Buddenbrooks
Encyclopedia
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann
's first novel
, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. The publication of the 2nd edition in 1903 confirmed that Buddenbrooks was a major literary success in Germany
.
It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a Family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck
over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society throughout several decades of the 19th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic detailed style, and it was this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1929, although according to Mann's wife this achievement would not have occurred without the publication of The Magic Mountain
.
Thomas Mann started writing the book in October 1897, when he was twenty-two years old. The novel was completed three years later, in July 1900, and published in October 1901.
His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between businessman and artist's worlds, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist
tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal
's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black
). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann
, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany
, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere.
Buddenbrooks is a transition novel, involving both the transition between the 19th century realistic style and 20th century symbolism; it is also a novel of personal transition for the author, starting his departure from 19th century influences to the more essayistic, symbolic and intertextual modern tone of his later works. That said, Buddenbrooks already presents in full style the perfection of narrative, the subtle irony of tone, and the complex and obsessively detailed character descriptions that characterize Mann's work.
Up to the time of writing Buddenbrooks, Mann had concentrated on smaller stories, almost all of which referred to his own difficult decision to live the life of an artist instead of continuing the commercial and otherwise bourgeois duties expected by his family. These stories had been already published under the title Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898, Little Herr Friedmann). They treated spiritually and physically weak figures in an ambivalent way and demonstrated their fight against the moral and social constraints of bourgeois society. This same treatment reappears in the context of Buddenbrooks, and in different ways in some of Mann's later works.
The exploration of decadence in the novel can be attributed to the profound influence of Arthur Schopenhauer
(see The World as Will and Representation
also translated as The World as Will and Idea, 1829) on Thomas Mann during his youth. The three generations of the family depicted in the book experience a continuous economical, physical, and spiritual decline, with true happiness becoming increasingly unavailable to all the members of the family. The characters who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the family firm meet unfortunate ends, just as those who do not.
The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Mann's hometown of Lübeck
that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the author's own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the "money aristocracy", although merchandizing is a central topic.
The main period of time considered covers 1835 to 1877, and thus includes some of the most dramatic episodes of 19th-century German history: the Revolutions of 1848
, the Austro-Prussian War
, the North German Confederation
, and the establishment of the German Empire
). However, in agreement with the above-mentioned remarks, these events play only a peripheral role and thus in this sense Buddenbrooks is also not a historical novel.
, in the case of Buddenbrooks an example can be found in the description of the color - blue and yellow, respectively - of the skin and the teeth of the characters. Each such description alludes to different states of health, personality and even the destiny of the characters. Rotting teeth are also a symbol of decay and decadence because it implies indulging in too many cavity causing foods. An example of this would be Hanno's cup of hot chocolate at breakfast.
Many aspects of Thomas Mann's personality are represented in the two main male representatives of the third and the fourth generations of the fictional family: Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno Buddenbrook. It should not be considered a coincidence that Mann shared the same first name with one of them. Thomas Buddenbrook reads a chapter of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and the character of Hanno Buddenbrook escapes from real-life worries into the realm of music, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
in particular. (Wagner himself was of bourgeois descent and decided to dedicate himself to art.) In this sense both Buddenbrook persons symbolize the conflict lived by the author: the evasion of a productive bourgeois life to pursue an artistic one, though never turning his back on bourgeois ethics.
In any case, the main theme of Thomas Mann's novels, the conflict between art and business, already governs this work. Also the music plays a major role: Hanno Buddenbrook, like his mother, tends to be an artist and musician, and not a person of commerce like his father.
) by Max Weber
was published, Thomas Mann himself recognised the affinities with his own novel. The same happened with Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) by R.H. Tawney. (See Hugh Ridley's Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks - Cambridge, 1987).
Before writing the novel, Mann conducted extensive research in order to depict with immaculate detail the conditions of the times and even the mundane aspects of the lives of his characters. In particular, his cousin Marty provided him with substantial information on the economics of Lübeck, including corn prices and the city's economic decline. The author carried out financial analysis to present the economic information depicted in the book accurately.
