Hanno Buddenbrook Character Analysis

“What a beautiful day, Tom. I’m so happy, happier than I’ve been for years. We Buddenbrooks aren’t on our last legs yet. And anybody who thinks we are is making a very big mistake, thank God. And now that little Johann is here—it’s so wonderful that we have another Johann again—I feel as if a whole new era is beginning.”

“I’ve learned from life and history. I know that the external, visible, tangible tokens and symbols of happiness and success first appear only after things have in reality gone into decline already.”

“Well, this is no fun,” the senator said in a gruff, annoyed voice and stood up. “What are you crying about? Although it’s enough to make us all cry that you couldn’t put forth the effort to please me a little on a day like today. Are you a little girl? What’s to become of you if you keep on like this? Do you think you can still break into tears when you grow up and have to give a speech to people?”

Never, Hanno thought in despair, I’ll never give a speech to anyone!

[Tony] was disappointed—indeed, deeply hurt—by the idea that her brother had passed over his son and sole heir, that he had not wished to keep the firm going for his sake. She spent many hours weeping over it, because it meant that the firm’s venerable shield, a treasure handed down over four generations, would have to be disposed of, that its history would come to an end—even though there was a legitimate heir.

She wept bitterly when the time came to say farewell to her little Johann. He embraced her: then, putting his hands behind his back and shifting his weight to one leg while balancing his other foot on the toe, he watched her depart; and his gold-brown eyes rimmed with bluish shadows had the same brooding, introspective look that they had taken on when he stood beside his grandmother’s corpse, when his father died, when their grand old home was broken up—or on so many other occasions, which had less to do with life’s external events. As he saw it, old Ida’s departure was consistent with the other instances of decline, dissolution, and termination that he had witnessed. That sort of thing no longer astounded him—had never astounded him, strangely enough. Sometimes, when he would raise his head with its curly brown hair and flair his nostrils fastidiously, his lips slightly twisted as always, it looked as if he were cautiously sniffing the air and the atmosphere of life around him, expecting to catch a whiff of that odor, that strangely familiar odor, which the fragrance of all those flowers beside his grandmother’s casket had not been able to overpower.

“It is so!” she said with all her strength and dared them with her eyes.

There she stood, victorious in the good fight that she had waged all her life against the onslaughts of reason. There she stood, hunchbacked and tiny, trembling with certainty—an inspired, scolding little prophet.