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Part 10, Chapter 8
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
All the flower shops in town do great business from all the wreaths people order to be sent to the grieving Buddenbrooks. The Iwersens’ shop does particularly well. When Frau Iwersen arrives at the Buddenbrook home to make a delivery one day, she asks if she can go upstairs to see Thomas’s body. Ida Jungmann guides her upstairs. It’s an arduous trek—Frau Iwersen “[i]s expecting, as usual.” She reaches the room where Thomas’s body has been laid out and walks toward the body, an unreadable expression appearing on her face. She sobs just once, and then she leaves.
The narration doesn’t give Frau Iwersen’s first name, but both the location of the Iwersens’ flower shop and Frau Iwersen’s strange expression as she views Thomas’s remains imply that she is the woman Thomas saw as a young man prior to his relocation to Amsterdam. Though he broke things off with her at the time (and rather cruelly), their connection seemed more genuine and loving than Thomas’s relationship with Gerda. This scene thus evokes a mood of remorse and regret as readers see the life and love Thomas gave up to fulfill his duty to his family.
Active
Themes
Tony “love[s]” these visits.” She loves seeing how revered and beloved Thomas was around town. She reads and re-reads all the glowing pieces about him that people have published in the paper. She even invites the office workers to view Thomas’s remains. The workers appear bored. Tony claims to have seen some of them with tears in their eyes, though this is not true.
Tony reacts to Thomas’s mourners with characteristic glee at being the center of attention and an object of pity. Her lie about seeing tears in the workers’ eyes seems intended to portray Thomas in a more favorable light in death than he was in life. In truth, it is more likely that mourners have come to pay their respects to the Buddenbrooks out of social obligation, not genuine sadness over Thomas’s passing.
Active
Themes
At last, the day of the burial arrives. Thomas’s body is sealed in a metal casket. A procession carries Thomas’s casket to the cemetery, and then Thomas’s casket is placed in the Buddenbrook family vault, where he joins his parents. Pastor Pringsheim presides over the ceremony. Christian listens, and the stiff formality of it all leaves him feeling awkward and uncomfortable.
Active
Themes