Accurate information through extensive research was a general topic in Thomas Mann's other novels. Some characters in the book speak in the Low German of northern Germany.
In the conversations appearing in the early parts of the book, many of the characters switch back and forth between German and French, and are seen to be effectively bilingual. The French appears in the original within Mann's German text, similar to the practice of Tolstoy
in "War and Peace
". The bilingual characters are of the older generation, who were already adults during the Napoleonic Wars
; in later parts of the book, with the focus shifting to the family's younger generation against the background of Germany moving towards unification and assertion of its new role as a major European power, the use of French by the characters visibly diminishes.
All occurrences in the lives of the characters are seen by the narrator and the family members in relation to the family trade business: the sense of duty and destiny accompanying it as well as the economic consequences that events bring. Through births, marriages, and deaths, the business becomes almost a fetish or a religion, especially for some characters, notably Thomas and his sister Tony. The treatment of the female main character Tony Buddenbrook in the novel resembles the 19th-century Realists (Flaubert's Madame Bovary
and Leo Tolstoy
's Anna Karenina
), but from a more ironic and less tragic point of view.
The influence of Buddenbrooks on later novels of the 20th century is probably less than Mann's other novels. Nonetheless, Faulkner
said of the novel that it was for him "the greatest novel of the century" and kept an edition of Buddenbrooks in his home library bearing Faulkner's own signature.
's philosophy. When he read the second volume of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation
, Thomas Buddenbrook was strongly affected by Chapter 41, entitled "On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature." From this chapter's influence, he had such thoughts as "Where shall I be when I am dead? …I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say 'I' " …"Who, what, how could I be if I were not—if this my external self, my consciousness, did not cut me off from those who are not I?"…"soon will that in me which loves you be free and be in and with you — in and with you all." "I shall live…Blind, thoughtless, pitiful eruption of the urging will!" Schopenhauer had written that "Egoism really consists in man's restricting all reality to his own person, in that he imagines he lives in this alone, and not in others. Death teaches him something better, since it abolishes this person, so that man's true nature, that is his will, will henceforth live only in other individuals." According to this teaching, there really is no self to lose when death occurs. What is usually considered to be the self is really the same in all people and animals, at all times and everywhere. Irvin D. Yalom
had a character in his novel describe it as follows:
However, a few days after reading Schopenhauer, "his middle class instincts" brought Thomas Buddenbrook back to his former belief in a personal Father God and in Heaven, the home of departed individual souls. There could be no consolation if conscious personal identity is lost at death. The novel ends with the surviving characters' firm consoling belief that there will be a large family reunion, in the afterlife, of all the individual Buddenbrook personalities.
directed two film adaptions of Buddenbrooks. Buddenbrooks - 1. Teil was released in 1959 and featured actors Liselotte Pulver
, Nadja Tiller
, Hansjörg Felmy
, Hanns Lothar
, Lil Dagover
and Werner Hinz
. The following year, Buddenbrooks - 2. Teil was released in theaters and featured the same cast.
A silent version by Gerhard Lamprecht
released in 1923 still showed a pre-war Lübeck. Franz Peter Wirth directed a 10-hour TV version that premiered in 1979 and was filmed in less-damaged Gdansk
.
In 2008, a film adaption was made by a German production. One of the castings is Armin Mueller-Stahl
, known from several Hollywood films.
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
's first novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. The publication of the 2nd edition in 1903 confirmed that Buddenbrooks was a major literary success in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a Family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck
Lübeck
The Hanseatic City of Lübeck is the second-largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, and one of the major ports of Germany. It was for several centuries the "capital" of the Hanseatic League and, because of its Brick Gothic architectural heritage, is listed by UNESCO as a World...
over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society throughout several decades of the 19th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic detailed style, and it was this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
in 1929, although according to Mann's wife this achievement would not have occurred without the publication of The Magic Mountain
The Magic Mountain
The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature....
