Thomas Mann subtitled his 1901 novel "The Decline of a Family," and the tree is the argument. Four generations of a Lübeck grain-merchant family stand on the page: Johann Buddenbrook Sr. (1765–1842), the Voltairean who inherited the firm his own father founded in 1768 and greatly enlarged its fortune; his son Consul Jean (c. 1800–1855), who married piety to business; Jean's children Thomas, Tony, Christian and Clara; and finally Hanno (1861–1877), who dies at fifteen and never enters the trade. Johann Sr., Jean and Thomas lead the firm in turn; each generation is richer in feeling and poorer in vitality than the last.
The first fracture is in the founder's own two marriages. Gotthold, son of the first, married a shopkeeper's daughter against his father's will and was bought out of the firm with a reduced settlement; the breach with his father never healed, though he and his half-brother Jean cautiously reconciled once the old man was dead. Jean married the wealthy Elisabeth (Bethsy) Kröger and inflicted the next wound himself, overriding Tony's love for the Travemünde pilot's son Morten Schwarzkopf to marry her to Bendix Grünlich, whose solvency proved forged. Tony left her second husband, the Munich hop dealer Alois Permaneder, after finding him drunk and making advances to the cook, whereupon he insulted her.
The third generation splits into duty and dissipation. Thomas (1826–1875) carries the firm and the senate seat by will alone, married to the Amsterdam violinist Gerda Arnoldsen, whom he admires without ever reaching; she fuses instead with their son Hanno, while the organist Edmund Pfühl accompanies her and teaches the boy. The man the town suspects of an affair with Gerda is Lieutenant von Throta. Christian drifts through Valparaíso and London, marries Aline Puvogel, and is finally committed by her. Clara dies childless in Riga, her inheritance secretly given to Pastor Tiburtius by Bethsy — a betrayal that breaks Thomas's trust. Erika repeats her mother's pattern: Hugo Weinschenk goes to prison for fraud and then abroad forever, leaving little Elisabeth (1868) fatherless.
The tree follows the novel as Mann published it in 1901, drawn closely from his own Mann family of Lübeck merchants and preserved in the family papers Tony keeps annotating and finally inherits. Its enduring pull is structural: the house survives on women and servants — Tony guarding the name through every humiliation, the Prussian governess Ida Jungmann mothering Jean's children and then Hanno — while the male line thins to a musical boy whose only allies are Pfühl and his friend Kai Graf Mölln. The firm is liquidated in 1876 under Thomas's will; Hanno's typhoid in 1877 ends the legitimate male line, and the genogram closes on a widow, deserted wives, spinsters and one child.
Open & edit this family tree →