriately, at the dentist, his body finally betraying the spirit that has long since abandoned it.
Christian Buddenbrook
Christian is Thomas’s younger brother, the family’s internal exile. He is hypochondriacal, theatrical, incapable of sustained effort. He travels the world, fails at various enterprises, returns to Lübeck to be a perpetual embarrassment to his respectable brother. He is the Buddenbrook who has not declined but never ascended; he was always, from birth, incapable of the discipline that commerce requires. His survival to the end of the novel, when the capable Thomas and the gifted Hanno are both dead, is Mann’s cruelest irony.
Hanno Buddenbrook
Hanno is the fourth generation, the end of the line. He is sickly, sensitive, artistically gifted. He loves music, not ledgers; he improvises at the piano, losing himself in harmonic explorations that have no practical application. His school days are a torment of bullying and humiliation. His final illness, typhoid fever, is almost a relief; he has never been suited for the life that awaits him. His death is the extinction not merely of a family but of a possibility. The Buddenbrooks have refined themselves out of existence.
Tony Buddenbrook
Tony is the novel’s most vivid and most tragic figure. She is not intelligent, not subtle, not capable of learning from experience. She makes the same mistakes repeatedly: she marries the wrong man, divorces him, marries another wrong man, divorces him. She clings to the family’s dignity, its history, its pretensions, long after the substance has vanished. She is ridiculous and she is magnificent. Her refusal to accept decline is both the source of her suffering and the proof of her humanity.
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
Midway through the novel, Thomas Buddenbrook discovers the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. He reads, in a single night, The World as Will and Representation. He experiences a revelation: the self is an illusion, death is liberation, the will that drives us is the source of all suffering. His conversion is intellectual, not practical; he cannot sustain the insight. But the episode is crucial for understanding the novel. Mann is not merely chronicling decline; he is diagnosing the philosophical conditions that make decline inevitable. The Buddenbrooks die because they have become conscious of themselves.
Why Read the Novel Buddenbrooks Today?
Because it is the definitive portrait of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in its moment of transition from confidence to anxiety. The Buddenbrooks are not merely a family; they are a class, a culture, a civilization. Their decline is the decline of liberal, commercial, Protestant Europe, the world that believed in progress and order and the gradual improvement of the human condition. Mann wrote his novel at the threshold of the twentieth century, before the catastrophes that would complete the work of destruction. He saw what was coming. He recorded it in the lives of these merchants and their wives and children. The book is a prophecy disguised as a chronicle.
FAQ
Is this novel based on Mann’s own family?
Yes. The Buddenbrooks are closely modeled on the Mann family of Lübeck. Thomas Mann’s father was a prosperous grain merchant; his mother was artistic and cosmopolitan; his brother Heinrich was a writer; his sister Julia married unhappily and committed suicide. Mann transformed this raw material into art, but the foundations are autobiographical.
Is it difficult to read?
It is long, but it is not difficult. Mann’s prose, even in translation, is lucid and accessible. The novel is crowded with characters, but the family tree is provided in most editions. Read slowly; there is no hurry.
Why did it win the Nobel Prize?
The Nobel committee specifically cited Buddenbrooks as the work that established Mann’s reputation and demonstrated his mastery of the novel form. It remains, for many readers, his finest achievement.
How does it compare to Mann’s later work?
Buddenbrooks is more conventional than The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. It is a nineteenth-century novel, written in the twentieth century, deeply indebted to the realist tradition of Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Mann’s later work is more experimental, more philosophical, more self-conscious. Buddenbrooks is the foundation; the later novels are the superstructure.
Can I read it on my phone?
Yes, but it is a commitment. Allow yourself time. This is a novel to inhabit, not to consume. The Buddenbrook house will become, over the course of your reading, a place you know as well as your own home.