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The Case Against God by Gerald Priestland | Goodreads

The Case Against God by Gerald Priestland | Goodreads

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The Case Against God


Gerald Priestland

3.60
5 ratings2 reviews

192 pages, Paperback
Published November 14, 1985
192 pages, Paperback
November 14, 1985 by Fount

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About the author


Gerald Priestland21 books2 followers



Educated at Charterhouse and New College, Oxford, Gerald Priestland began his career at the BBC writing obituaries. He eventually became a foreign correspondent for the BBC, covering politics in America. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Priestland converted to Christianity and became a Quaker. Upon recovering from his breakdown, he became involved in religious affairs, culminating in taking a role as the BBC's religious affairs correspondent. He published several books, including an autobiography, and delivered various lectures, before his death in 1991.
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Marija Carter
18 reviews
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January 25, 2022
The book was written by a well-read man skilfully using his language to describe what is by definition often incredibly hard to put into words. While reading this book as an agnostic was an interesting thought experiment and I do not regret one bit opening my mind to the author’s view of the world, the full nature of which, after all, can neither of us be certain, his case was clearly tilted in favour of religion. Priestland does not conceal this fact, for better and worse. 

Personally, I had also been rather annoyed by the insistence that whatever divine there is or isn’t, is surely is “a He.” 
It seems rather absurd to insist than, despite every single observation one can readily make in nature, the creative force would be a man. The implicit insistence on this element is rather frustrating throughout this book.

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Bob Breckwoldt
78 reviews
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April 12, 2014
Nowhere near as succesful as his other books but a great set of interviews of believers and non believers and the uncertain. All attempt, in as simple and direct way as possible, to articulate the reasons for their beliefs. Includes amongst others, Freddie Ayer, Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Miller, Michael Dummett and Shirley Williams. My favourites are John Mortimer and Michael Goulder.

Forcing each to be as simple as possible make it a much better contribution to the Philosophy of Religion than other academic but tedious works.

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Lay Reader's Book Reviews

The Case Against God — G. Priestland.
April 4, 2015


Excellent, like all his books, allowing people to speak for themselves, and put­ting ideas forward thoughtfully and ensuring that all the issues are stated.

I like the idea that 90% of suffering is man-made and that the rest is an incentive to scientific research because evolution isn’t complete and we’re partners in it and that religions should not seek a false syncretism but seek God in the depths. Also that doctrines are a means to an end – taken literally they are like when a man points to the moon but the observer looks at the finger. 

The book turns out to be a good theodicy and even the institutional church is ‘justified’ as being the transmitter of ‘story’ which the secular world learns from and put into practice in many ways.






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Gerald Priestland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gerald Priestland

Gerald Francis Priestland (26 February 1927 – 20 June 1991) was a foreign correspondent, presenter and, later, a religious commentator for the BBC.

Early life and work[edit]

Gerald Priestland was the son of (Joseph) Francis ('Frank') Edwin Priestland, Cambridge-educated publicity manager at Berkhamsted agricultural chemical business Cooper's (later Cooper, McDougall and Robertson- now part of GlaxoSmithkline), and a lieutenant in the Machine Gun Corps during the First World War, and Ellen Juliana, daughter of Colonel Alexander McWhirter Renny, of the 7th Bengal Lancers.[1] The owner of Cooper's was Frank Priestland's brother-in-law Sir Richard Ashmole Cooper, 2nd Baronet (married to his sister Alice).[2] Frank Priestland's father, Rev. Edward Priestland, was headmaster of Spondon House School in Derbyshire, having taken over from his father-in-law, Rev. Thomas Gascoigne.[3]

Gerald Priestland was educated at Charterhouse and New College, Oxford. He began his work at the BBC with a six-month spell writing obituary pieces for broadcast news. Indeed, he even jokingly wrote his own obituary shortly before leaving the job for a post as a sub-editor in the news gathering operation. In 1954, he became the youngest person (at 26 years) to work as a BBC foreign correspondent, having been sent by the controversial Editor of News, Tahu Hole, to the BBC's office in New Delhi. Between 1958 and 1961, Priestland was relocated to Washington, D.C. where he covered, among other things, the successful election of John F. Kennedy and the first US human spaceflight of Project Mercury.[4] Following this, he spent most of the next four years as the BBC's Middle East correspondent, including covering the funeral of Jawaharlal Nehru,[5] before requesting a transfer back to London as a television newsreader.

