Buddenbrooks

Written as though the original tone and plot are unimpeachable, with even the dialogue closely paralleled to the text, this twelve-hour presentation has little soul and no joie de vivre. Viewing this at a remove of 45 years, the direction, cinematography, and set design present little original or incisive; the acting choices remain staid and unpersuasive with little remarkable, even in the heightened moments of conflict. Obviously made for television and, likely, proposed as a teaching aid for younger readers of the German original or its translations, I fear that the four-CD series would offput anyone from reading far into the far better novel.

I sometimes think there are too many period dramas, mostly British, in which immense sums of money are spent taking over streets and removing all the television aerials from them, just to prove that gorgeously-dressed men with stiff collars and moustaches are also prey to the finer emotions. This television series can't really be blamed for that, because it dates from 1978, when I think such adaptations were not so thick on the ground. All the same I can't help thinking of it as yet more of the same, and while the quality is very good, and it all looked very expensive, and I enjoyed watching the stiff collars and railway trains, I didn't notice any overarching theme or idea.

As I'm British, I just can't help comparing this with Brideshead Revisited (1982), which has to be the best television series ever. This is a monstrously unfair comparison, and it's not surprising that the acting in Buddenbrooks comes out badly when compared with that of Brideshead, given that Brideshead's cast included the likes of John Gielgud, Jeremy Irons and Laurence Olivier, all at the top of their form. But it just goes to show how impossibly good a straight period drama has got to be these days to stand out from all the others.

Nevertheless Buddenbrooks is certainly pretty good as period dramas go. Certainly it would save a heap of money, and be a good idea generally, if the next time a British television station planned yet another Jane Austen adaptation, they scrapped it and broadcast a subtitled version of Buddenbrooks instead.

It is rather daring to present Thomas Mann's work ("Buddenbrooks", "Magic Mountain", "Dr. Faustus"), even on film, to the non-European audience because nowadays, hardly the native Germans dispose of the knowledge required to understand those works. Hardly any sentence spoken in the "Buddenbrooks" is free of allusions to classical Latin, Greek or German literature. If you do not know what E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Serapion" is about, you will not understand what is going on exactly when Grünlich is presented to the Buddenbrook family in the first episode and which is one of the major threads of the whole story.

The Buddenbrooks represent one of those highly educated and rich families which formed the Upper Class level of the German society in the 19th century. However, at the time, when Thomas Mann wrote his autobiographic novel, this was already past, since those families did not survive the time of the upcoming revolutions instigated by such theoreticians like De Tocqueville, Marx or Engels. Another strong feature, quite unknown in America, is the strict division of society in the Ruling Level on the one side and the "People" (= mob) on the other side. The world of the Buddenbrooks is the first level: One speaks a well-educated High-German, spiced with French expressions (French had been state language of Prussia under Emperor Friedrich the Great), one eats delicate food from plates made from Meissner porcelain, one has several servers. The rules of conversation and social behavior are even kept strictly up between family members (cf. the Gotthold story), even between husband and wife (because they come from different families which implies different degrees of ruling levels). On the contrary, the "mob" speaks Platt, a language typologically situated between German and Dutch (and the movie brings a few nice examples of this almost extinct language, although most people are not real Platt speakers, Rolf Boysen, born 1920 in Flensburg, excluded).

However, Thomas Mann's novel is not about the family Buddenbrook representing this highly educated level of ruling class (although he belonged to them himself and admired them his whole life), it is about their decline, and the decline of the Buddenbrooks stands paradigmatic for the decline of a whole epoch, which can only be compared to the decline of the Habsburgian society after the shot in Sarajevo which had been treated, amongst many others, by Joseph Roth in his "Radetzky march" which also has been filmed. For everyone not familiar with German history and, more important, with a whole continent which had been built on different levels of society and education, I recommend to read first the book and watch the movie after. Or watch Fassbinder's "Effie Briest", before you watch the "Buddenbrooks". I also recommend to watch Thomas Mann's "Zauberberg" (Magic Mountain), directed by Geissendörfer, as a preparation before trying to digest the heavy Buddenbrook stuff. And believe me: This movie, directed by Franz Peter Wirth, is well worth watching!