Family and Sacrifice Theme Analysis

“Bon appétit!” she said with a sudden, brief, cordial nod, while her eyes rapidly swept the full length of the table to the children at the far end.

“Father, I find this whole affair with Gotthold so depressing,” the consul said softly.

“Nonsense, Jean, no sentimentalities! What depresses you about it?”

Thomas, who was destined from birth to be a merchant and the future owner of the firm, attended modern, scientific classes beneath the Gothic arches of the Old School. He was a clever, alert, and prudent young man, but he took immense enjoyment in Christian’s wonderful gift for imitating the teachers of the humanities classes he attended, where he showed no less talent than his brother, although less seriousness.

Tony followed the gesture with her eyes, and they gazed together into the same distance—it would not have taken much for their two hands, lying side by side on the beach, to have joined. They said nothing for a long time. And while the sea murmured ponderously and peacefully below, Tony suddenly felt herself united with Morten in a great, vague, yearning, intuitive understanding of what “freedom” meant.

We are not born, my dear daughter, to pursue our own small personal happiness, for we are not separate, independent, self-subsisting individuals, but links in a chain; and it is inconceivable that we would be what we are without those who have preceded us and shown us the path that they themselves have scrupulously trod, looking neither to the left nor the right, but, rather, following a venerable and trustworthy tradition.

Tony gazed for a long time at her own name and the open space after it. And then, suddenly she flinched and swallowed hard, her whole face a play of nervous, eager movement, her lips quickly touching for just a moment—and now she grabbed the pen, plunged rather than dipped it into the ink well, and, crooking her index finger any laying her flushed head on her shoulder, wrote in her own clumsy hand, slanting upward from left to right: “Engaged on 22 September 1845 to Herr Bendix Grünlich, merchant from Hamburg.”

It would be difficult to describe the play of emotions on Johann Buddenbrook’s face. There was shock and sadness in his eyes, but he pressed his lips together hard, creating folds along his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth, an expression he usually reserved for the completion of a profitable business deal. He said softly, “Four years…”

Suddenly [Christian] said, “You know, it’s strange—sometimes I feel like I can’t swallow. No, now don’t laugh. I’m being quite serious. The thought occurs to me that I can’t swallow, and then I really can’t. What I’ve eaten is clear at the back of my mouth, but these muscles here, along the neck—they just won’t work. They won’t obey my will, you see. Or, better, the fact is: I can’t bring myself to actually will it.”

“Why do you constantly use the expression ‘Good God’?” Thomas asked in annoyance. But that was not really what upset him. He felt as if Christian told this story with such relish because it gave him an opportunity to scorn and ridicule work. At which point their mother discreetly changed the subject.

“There are so many ugly things in this world,” Elisabeth Buddenbrook, née Kröger, thought to herself. “Even brothers can hate or despite each other; that does happen, as awful as it may sound. But no one ever speaks of it. They gloss over it. It’s best to know nothing about it.”

The fierce contempt in which Thomas held his brother—and the wistful indifference with which Christian bore it—found expression in all those trivial moments of life that can only manifest themselves among people thrown together in families. If, for example, conversation turned to the history of the Buddenbrooks, Christian could become wrapped up in a mood of high seriousness—which ill became him—and speak with love and admiration of his hometown and his forebears. The consul would immediately cut him off with an icy remark. He could not stand it. He despised his brother so much that he would not allow him to love the things he loved.

“Every word you’ve said is childish. I beg you, won’t you please, just for one second, agree to look at the matter like an adult? Don’t you see that you are carrying on as if something serious and awful had happened to you, as if your husband had cruelly betrayed you, holding you up to shame before all the world? Just consider for a moment—nothing happened at all! Not one human soul knows anything about that absurd scene on your staircase on Kaufinger Strasse. You will not prejudice your dignity, or ours, one iota if you return to Permaneder, perfectly calm and cool, and at most with your nose set slightly in the air. On the contrary—you will prejudice our dignity if you don’t do it, because that would turn a mere bagatelle into a true scandal.”

Days of tense waiting followed, and then came Herr Permaneder’s reply, an answer that no one—not Andreas Gieseke, or Elisabeth, or Thomas, not even Antonie herself—had expected. In simple terms, he agreed to the divorce.