BBC2 opening night[edit]

Possibly Priestland's best known news broadcast occurred on the opening night of the BBC2 channel (Monday 20 April 1964). He had the onerous and unexpected task of anchoring the evening's transmission from the newsroom at Alexandra Palace as a consequence of an extensive power failure across London.[6] The channel's output that evening was restricted to repeated readings of the news and apologies for the loss of normal service and only lasted for about three hours.

Later life and work[edit]

During the late 1960s, Priestland was back in the USA as chief American correspondent where he covered such events as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the moon landing of the Apollo program and the outraged response of students to the Vietnam War. He returned to Britain at the end of the decade but his broadcasting duties were interrupted when he suffered a nervous breakdown. In the course of his recovery, Priestland became a devoted Quaker, despite having been a confirmed atheist in his youth.

Religious affairs[edit]

From the 1970s onward, Priestland became increasingly involved in religious broadcasting and was the BBC's religious affairs correspondent from 1977 to 1982. His "Priestland's Postbag" was a controversial part of Terry Wogan's BBC breakfast programme, drawing both praise and criticism. During this period, he reported on both Papal Elections of 1978 and introduced a Saturday morning programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled Yours Faithfully. 


He gave the 1982 Swarthmore Lecture entitled, Reasonable Uncertainty: a Quaker approach to doctrine to the annual gathering of British Quakers. Priestland published his autobiography, Something Understood, in 1986, a work which he hastily altered before publication to express his true feelings about Tahu Hole, who had recently died: "He was a monster in every sense."

Priestland participated in a number of television and radio programmes for both the BBC and ITV until his death in 1991. After his death he received the rare honour (shared with John Reith, Huw Wheldon and Richard Dimbleby) of having a series of annually broadcast lectures named in his honour. He expressed his love of Cornwall in Postscript: with love to Penwith, published after his death.

Programmes[edit]

Priestland presented or featured on the following BBC programmes:

  • BBC2 news (television programme) as a newsreader
  • Sunday (radio programme) as a presenter
  • Analysis (radio programme) as a presenter - 1974 to 1975
  • Yours Faithfully (radio programme) as a presenter
  • Priestland's Progress (radio programme) as a presenter[7] - 1981
  • Desert Island Discs (radio programme) as a guest castaway[8] - 1984
  • Radio Lives (radio programme) as the biography subject - 1995

Personal life[edit]

On 14 May 1949, Priestland married (Helen) Sylvia Rhodes (17 May 1924 - 14 January 2004), daughter of (Edward) Hugh Rhodes, C.B.E.,[9] of Turner's Wood, Hampstead Garden Suburb, a senior civil servant.[10] Sylvia Priestland was an artist. They had two sons and two daughters.[11][12]

Sources[edit]

Printed material by Gerald Priestland[edit]

