Buddenbrooks

The Buddenbrook family records symbolize the Buddenbrook’s family legacy, both in practical terms as well as the mythologized vision of it that various family members have built in their minds. In practical terms, the family records—an old book with yellowed, age-worn pages—document everything and everyone that has contributed to the family legacy. There are birth announcements, death notices, and the dates of marriages and engagements. The book also contains more personal bits of documentation, like old journal entries describing trips the family took together.

But the family records also represent how the Buddenbrooks’ fixation on their history and their inherited duty to uphold their family legacy can overwhelm and consume their lives. The meticulous, official nature of the records illuminates how seriously the Buddenbrooks take themselves and the project of upholding their legacy. Often, it’s as though an event hasn’t actually occurred unless someone enters it into the records, making it official. It is only after Tony goes back through the extensive family records, filling with pride and an inflated sense of self-importance with each impressive achievement she reads about, that she at last resigns herself to marrying Grünlich, entering in their names and the date of their engagement so that she can join the ranks of the admirable and self-sacrificing Buddenbrooks who came before her. While there is something rich and human about the great pride the Buddenbrooks take in their family’s accomplishment, the almost fetishistic way Tony and her family relate to the records illuminates how getting too wrapped up in the mythologized story of their legacy can take over their lives, incentivizing them to make the sorts of enormous sacrifices that comprise the records—often at great cost to their personal wants and needs, as well as to their development as individuals.