Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann

Why, even the lamps aren't lighted. That's going too far with the revolution.

She still loved to set a good table, to dress well and richly, to ignore events that were unpleasant, and to share with complacency in the high regard that was everywhere felt for her son.

I can't. I get so tired of things. I'd like to sleep and never wake up. I'd like to die, Kai! No, I am no good. I can't want anything. I don't even want to be famous. I'm afraid of it, just as much as if it were a wrong thing to do. Nothing can come of me, that is perfectly sure. One day, after confirmation-class, I heard Pastor Pringsheim tell somebody that one must just give me up, because I come of a decayed family.

This great dirge of the middle class, sung as the first generations that were truly mediocre were finally waking to the sound of their own foolish dreams crumbling about them. The middle class has justly been known as many things but I have yet to hear it called what Buddenbrooks paints it as: unspectacular.
Mann charts the downfall, and by way of this the earlier rise, of the Buddenbrook family. This merchant family enacts the drama of all middle classes. They try hardest to not be what they clearly are. The Buddenbrooks, each foolish and bewildered one of them, try to step out of the class they are in. They reach furiously for the upper classes only to come to burning end without ever skidding along the bottom. Despite all their best efforts to be gloriously rich or stupendously poor, they find nothing other than mediocrity.
What is the end of these insatiable passions? Paralysis. Hanno's "decayed family." The Buddenbrooks are a family with more determination, drive, perseverance, and industry than many others--they simply cannot recognize that there are things to do besides those you have to do. They are weak because they never focus on what they are, but always what they want to be. Thomas Buddenbrooks, in a sparking delirium as he dies, discovers: we can never be what we want to be, because the only thing we are is what we will never cease to be. Chasing after the rest, what we see beyond the prison bars of our personality, is simply a foolish denial of where and when reality is.
The Buddenbrooks are the tiny details of life--interesting, exotic at times, even humorous to watch, but you can never escape the feeling that they are just one more mediocre grouping of atoms spinning about with no general purpose at all.
The true length and breadth of nobility appears in the young person of Count Mölln. His hands are dirty and his cloths shabby; he has no plans for a brilliant future, nor even any securities for the year after this--yet you get the feeling you've never come across a nobler man.