.
Thomas Mann started writing the book in October 1897, when he was twenty-two years old. The novel was completed three years later, in July 1900, and published in October 1901.
His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between businessman and artist's worlds, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal
Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...
's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black
The Red and the Black
Le Rouge et le Noir , 1830, by Stendhal, is a historical psychological novel in two volumes, chronicling a provincial young man’s attempts to socially rise beyond his plebeian upbringing with a combination of talent and hard work, deception and hypocrisy — yet who ultimately allows his passions to...
). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann
Heinrich Mann
Luiz Heinrich Mann was a German novelist who wrote works with strong social themes. His attacks on the authoritarian and increasingly militaristic nature of pre-World War II German society led to his exile in 1933.-Life and work:Born in Lübeck as the oldest child of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann...
, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere.
Buddenbrooks is a transition novel, involving both the transition between the 19th century realistic style and 20th century symbolism; it is also a novel of personal transition for the author, starting his departure from 19th century influences to the more essayistic, symbolic and intertextual modern tone of his later works. That said, Buddenbrooks already presents in full style the perfection of narrative, the subtle irony of tone, and the complex and obsessively detailed character descriptions that characterize Mann's work.
Up to the time of writing Buddenbrooks, Mann had concentrated on smaller stories, almost all of which referred to his own difficult decision to live the life of an artist instead of continuing the commercial and otherwise bourgeois duties expected by his family. These stories had been already published under the title Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898, Little Herr Friedmann). They treated spiritually and physically weak figures in an ambivalent way and demonstrated their fight against the moral and social constraints of bourgeois society. This same treatment reappears in the context of Buddenbrooks, and in different ways in some of Mann's later works.
The exploration of decadence in the novel can be attributed to the profound influence of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
(see The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
also translated as The World as Will and Idea, 1829) on Thomas Mann during his youth. The three generations of the family depicted in the book experience a continuous economical, physical, and spiritual decline, with true happiness becoming increasingly unavailable to all the members of the family. The characters who sacrifice their lives for the sake of the family firm meet unfortunate ends, just as those who do not.
The city where the Buddenbrook family lives shares so many of its street names and other details with Mann's hometown of Lübeck
Lübeck
The Hanseatic City of Lübeck is the second-largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, and one of the major ports of Germany. It was for several centuries the "capital" of the Hanseatic League and, because of its Brick Gothic architectural heritage, is listed by UNESCO as a World...
that the identification is perfect, although Mann carefully avoids explicit pronunciation of the name throughout the whole novel. In spite of this fact, many German readers and critics attacked Mann for writing about the "dirty laundry" of his hometown and his own family. However, although this may be debated, it must be said that the fate of the Buddenbrooks bears no direct resemblance with the author's own family, nor with that of the 19th century German bourgeoisie in general, not even with the "money aristocracy", although merchandizing is a central topic.
The main period of time considered covers 1835 to 1877, and thus includes some of the most dramatic episodes of 19th-century German history: the Revolutions of 1848
Revolutions of 1848
The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It was the first Europe-wide collapse of traditional authority, but within a year reactionary...
, the Austro-Prussian War
Austro-Prussian War
The Austro-Prussian War was a war fought in 1866 between the German Confederation under the leadership of the Austrian Empire and its German allies on one side and the Kingdom of Prussia with its German allies and Italy on the...
, the North German Confederation
North German Confederation
The North German Confederation 1866–71, was a federation of 22 independent states of northern Germany. It was formed by a constitution accepted by the member states in 1867 and controlled military and foreign policy. It included the new Reichstag, a parliament elected by universal manhood...
, and the establishment of the German Empire
German Empire
The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...
). However, in agreement with the above-mentioned remarks, these events play only a peripheral role and thus in this sense Buddenbrooks is also not a historical novel.
