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Part 3, Chapter 7
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
Tony’s summer vacation continues swimmingly. She eats well, swims, and goes on long walks with Morten. Tony likes Morten but finds him rather frustrating sometimes—he has strong opinions about everything. Tony scolds him when he expresses his disdain for nobility. When Tony spends time with her friends from town, Morten sits back on the same stones he did that first day. Between Morten and Tony, the phrase “to sit on the stones” becomes shorthand for “to be lonely and bored.”
Even as their feelings for each other grow more intense (as the sentiment of their “sit on the stones” catchphrase makes clear), it’s not all smooth sailing for Tony and Morten. Just as Morten seemed to fear from the start, his strong political opinions bring tension to his developing relationship with Tony. Despite her rebellious rejection of Grünlich, Tony very much upholds the status quo. Her society’s rigid class hierarchy has given her a life of abundance and privilege, and she is ignorant as to how ordinary, working-class people like Morten and his family live.
Active
Themes
One rainy day, Tony and Morten walk to a nearby pavilion, strolling along the cliffs that line the shore. Tony sees a ship in the distance and asks about it. Morten explains that the ship is headed toward Russia. Tony senses him about to make a disparaging remark about the Russian nobility, and she scolds him. Has he ever known nobility personally? When he clarifies that he hasn’t, she says he has no right to judge. She cites her school friend Armgard von Schilling as a lovely, kind girl who happens to be nobility.
Tony’s sympathy for the nobility is rather unusual given her alignment with a wealthy merchant family. Hanseaten families like the Buddenbrooks, who live in a free imperial city where the nobility is barred from living, tended to see rural nobility as uncultured and unrefined. Of course, Tony’s attitude isn’t based on much—she just happened to like her roommate from boarding school, Armgard. Tony’s worldview comes off as flaky and uninformed compared to Morten’s political consciousness, underscoring her youthful frivolity and her ignorance about the world.
Active
Themes
Morten retorts that there are exceptions to the rule, but “the institution” is unjust. He thinks there should be an end to the class hierarchy: it’s not right for some to be born into “privileges and arbitrary power” while laypeople suffer. “Merit,” in Morten’s eyes, should be all that matters. The present king is a mere “romantic” who has lofty ideals but no sense of the real conditions of the average layperson. He accuses Tony of being “an aristocrat [her]self.” The Buddenbrooks might not be nobility, but they are one of the ruling families all the same, and that comes with all the same privileges. Tony might like Morten now, but when her vacation ends, she’ll return to her privileged life in town. As she and Morten stare off into the water in silence, she considers that perhaps her own notion of “freedom” is not so different from Morten’s.
