Four generations of a wealthy Lübeck merchant family decline from civic grandeur into illness, failed marriages, and irrelevance, as commercial ambition gives way to art, illness, and doubt.
Books mentioned in Buddenbrooks (3)
Wilhelm Tell by Friedrich Schiller: “The performance was Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell; and the rôle of Tell’s son Walter was played by a young lady”
Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller: “Once he had played the rôle of Domingo in an amateur performance of Schiller’s “Don Carlos””
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare: “when he gave out the opinion that Romeo and Juliet was a piece by Schiller”
Books that mention Buddenbrooks (2)
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth: “It was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and it was unutterably dull.”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “conservatively followed the template of nineteenth-century realist novels such as Buddenbrooks or Anna Karenina”