  • America, the Changing Nation (1968)
  • Frying Tonight: the saga of fish and chips (1972)
  • The Future of Violence (1974)
  • The Dilemmas of Journalism: speaking for myself (1979)
  • West of Hayle River: (with Sylvia Priestland) (1980), new edition 1992 as Priestlands' Cornwall
  • Priestland's Progress: One man's search for Christianity now (1981)
  • Coming Home: an introduction to the Quakers (1981)
  • Reasonable Uncertainty: a Quaker approach to doctrine (Swarthmore Lecture – 1982)
  • Priestland: Right and Wrong (1983)
  • Who Needs the Church?: the 1982 William Barclay Lectures (1983); Edinburgh, St Andrews Press ISBN 0715205536
  • The Case Against God (1984)
  • For All the Saints (1985) – the 1985 James Backhouse Lecture (pamphlet – 18 pages)
  • Something Understood: an autobiography (1986)[13]
  • The Unquiet Suitcase: Priestland at Sixty (1988) – Gerald Priestland's diary for 1 year, from February 1987
  • Postscript: With Love to Penwith: two essays in Cornish History; with a foreword by Sylvia Priestland (1992)
  • My Pilgrim Way: late writings; edited by Roger Toulmin (1993)
  • Three volumes of the Yours faithfully collected radio talks, the third volume having the title Gerald Priestland at Large.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Something Understood- An Autobiography, Gerald Priestland, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1986, pp. 11-14
  2. ^ Something Understood- An Autobiography, Gerald Priestland, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1986, pp. 11-12
  3. ^ Something Understood- An Autobiography, Gerald Priestland, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1986, p. 10
  4. ^ Turnill, Reginald (2003). The Moonlandings: An Eyewitness Account. Cambridge University Press. p. 48. ISBN 9780521035354.
  5. ^ "Fond farewell to modern India's father". 13 September 2005. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  6. ^ "BBC Two's 50th anniversary: Disastrous launch remembered". BBC News. 2014.
  7. ^ "Priestland's Progress - BBC Radio 4 FM - 30 September 1981 - BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  8. ^ "BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs, Gerald Priestland". BBC. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  9. ^ Who was Who: A Companion to Who's Who, A. & C. Black, 1981, p. 636
  10. ^ Something understood (Pbk edition) pp.78, 91 "With my exam of my life behind me, the Navy dismissed, and a job in hand, Sylvia and I were able to fix the wedding for May 14th 1949, three days before Sylvia's birthday"
  11. ^ George Wedell: Priestland, Gerald Francis (1927–1991), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011, accessed 24 May 2015
  12. ^ The last page of Something understood gives more family information.
  13. ^ The title, "Something understood", is the last two words of George Herbert's poem "Prayer", referred to on page 8 (pbk edition). Monochrome illustrations, Hardback, 1986 ISBN 0233975004, paperback edition, Arrow, 1988 ISBN 0099523809

External links[edit]

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Internet Archive: Gerald Priestland

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine



Gerald Priestland at large : volume three of the Yours faithfully collected radio talks
Priestland, Gerald
1982


11




Priestland : right and wrong
Priestland, Gerald
1982


7




Gerald Priestland
BBC Radio 4
Mar 02, 1984


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Practicing Compassion for the Stranger by Nancy C. Alexander | Pendle Hill Pamphlets

Practicing Compassion for the Stranger by Nancy C. Alexander | Goodreads






Pendle Hill Pamphlets
Practicing Compassion for the Stranger


Nancy C. Alexander


Who is my neighbor? Who do I consider a stranger? Since coming to work with the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington, D.C., I have broadened my definition of neighbor to include all the world’s people – especially the poor and estranged. My responsibilities are to help bring peace to the Middle East, self-sufficiency to the Third World, and effectiveness to international organizations. Friends do set herculean goals. This work has shown me that most conflicts, from the interpersonal to the international, stem from the way that we human beings set up “we/they” situations which make the “other” – other nation, community or person – a stranger.

To me, a stranger is someone who is unacceptable as is, to be isolated and avoided. How can we transcend our proclivity to think in we/they terms? One answer is to embrace estranged aspects of ourselves. When the stranger is within us, and is ignored and repressed, then we cannot act from our center. When acting out of a divided self, our motives become unclear at best and warped at worst. If we embrace the stranger within ourselves, we gain access to great stores of compassion for the strangers in our life, and power to transform our community. But many of us feel blocked from reaching out compassionately to the stranger within. We are unforgiving with ourselves, and, as a result, unforgiving and angry with others. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself is harder than it sounds.

Part I of this pamphlet seeks to provide ways to broaden the definition of “neighbor” and learn to embrace the stranger within and without. 