Major themes
One of the most famous aspects of Thomas Mann's prose style can be seen in the use of leitmotifs. Derived from his admiration for the operas of Richard WagnerRichard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
, in the case of Buddenbrooks an example can be found in the description of the color - blue and yellow, respectively - of the skin and the teeth of the characters. Each such description alludes to different states of health, personality and even the destiny of the characters. Rotting teeth are also a symbol of decay and decadence because it implies indulging in too many cavity causing foods. An example of this would be Hanno's cup of hot chocolate at breakfast.
Many aspects of Thomas Mann's personality are represented in the two main male representatives of the third and the fourth generations of the fictional family: Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno Buddenbrook. It should not be considered a coincidence that Mann shared the same first name with one of them. Thomas Buddenbrook reads a chapter of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and the character of Hanno Buddenbrook escapes from real-life worries into the realm of music, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Straßburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 and premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting...
in particular. (Wagner himself was of bourgeois descent and decided to dedicate himself to art.) In this sense both Buddenbrook persons symbolize the conflict lived by the author: the evasion of a productive bourgeois life to pursue an artistic one, though never turning his back on bourgeois ethics.
In any case, the main theme of Thomas Mann's novels, the conflict between art and business, already governs this work. Also the music plays a major role: Hanno Buddenbrook, like his mother, tends to be an artist and musician, and not a person of commerce like his father.
Literary significance and criticism
Thomas Mann did not intend to write an epic against contemporary aristocratic society and its conventions. On the contrary, Mann often sympathizes with their Protestant ethics. Mann criticizes with irony and detachment. When Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus (1905, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a book written by Max Weber, a German sociologist, economist, and politician. Begun as a series of essays, the original German text was composed in 1904 and 1905, and was translated into English for the first time by Talcott Parsons in 1930...
) by Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
was published, Thomas Mann himself recognised the affinities with his own novel. The same happened with Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) by R.H. Tawney. (See Hugh Ridley's Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks - Cambridge, 1987).
Before writing the novel, Mann conducted extensive research in order to depict with immaculate detail the conditions of the times and even the mundane aspects of the lives of his characters. In particular, his cousin Marty provided him with substantial information on the economics of Lübeck, including corn prices and the city's economic decline. The author carried out financial analysis to present the economic information depicted in the book accurately.
Accurate information through extensive research was a general topic in Thomas Mann's other novels. Some characters in the book speak in the Low German of northern Germany.
In the conversations appearing in the early parts of the book, many of the characters switch back and forth between German and French, and are seen to be effectively bilingual. The French appears in the original within Mann's German text, similar to the practice of Tolstoy
Tolstoy
Tolstoy, or Tolstoi is a prominent family of Russian nobility, descending from Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy who served under Vasily II of Moscow...
in "War and Peace
War and Peace
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...
". The bilingual characters are of the older generation, who were already adults during the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
; in later parts of the book, with the focus shifting to the family's younger generation against the background of Germany moving towards unification and assertion of its new role as a major European power, the use of French by the characters visibly diminishes.
All occurrences in the lives of the characters are seen by the narrator and the family members in relation to the family trade business: the sense of duty and destiny accompanying it as well as the economic consequences that events bring. Through births, marriages, and deaths, the business becomes almost a fetish or a religion, especially for some characters, notably Thomas and his sister Tony. The treatment of the female main character Tony Buddenbrook in the novel resembles the 19th-century Realists (Flaubert's Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
and Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
's Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...
), but from a more ironic and less tragic point of view.
The influence of Buddenbrooks on later novels of the 20th century is probably less than Mann's other novels. Nonetheless, Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
said of the novel that it was for him "the greatest novel of the century" and kept an edition of Buddenbrooks in his home library bearing Faulkner's own signature.
