Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Mann and history
- 2 The intellectual world of Thomas Mann
- 3 Mann's literary techniques
- 4 Mann's man's world
- 5 Mann's early novellas
- 6 Classicism and its pitfalls
- 7 The political becomes personal
- 8 Buddenbrooks
- 9 The Magic Mountain
- 10 Religion and culture
- 11 Doctor Faustus
- 12 Lotte in Weimar
- 13 The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
- 14 Mann as essayist
- 15 Mann as diarist
- 16 Mann in English
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Buddenbrooks
between realism and aestheticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Mann and history
- 2 The intellectual world of Thomas Mann
- 3 Mann's literary techniques
- 4 Mann's man's world
- 5 Mann's early novellas
- 6 Classicism and its pitfalls
- 7 The political becomes personal
- 8 Buddenbrooks
- 9 The Magic Mountain
- 10 Religion and culture
- 11 Doctor Faustus
- 12 Lotte in Weimar
- 13 The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
- 14 Mann as essayist
- 15 Mann as diarist
- 16 Mann in English
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
One of the most astute early reviews of Buddenbrooks was written by a young poet who was Thomas Mann's exact contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke. What strikes today's reader is not so much Rilke's positive response to the novel as his perceptive grasp of the inner tensions that give Buddenbrooks its unique and innovative character. Rilke describes Mann as having reconceptualised the traditional role of chronicler in a modern way. At the same time as Mann builds up an increasing sense of material concreteness in what he depicts, he also works over the surface of his presentation with 'a hundred furrows', producing an unusual richness of detail. While avoiding authorial intrusions in which 'a supercilious writer bends down to the ear of a supercilious reader', Mann maintains a narrative objectivity that nonetheless gets us involved, just as if we were reading our own family documents, discovered 'in some secret drawer'. Rilke's review, published in 1902, recognises fundamental aspects of the position of Buddenbrooks in the first year of the twentieth century. Rilke is fully aware of the novel's double character as a record of an actually experienced reality and a carefully constructed and intricately developed work of art. He assesses quite deftly what has since been called Mann's 'irony': his ability to hold sympathy and critical distance in balance.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann , pp. 119 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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