Buddenbrooks ends when there are no men left. Nothing ends a dynastic novel so efficiently as the end of reproduction, which means one sex has to vanish. This does not necessarily suggest that the other triumphs. In this instance, I would say not.
Who, in the last scene, is left? Gerda, with her violin and her blue-shadowed eyes, like Homeric epithets. But Gerda is going back to Amsterdam, to her father, the only man still standing. (Christian, in the institution, is not exactly standing.) She returns, it is understood, to music, having been on loan to the world for twenty-one years. Presumably, she will inhabit again an identity not relinquished in Germany but not fully lived. Her German years appear to have marked her not at all. The degree to which this is the case is suggested by her prompt departure; with Hanno gone, nothing holds her. She is not a Buddenbrook; she was never a Buddenbrook. Present for nearly the whole of the novel, she remains substantial but shadowy, her motives opaque. Opaque, initially, to Tony, her schoolmate, later to the reader. Why does she marry Thomas? Their courtship, like Hanno’s death, occurs offstage. Passion, we assume (we would marry Thomas, too). And yet the young couple, when they reappear, give no evidence of that; rather their mutual respect and understanding are remarked. And no children are born for quite some time (in Mann, fecundity seems to correspond to animal appetite). We do not understand Gerda, I think, because the Buddenbrooks do not understand her. For the same reason, Clothilde is a cipher, though Gerda is magnetic and Clothilde is not. (To which we might add Gerda is rich and Clothilde is not.) Clothilde is gray, scrawny, and voracious.
The dominant female character is Tony. Poor girlish Tony: so much purposeless stamina. At fifty, she has hardly changed, despite “the stormy life behind her and despite her weak digestion.” Her skin has faded somewhat; on her memorable upper lip, a few hairs have appeared. But there is not a sign of white in her coiffure. In fifty years, Tony’s imagination came up with one idea: romantic love. She was taught, systematically, a second: service to family. The second more or less succeeds the first, which survives in a series of projections. Conflict, and with it the possibility of change, disappears early. She is animated by the wish to give herself to something (she also wishes the importance of the gift to be fully appreciated). In a late scene, she picks up her knitting. I remember my amazement: When had she ever learned something so useful? (Though she has, we learn early, housekeeping skills, the one ability Tony Buddenbrook will need less and less, certainly on the grand scale such gifts suggested to their owner.)
There remain the Misses Buddenbrook, whom Erica, Clothilde, and Tony mirror: they are now all artifacts together. (Erica, at thirty-one, already has as her main attribute resignation.) And Sesemi Weichbrodt, to whom the last moments of the novel belong.
Musical Hanno is gone, the prodigy whose taste early outstrips that of his teacher. The blue-shadowed eyes inherited from his mother are, in Hanno, a sign of physical fragility; he is, we know early, somehow unviable. Hanno is like Tonio Kröger, one of Mann’s dangerous gene mixes; when these characters survive, they usually become artists. But Tonio had his passionate southern mother, a source, we assume, of both physical durability and maternal love, whereas Hanno has remote Gerda. Not enough. And music. Which proves no match for the bleak agenda of the body.
Among the main characters, taken together, it seems only Thomas who changes, or attempts to change. He dares. He looks—imagine!—into a future different from the present. Which he tries to anticipate, for which he tries, for himself and his family, to prepare. He marries Gerda. He builds a new house. Repeatedly, in his business and social dealings, his attempt is to anticipate large shifts, the signs of which he is quick to read. How brave, how remarkable, how isolated a figure he seems. And in the end, he cannot change enough to move from one century to another.
2003