Thomas Buddenbrook and Schopenhauer
In Part 10, chapter 5, Thomas Mann described Thomas Buddenbrook's encounter with SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
's philosophy. When he read the second volume of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
, Thomas Buddenbrook was strongly affected by Chapter 41, entitled "On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature." From this chapter's influence, he had such thoughts as "Where shall I be when I am dead? …I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say 'I' " …"Who, what, how could I be if I were not—if this my external self, my consciousness, did not cut me off from those who are not I?"…"soon will that in me which loves you be free and be in and with you — in and with you all." "I shall live…Blind, thoughtless, pitiful eruption of the urging will!" Schopenhauer had written that "Egoism really consists in man's restricting all reality to his own person, in that he imagines he lives in this alone, and not in others. Death teaches him something better, since it abolishes this person, so that man's true nature, that is his will, will henceforth live only in other individuals." According to this teaching, there really is no self to lose when death occurs. What is usually considered to be the self is really the same in all people and animals, at all times and everywhere. Irvin D. Yalom
Irvin D. Yalom
Irvin David Yalom , M.D., is an author of fiction and nonfiction, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University, an existentialist, and accomplished psychotherapist.-Life and Work:...
had a character in his novel describe it as follows:
However, a few days after reading Schopenhauer, "his middle class instincts" brought Thomas Buddenbrook back to his former belief in a personal Father God and in Heaven, the home of departed individual souls. There could be no consolation if conscious personal identity is lost at death. The novel ends with the surviving characters' firm consoling belief that there will be a large family reunion, in the afterlife, of all the individual Buddenbrook personalities.
Film adaptations
In 1959 and 1960, German filmmaker Alfred WeidenmannAlfred Weidenmann
Alfred Weidenmann was a German film director and screenwriter. He directed 36 films between 1942 and 1984.-Selected filmography:* Der Stern von Afrika * Sacred Waters * Adorable Julia...
directed two film adaptions of Buddenbrooks. Buddenbrooks - 1. Teil was released in 1959 and featured actors Liselotte Pulver
Liselotte Pulver
Liselotte Pulver , sometimes credited as Lilo Pulver, is a Swiss actress.Pulver was one of the stars of German cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, where she often was cast as a tomboy...
, Nadja Tiller
Nadja Tiller
Nadja Tiller is an Austrian actress. She was one of the most popular German actresses of the 1950s and 1960s.She won the Miss Austria competition in 1949, a national beauty pageant for unmarried women in Austria. She had her major film debut in 1952 in 'Märchen vom Glück .In 1955, she acted...
, Hansjörg Felmy
Hansjörg Felmy
Hansjörg Felmy was a German actor. He appeared in 50 films and television shows between 1957 and 1995. He starred in the film The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, which was entered into the 11th Berlin International Film Festival...
, Hanns Lothar
Hanns Lothar
Hanns Lothar was a German film actor. He appeared in 36 films between 1948 and 1966.He was born in Hannover, Germany and died in Hamburg, Germany.-Selected filmography:* Piccadilly Zero Hour 12...
, Lil Dagover
Lil Dagover
Lil Dagover was a German stage, film and television actress whose career spanned nearly six decades.-Early life:...
and Werner Hinz
Werner Hinz
Werner Hinz was a German film actor. He appeared in 70 films between 1935 and 1984.-Selected filmography:* Die Buntkarierten * No Greater Love * The Last Witness...
. The following year, Buddenbrooks - 2. Teil was released in theaters and featured the same cast.
A silent version by Gerhard Lamprecht
Gerhard Lamprecht
Gerhard Lamprecht was a German film director and screenwriter. He directed 63 films between 1920 and 1958. He also wrote for 26 films between 1918 and 1958...
released in 1923 still showed a pre-war Lübeck. Franz Peter Wirth directed a 10-hour TV version that premiered in 1979 and was filmed in less-damaged Gdansk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
.
In 2008, a film adaption was made by a German production. One of the castings is Armin Mueller-Stahl
Armin Mueller-Stahl
Armin Mueller-Stahl is a German film actor, painter, writer and musician.-Early life:Mueller-Stahl was born in Tilsit, East Prussia...
, known from several Hollywood films.