In Part II, it is suggested that our culture’s lack of compassion is due, in part, to the way we have estranged the “feminine” principle, or what I term the “heart sense” in love, work and religion. If men and women reintegrate the “heart sense,” then someday, goals of a compassionate world may be within our grasp.




32 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 2, 2015
Series
Pendle Hill Pamphlets






This edition
Format
32 pages, Kindle Edition

Published
April 2, 2015 by Pendle Hill Publications

Language
English
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REVIEW: Joseph and his Brothers by Thomas Mann – Roses And Thorns

REVIEW: Joseph and his Brothers by Thomas Mann – Roses And Thorns

REVIEW: Joseph and his Brothers by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt.

 Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur.

Warnings: Violence, Slavery, Rape, Incest, Racism

Category: M/F

Joseph and his Brothers, originally published in German, is an epic four book series of novels that re-tell the classic Bible story of Joseph, of the famed multi-coloured coat. It’s a big, sweeping epic of a novelization, and took me a very long time to read through, but despite it’s verbosity, complicated prose, and problematic elements, it was a very fascinating read, and one I have been so very looking forward to reviewing.

WRITING

While the author of this novelization, Thomas Mann, is more well known for his novella Death in Venice, this particular work did not gain the same fame despite the author considering it his magnum opus. The forward at the beginning of the book notes that one of the reasons audiences at the time of it’s original publication did not take to it, is its “turgid and dense, almost unreadable prose.” To say its not exactly light reading is an understatement; this is very complex prose indeed, the sort of which you need to read in small chunks and then ruminate on for a while to fully grasp all of the author’s meanings and turns of phrase. That said, I found that very engaging most of the time, and really enjoyed interacting with its complicated ideas and descriptions. 

However, it did have its moments where the narrative dragged on and on and lost me, most notably for the first half of book 3, Joseph in Egypt, which is taken up with chapter after chapter of travel descriptions before Joseph actually makes it to Egypt. All in all, in order to read a book like this one you have to be willing to let the reading process be a kind of exercise in thought experiments and contemplation, rather than an exciting entertainment. 

The story this book follows is familiar if you know your Bible stories, and starting with Jacob was a very nice choice. There is also a fair bit of wit, humour, and light-heartedness in the story, particularly in character interactions if you know how to spot it, which makes it even more engaging. I really enjoyed how much reading this book challenged me, even if at times it was on the dry side.


EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT

The style of this prose, which is a very top-down view, omniscient narrator voice, doesn’t really lend itself so much to intensive emotional connection to characters. Instead of letting us have a connection to the emotions of the principle character, what this book does do instead is create a narrator voice that conveys a sense of affection and wonder for the principle character. It is worth noting that Death in Venice, the author’s more well known work, is a story about gay pining, and notes from his diaries reveal that this work was based in part on some of his own experiences. The fact that Mann was very likely gay and closeted lends a certain light to shine on how he approached writing the character of Joseph, or, more accurately, how his narrator voice speaks about the character of Joseph.

 From early on in the story we get descriptions of Joseph as being the most beautiful human to ever live, of how he was so beautiful and so charming that people routinely mistake him for a deity, of how despite his arrogance and self-obsession Joseph is an object of desire and admiration to all who meet him, and the narrator hardly feels excluded from these numbers. Thus, the reader experiences a real sense of that pining and that longing for Joseph, which is a fascinating experience and creates a kind of warmth for the character that Mann is so lovingly bringing to life in this story.

WORLDBUILDING

The worldbuilding here might be some of the most ambitious I have ever seen, and this aspect of the narrative is equal parts fascinating, and problematic. The second reason the forward cites for audiences of its day not gravitating to this work is the fact that it is, from a religious standpoint, intensely sacrilegious. However, non-religious audiences had no interest in reading Bible stories, so this book was left without much of an audience at all. Mann is undertaking here the task of cobbling together various ancient belief systems and religions into one larger mythology, blending together various notions and ways of thinking of the Divine. Joseph is, multiple times, presented as a pre-Christ Christ figure complete with lines and speeches from the Gospels, and also as a reincarnation of Osiris. 

