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Part 3, Chapter 12
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
Tom and Tony arrive at Meng Strasse. The consul steps out of his office to welcome Tony home. Though her eyes are still red with tears, she’s no longer angry. The next morning, Tony wakes early, walks downstairs, and finds the old family records among a stack of papers and letters on the secretary. Though all these mundane family matters used to bore her, now she reads them “with pride and high seriousness.” She realizes that what her father had said was right: she is “a link in that chain” to which all her family belongs. On the page containing the family lineage she writes under her own name, “Engaged on 22 September 1845 to Herr Bendix Grünlich, merchant from Hamburg.”
Tony’s return to Meng Strasse is also a symbolic return to her old way of life—to a life bound by the rigid class hierarchy that dictate every facet of her life. She tries to take her heartbreak (and the unhappy future she will almost certainly have as Grünlich’s wife) in stride, framing it as a sacrifice she has made, “with pride and high seriousness,” for the sake of her family. If she has any lingering feelings for Merton (which almost certainly she does), she will set them aside to honor her duty to uphold the Buddenbrook family legacy.
Active
Themes
