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Part 10, Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Buddenbrooks, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Sacrifice
Tradition, Modernity, and Change
The Protestant Ethic
Personal Fulfillment and Self-Knowledge
Pretense and Etiquette
Summary
Analysis
In recent years, the Buddenbrooks have tended not to travel much over the summers. Gerda, Ida Jungmann, and Hanno always spend a month at the hotel in Travemünde, but that’s only because it’s good for Hanno’s health. Hanno, for one, can’t imagine not vacationing in the summer—what misery that would be! This summer, he and his family are staying in a Swiss-style lodge adjacent to a pastry shop. On his first morning there, he awakes in his room, “bathed in yellowish daylight,” feeling content and rested.
Hanno’s love of the sea—and specifically, the seaside resort town of Travemünde—further highlights the decadent tastes he has adopted as a young person. He is not so much his father Thomas’s son as he is his uncle Christian’s nephew. He is self-indulgent, not self-disciplined.
Active
Themes
Sunday is the only day Hanno doesn’t like: that’s when people from town—“middle-class day-trippers,” as Ida Jungmann disparagingly calls them—come to the beach to relax and have fun. Hanno would prefer to just stay in his room on those days.
If Hanno has inherited his uncle Christian’s decadent tastes, he has also inherited his aunt Tony’s contempt for the middle-class families who deign to have fun at Travemünde. If only subconsciously, he feels entitled to the shorefront, as though it were his private retreat.
Active
Themes
After a month in Travemünde, Hanno’s vacation has at last come to an end. The carriage, loaded with their luggage, pulls up outside the hotel, and then the family departs for home. Hanno looks longingly back at the lighthouse, and Ida comforts him as he begins to cry. Hanno reflects on his family’s justification for the trip—to strengthen Hanno—and decides that it has been a failure. In fact, he is only weaker and more absent-minded than he was before he left home. He takes solace in the comfort that his friend Kai and his music lessons with Herr Pfuhl will bring him.
Active
Themes
Only Tony seems to grasp Hanno’s “yearning for the sea,” and she patiently listens to him as he tells her all his happy stories of his time there. She shares her own fond memories of one summer she spent there, when she “was just a silly young goose.” She stayed with a family there whom she quite liked—they were “fine people,” common but “straight-thinking” and well read.” She’ll never forget them. She says she learned a lot that summer, “views and opinion and facts that have stood [her] in good stead all [her] life.”
Active
Themes
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