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»Buddenbrooks« - Novel of the Century


Literature made tangible

 A novel returns to the scene of the action. We allowed ourselves to be guided by this idea in creating the permanent exhibition Buddenbrooks - Novel of the Century. In the house in which a large part of Buddenbrooks takes place, the visitor is presented with the creation, plot and effect of the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Thomas Mann. We have attempted to develop a new type of literary exhibition which combines the spectacular with the academic, and which is centred on the fundamental principles of Thomas Mann's artistic view. 

We refer to the principle of the double perspective, a term that first appears in Nietzsche's description of the musical artistry of Richard Wagner. A general overview of Buddenbrooks is offered to visitors of the exhibit, who, with the help of audio islands and reading desks, can delve deeper. Whoever wishes to do so can "bury" themselves in the material and layers of knowledge offered by our virtual exhibition. Our exhibition calls on many different media to impart its content while conveying the central message: one has to pick up the novel and read it in order to truly enjoy its literary qualities.

The main stage of Buddenbrooks is Lübeck. 

Although the name of the "mediocre trading center on the Baltic Sea" is never mentioned, there is not one street or place in this novel's city that cannot be be identified in Lübeck. At the heart of the novel is the house on Mengstraße 4. Precisely on this floor and behind these very windows where the Mann family lived in the middle of the 19th century, there is an exhibition about a fictitious family that sits -- as described by Thomas Mann -- opposite St. Mary's Church in a "landscape room" and a dining room with "white figures of gods and goddesses".

Buddenbrooks is not a cultural and historic chronicle, but rather the highly artificial literary game of a young Thomas Mann, written in a style which lies between naturalism and realism, and which was still popular but controversial around 1900. The interest of the young author was in the truthful representation of that which lies within and in the emotional state and development of his figures. Mann’s text details the inner landscapes of characters’ minds whilst ostensibly describing physical living spaces and sometimes conveys atmosphere at the expense of historical or objective truths.

Our production is based on the following prerequisites. First of all, the world of the fictional Buddenbrooks family and not the Mann family is to be depicted. 

Furthermore, the world of language can be translated into illustrative materials if the material translation itself assumes features of the poetic world of words.

The first unit of the exhibit is called THE BOOK (I. DAS BUCH) (1901 - 2000). 

Thomas Mann completed three years of work on his novel on July 18, 1900. The editing of the draft commenced in March 1901 and in October of the same year, the two-volume first edition of Buddenbrooks was published, but initially achieved only moderate sales. With the publication of the one-volume edition in 1903, the novel turned into a sales success. By 1905, 35,000 copies had been sold and by 1920, more than 100,000. As early as 1924, the Nobel Prize committee of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm was considering honoring Thomas Mann, especially for his novel Buddenbrooks. Five years later, it finally happened. On November 12, 1929, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sales figures then abruptly surpassed the one million mark. Whilst the Nazis were in power, sales stagnated but they increased once again after 1945. Today, interest in the novel is at a relatively high level.

The second section of the exhibition, DEVELOPMENT (II. ENTSTEHUNG), displays a selection of books that were significant in the creation of Buddenbrooks. These were the works that inspired Thomas Mann between 1897 and 1900 in his presentation of certain scenes and designs. Special mention must be made of Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Schopenhauer.

This section also details the development of events after the death of Senator Thomas Mann on October 13, 1891. The widowed Julia moved to Munich with her children in 1893, leaving Thomas behind in Lübeck, where he repeated the sixth year of secondary school. A series of family and social events contributed to Thomas Mann's departure from his birthplace in March 1894. In 1897 the publisher Samuel Fischer told the young author that he intended to issue his first volume of novellas in the same year and simultaneously offered to publish a novel. At that point, Thomas Mann was with his brother Heinrich in Casa Bernadini in Palestrina. The writing of the novel, however, began in 1897 in Rome, where the brothers then lived. In those months, he filled notebooks with preliminary work on the novel.

The third part of the exhibition considers THE INTERIOR OF THE NOVEL (III. DAS INNERE DES ROMANS). In Buddenbrooks, contemporary critics of the time saw either a society novel in the tradition of realistic and naturalistic narrative or a book about the artist-bourgeois conflict in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of decadence. In 1949, Georg Lukács suggested a Marxist interpretation of the book. Most recently, the influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy and the similarity of the narrative to the music of Richard Wagner have been discussed.

In addition to the varied approaches to reading, the exhibition also considers the novel's locations and figures. The reader follows the story of the merchant family, the Buddenbrooks, through four generations and its immigration from the Mecklenburg region in the 18th century. Beyond the family members, Thomas Mann introduced more than 400 secondary and minor characters. Many residents of Lübeck thought that they recognized themselves and their fellow citizens in the figures of the novel and even came up with so-called key lists.

The exhibition’s penultimate section bears the name IV. BUDDENBROOKS BELÉTAGE. The visitor finds here the dining room and the room with the figures of gods and goddesses recreated as described in the novel. Additionally, some Mann family belongings are displayed in a glass case. The Manns were respected business people in Rostock in the 18th century. Johann Siegmund Mann Sr. opened a commissions and shipping business in Lübeck. His son, Johann Siegmund Jr. purchased the house at Mengstraße 4 in 1842.

The last section of the exhibition, BUDDENBROOKS AND NO END (V. BUDDENBROOKS UND KEIN ENDE), shows theater, film and television productions of the novel. The 1976 theater production of Buddenbrooks in Basel and three other films can be viewed. They include the 1923 film adaptation, which Thomas Mann described as a "stupid . . . movie drama. . .", but which he supported nevertheless out of financial interests; a film made in 1959; and an 11-part television series that was broadcast in 1979.