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Part 8, 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
Her mood still joyful from Thomas’s anecdote, Tony walks upstairs to see Hanno. She finds Ida Jungmann there, who urges Tony to be quiet, gesturing toward the sleeping child. Tony kisses her nephew. Ida feels badly for the boy, who struggles to focus on his schoolwork. He even cried when it was time for him to leave for his first day of classes. Tony says that’s how it is with all the children from “the finer houses”—they have things so good at home, they don’t want to leave.
Ida’s description of Hanno portrays him as frail and ill-equipped to handle life’s ordinary challenges, much less the enormous responsibilities he is fated to take on as his family’s heir. Tony, predictably, sees Hanno’s emotional instability as evidence of how great her family is (Hanno comes from one of “the finer houses”). She does not consider that Hanno’s struggles are the natural consequence of the young boy’s spoiled upbringing.
Active
Themes
Just then, Hanno cries out in his sleep. The noise frightens Tony, but Ida says it happens all the time. Hanno starts to mutter in his sleep, saying something about God helping the needy. Ida explains that they’re lines from poems in his reader. A lot of the poems are odd. One is about a hunchbacked man who makes trouble for everyone. Hanno is obsessed with the poem. He even sympathizes with the hunchbacked man, explaining that the man doesn’t misbehave because he’s bad—he does it because he’s “sad.”
If Hanno’s elders spoil or overindulge him, it hasn’t made him careless or insensitive. To the contrary, his sympathy for the hunchbacked man in his poem indicates that he is a sensitive and thoughtful child who is attuned to human suffering, even if he doesn’t quite understand it. His idea that the man makes trouble because he is “sad,” not because he is bad points to his understanding that people behave poorly or unpredictably when they are without direction, purpose, or means—not because they are fundamentally bad. He could be thinking just of the hunchbacked man in his poem, but the idea could also apply to several of his family members: his uncle Christian, for one, or even Hanno himself.
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Hearing all this makes Tony’s heart warm for her nephew—but she worries it’s not good for Hanno to feel the weight of the world so intensely. “The wagon driver gets up at three—well, good heavens, that’s what wagon drivers do,” Tony remarks. She complains about the family doctor, Grabow, insinuating that he’s diagnosing Hanno’s nightmares and melancholy as illness when really it’s the political atmosphere’s emphasis on “freedom and justice” that has Hanno feeling so rotten. With this, Tony bids Ida goodnight and heads out.
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