There is a theme running through the work of repeating narratives, of time as a circle where the same figures play out the same stories with slight differences over and over again, one figure becoming another, and symbols being indistinguishable from the literal. Needless to say, none of this is particularly in keeping with either the teachings of Judaism or Christianity, and it is not surprising that religious audiences of its day found it offensive, though I believe that if you are willing to engage with the narrative from a secular perspective, it’s quite an interesting weave. 

From a modern perspective however what is an even worse problem is how deeply the thread of racism runs through the crafting of the world. Various times this or that group of people are referred to as uncivilized, less than human, etc, though each group tends to view the other through similar lights, ie Joseph’s family think ill of Egyptians while Egyptians think ill of anyone non-Egyptian etc. The narrator takes this and presents this often as a matter of fact which can certainly leave a bad taste in the mouth. The treatment of a certain villainous dwarf character, as well, rubbed me quite the wrong way.

STEAMINESS

Talking about sex and sexuality in this book is very interesting. On the one hand, there is no explicit sexual material present in the book, but on the other hand there is from time to time allusions to sex or mentions of sexuality. A lot of the philosophical waxing can meander through the subjects of sex and gender and what gender means and if God is plural gendered or sexless, and all of this is really quite fascinating to read. 

When it comes to actual sex within the narrative however, we look most prominently to the treatment of Potiphar’s wife, who so infamously attempts to seduce Joseph. Her sexuality is a subject of considerable fixation within the story, and the narrator details her transformation from a virginal maiden, a chaste priestess (as Potiphar is presented as a eunuch here) through her sexual awakening and subsequent pursuit of Joseph. These passages are… interesting in their conception of female sexuality, and describe love and lust as a force that somehow alters and changes the woman’s appearance, causing her breasts to swell and for her to take on a sensual attractiveness that is absent of beauty. This certainly makes me circle back around to the immense amount of pining over Joseph present in the narrator’s voice and the high likelihood that the author may have in fact been gay, because the amount to which the narrator seems to be disturbed by women’s sexuality is pretty interesting. There is also a substantial thread of purity culture running through the narrative of female sexuality here, as when Joseph eventually marries we are treated to a philosophical exploration of the idea that sex and the loss of virginity is a kind of death, that women are destroyed by sex as a natural part of the circle of death and life, that marriage is a kind of abduction and rape. All this very strange and problematic and yet very compelling as a way to engage with the idea that death, like sex, is a natural part of our cycle of life.

Altogether one of the most difficult texts I have managed to get through. I loved and hated this tome at various times, and find the author’s stylistic verbosity very interesting- at times engaging and other times incredibly boring. Most modern audiences probably would find this book a bit too difficult to bother with, but if you can make up your mind to let the book challenge you, even when you disagree with it’s premises, I can see why Mann considered it his greatest literary accomplishment. I certainly consider it one of my most impressive reading accomplishments!

Have you read Joseph and his Brothers? Let me know what YOU thought by leaving me a comment!
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Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks | Wikipedia

Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks | PDF
Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the novel. For other uses, see Buddenbrooks (disambiguation).
Buddenbrooks
1901 Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks.jpg
First edition (two volumes) covers
AuthorThomas Mann
Original titleBuddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie
CountryGermany
LanguageGerman
GenreFamily saga
PublisherS. Fischer Verlag, Berlin
Publication date
1901
OCLC16705387
833.9/12
Original text
Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie online

Buddenbrooks (German: [ˈbʊdn̩ˌbʁoːks] (listen)) is a 1901 novel by Thomas Mann, chronicling the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family over the course of four generations, incidentally portraying the manner of life and mores of the Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the years from 1835 to 1877. Mann drew deeply from the history of his own family, the Mann family of Lübeck, and their milieu.