He wrote that he sincerely regretted what had happened, but that he respected Antonie’s wishes, realizing as he did that he and she “don’t rightly belong together.” If he had been a source of sorrow for her in the past few years, he hoped that she would try to forget and forgive. Since he would probably never see her and Erika again, he wished her and the child every possible happiness in the future—signed Alois Permaneder. In a postscript he expressly offered to make immediate restitution of her dowry. He could live without worry on his own income. He would need no extra time, since no business transactions were necessary. The house was paid for, and money was available upon demand.

Tony was almost a little ashamed and for the first time felt inclined to see something laudable in Herr Permaneder’s lack of passion when it came to money matters.

“What a beautiful day, Tom. I’m so happy, happier than I’ve been for years. We Buddenbrooks aren’t on our last legs yet. And anybody who thinks we are is making a very big mistake, thank God. And now that little Johann is here—it’s so wonderful that we have another Johann again—I feel as if a whole new era is beginning.”

“I’ve learned from life and history. I know that the external, visible, tangible tokens and symbols of happiness and success first appear only after things have in reality gone into decline already.”

It was nevertheless Frau Antonie’s most fervent wish—particularly since she had “gone out of business” herself, as she put it—that her daughter would fulfill the hopes that had gone so awry for her, that she would marry happily and advantageously, bringing honor to the family and erasing the memory of her mother’s fate.

“Well, this is no fun,” the senator said in a gruff, annoyed voice and stood up. “What are you crying about? Although it’s enough to make us all cry that you couldn’t put forth the effort to please me a little on a day like today. Are you a little girl? What’s to become of you if you keep on like this? Do you think you can still break into tears when you grow up and have to give a speech to people?”

Never, Hanno thought in despair, I’ll never give a speech to anyone!

“The lung is affected?” [Thomas] asked, looking from doctor to doctor.

“Yes—pneumonia,” Dr. Langhals said, with an earnest, correct bow.

“Just the least touch of infection in the right lung,” the family physician replied, “which we must do our very best to localize.”

“I became what I am,” Thomas said at last, with emotion in his voice, “because I did not want to become like you. If I have inwardly shrunk away from you, it was because I had to protect myself from you, because your nature and character are a danger to me. I am speaking the truth.”

He was empty inside, and he could see no exciting project or absorbing task into which he could throw himself with joy and satisfaction. But he had a need to keep busy, and his mind never stopped working. He was consumed by his own restless energy, which for him had always been something different form his father’s natural and solid joy in work, something artificial, more like a nervous itch, practically a drug—like the pungent little Russian cigarettes he constantly smoked. That energy had never left him, he was less its master than ever; it had gained the upper hand, had become such a torment that he wasted his time with a host of trivialities.

“You can’t believe how he looked when they brought him in. No one has ever seen even a speck of dust on him, he never allowed that, his whole life long. What vile, insulting mockery for it to end like this.”

[Tony] was disappointed—indeed, deeply hurt—by the idea that her brother had passed over his son and sole heir, that he had not wished to keep the firm going for his sake. She spent many hours weeping over it, because it meant that the firm’s venerable shield, a treasure handed down over four generations, would have to be disposed of, that its history would come to an end—even though there was a legitimate heir.

She wept bitterly when the time came to say farewell to her little Johann. He embraced her: then, putting his hands behind his back and shifting his weight to one leg while balancing his other foot on the toe, he watched her depart; and his gold-brown eyes rimmed with bluish shadows had the same brooding, introspective look that they had taken on when he stood beside his grandmother’s corpse, when his father died, when their grand old home was broken up—or on so many other occasions, which had less to do with life’s external events. As he saw it, old Ida’s departure was consistent with the other instances of decline, dissolution, and termination that he had witnessed. That sort of thing no longer astounded him—had never astounded him, strangely enough. Sometimes, when he would raise his head with its curly brown hair and flair his nostrils fastidiously, his lips slightly twisted as always, it looked as if he were cautiously sniffing the air and the atmosphere of life around him, expecting to catch a whiff of that odor, that strangely familiar odor, which the fragrance of all those flowers beside his grandmother’s casket had not been able to overpower.

“It is so!” she said with all her strength and dared them with her eyes.

There she stood, victorious in the good fight that she had waged all her life against the onslaughts of reason. There she stood, hunchbacked and tiny, trembling with certainty—an inspired, scolding little prophet.