Buddenbrooks: Part 10, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

People still can’t wrap their heads around Thomas and Gerda’s relationship. They assume it must be rooted in love and that Gerda’s hefty dowry was merely secondary. And yet, they don’t seem to like each other much. Meanwhile, Gerda remains youthful and beautiful as Thomas grows plump and old. Eventually, people notice that Gerda is perhaps a bit too friendly with Lieutenant von Throta, a handsome Rhinelander with black hair and intense, dark black eyes. Though a military man, he is decidedly “unmilitary” in how casually he holds himself. He behaves eccentrically, taking long walks around town on his own. He plays several instruments and loves opera.

Whenever “his wife’s friend” comes over, Thomas listens from his study to the “lilting, lamenting melodies” of the music they play together in a room upstairs. This goes on for hours. Worse, though, is the long silence that always follows. Thomas goes mad with grief listening to this silence and imagining what it means. One day, Thomas decides he’s had enough. He briefly considers confronting Gerda and von Throta, but in the end, he can’t do it.

Sometime later, while von Throta is over playing music with Gerda, Thomas wanders over to Hanno’s room, where Hanno is working on his schoolwork. They make polite but distant conversation until the music stops. In the silence, Thomas calmly remarks that von Throta has been with Gerda for quite a lot of time. To his shock, Thomas sees that Hanno has registered the hurt and confusion in his father’s eyes—and he knows that he can count on Hanno as a trusted confidant and a source of comfort.

But Thomas almost immediately brushes off this moment of emotional connection with Hanno; Thomas knows that he doesn’t have much longer to live, and he needs Hanno to be able to take over the firm once Thomas has died. Though only 48, Thomas has worked himself into the ground, and his health is poor. More than he worries about the future of the Buddenbrook firm, Thomas worries about dying. He has never embraced his father’s (the consul) straightforward, unquestioning Christianity, and it’s made him unprepared for death. All his life, he has preferred his grandfather Johann’s “worldly skepticism,” believing that he will live on not through eternal life but through the future achievements of his descendants. Now, that, too, seems questionable at best. 

In the summer of 1874, Thomas (uncharacteristically) takes to leaving the office in the middle of the day to wander the gardens. He’s decided he “must think […] before it is too late.” One day, he brings a book of philosophy into the garden and reads the book’s “yellowed pages” for hours. He reads with great interest, though he doesn’t entirely understand everything. One chapter especially grips him. It’s called “Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature.” He finishes it just as the maid fetches him for dinner, and he rises from his seat in a daze. What he has read resonates with him deeply, though he doesn’t understand it all fully.

Alone in his room that night (Gerda sleeps upstairs in Ida Jungmann’s room these days, to be closer to Hanno), Thomas ponders what he has read and how it relates to the meaning of life and to death. Suddenly elated, he realizes that he is “going to live. It is going to live.” He realizes that “it” and “I” are not as separate as he once thought. He realizes that death is a good thing, a return home after a life of uncertainty. He realizes how misguided he has been to be so frustrated with what he lacks when he should be grateful for what he has. He is part of the bigger story. It doesn’t matter whether he has a son, and whether his own image will live on in that son and in that son’s achievements. Being a part of the collective human experience is all that really matters.

Thomas weeps at how he has hated life, and yet he feels an overwhelming happiness at having finally freed himself from the prison he feels he has locked himself inside his entire life. He feels the overwhelming weight of “the constant flow of eternity.” He resolves to maintain this feeling of understanding of gratitude and  live in the moment from now on. But by morning, these feelings have left him. He rises late and has to rush out the door to make it to his various commitments that day. In the end, Thomas doesn’t look at the book again, and he doesn’t seek out the other volumes. Instead, he returns to life as he has always lived it. 

One day, Hanno overhears Thomas tell Gerda that he is arranging to meet with a lawyer to draw up his will. After dinner one evening, Hanno sees Thomas coming toward him, a man in a long black coat beside him. Thomas tells Hanno he has important business to discuss with the  man. He orders Hanno to ensure that no one disturbs them in the smoking-room and that no one overhears their meeting. Hanno takes his task seriously, standing guard outside the door.