Buddenbrooks (The Decline of a Family - Part 2)

A New Translation

By: Thomas Mann

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Lübeck, 1835. The Buddenbrook family is at the height of its prosperity: Johann Buddenbrook, grain merchant and patriarch, opens the doors of his magnificent new home to the cream of the city's society, and the world seems arranged to his satisfaction. The firm is strong. The family is respected. The future is assured.

It will not always be so.

Buddenbrooks follows four generations of a north German merchant dynasty from the peak of their wealth and social confidence to the extinction of their family line — a span of four decades rendered in extraordinary detail, from births and deaths and weddings and bankruptcies to recipes, sermons, schoolroom humiliations, and the slow, inexorable accumulation of small defeats. With each generation, something shifts: where the founders acted, their children reflect; where the children reflected, their grandchildren agonize; and where the last Buddenbrook should be carrying the firm forward, he can only play the piano and wait for an end he cannot bring himself to resist.

Thomas Mann began writing Buddenbrooks at twenty-one, completed it at twenty-five, and published it in 1901 to immediate controversy and eventual worldwide fame. It is his first novel and, by the Swedish Academy's own judgment, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 — a debut that has outlasted almost everything written in its century, a family chronicle that is also a philosophical meditation on what it costs a civilization to become fully aware of itself.

By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929.