It was Mann's first novel, published when he was twenty-six years old. With the publication of the second edition in 1903, Buddenbrooks became a major literary success. Its English translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was published in 1924. The work led to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann in 1929; although the Nobel award generally recognises an author's body of work, the Swedish Academy's citation for Mann identified "his great novel Buddenbrooks" as the principal reason for his prize.[1]

Mann began 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 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 such 19th-century works as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830; The Red and the Black). Buddenbrooks is his most enduringly popular novel, especially in Germany, where it has been cherished for its intimate portrait of 19th-century German bourgeois life.

Before Buddenbrooks Mann had written only short stories, which had been collected under the title Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898, Little Herr Friedemann). They portrayed spiritually challenged figures who struggle to find happiness in (or at the margins of) bourgeois society. Similar themes appear in the Buddenbrooks, but in a fully developed style that already reflects the mastery of narrative, subtle irony of tone, and rich character descriptions of Mann's mature fiction.

The exploration of decadence in the novel reflects the influence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844) on the young Mann. The Buddenbrooks of successive generations experience a gradual decline of their finances and family ideals, finding happiness increasingly elusive as values change and old hierarchies are challenged by Germany's rapid industrialisation. The characters who subordinate their personal happiness to the welfare of the family firm encounter reverses, as do those who do not.

The city where the Buddenbrooks live shares so many street names and other details with Mann's native town of Lübeck that the identification is unmistakable, although the novel makes no mention of the name. The young author was condemned for writing a scandalous, defamatory roman à clef about (supposedly) recognisable personages.[2] Mann defended the right of a writer to use material from his own experience.

The years covered in the novel were marked by major political and military developments that reshaped Germany, such as the Revolutions of 1848, the Austro-Prussian War, and the establishment of the German Empire. Historic events nevertheless generally remain in the background, having no direct bearing on the lives of the characters.

Plot summary[edit]

In 1835, the wealthy and respected Buddenbrooks, a family of grain merchants, invite their friends and relatives to dinner in their new home in Lübeck. The family consists of patriarch Johann Buddenbrook Jr. and his wife Antoinette; their son Johann III ("Jean") and his wife Elizabeth, and the latter's three school-age children, sons Thomas and Christian, and daughter Antonie ("Tony"). They have several servants, most notably Ida Jungmann, whose job is to care for the children. During the evening, a letter arrives from Gotthold, estranged son of the elder Johann and half-brother of the younger. The elder Johann disapproves of Gotthold's life choices, and ignores the letter. Johann III and Elizabeth later have another daughter, Klara.

As the older children grow up, their personalities begin to show. Diligent and industrious Thomas seems likely to inherit the business some day. By contrast, Christian is more interested in entertainment and leisure. Tony has grown quite conceited and spurns an advance from the son of another up-and-coming family, Herman Hagenström. Herman takes it in stride, but Tony bears a grudge against him for the rest of her life. The elder Johann and Antoinette die, and the younger Johann takes over the business, and gives Gotthold his fair share of the inheritance. The half-brothers will never be close, though, and Gotthold's three spinster daughters continue to resent Johann's side of the family, and delight in their misfortune over the coming years. Thomas goes to Amsterdam to study, while Tony goes to boarding school. After finishing school, Tony remains lifelong friends with her former teacher, Therese "Sesemi" Weichbrodt.

An obsequious businessman, Bendix Grünlich, of Hamburg, introduces himself to the family, and Tony dislikes him on sight. To avoid him, she takes a vacation in Travemünde, a Baltic resort northeast of Lübeck, where she meets Morten Schwarzkopf, a medical student in whom she is interested romantically. In the end, though, she yields to pressure from her father, and marries Grünlich, against her better judgment, in 1846. She produces a daughter, Erika. Later, though, it is revealed that Grünlich had been cooking his books to hide unpayable debt, and had married Tony solely on the hopes that Johann would bail him out. Johann refuses, and takes Tony and Erika home with him instead. Grünlich goes bankrupt, and Tony divorces him in 1850.

Christian begins traveling, going as far as Valparaíso, Chile. At the same time, Thomas comes home, and Johann puts him to work at the business. During the unrest in 1848, Johann is able to calm an angry mob with a speech. He and Elizabeth become increasingly religious in their twilight years. Johann dies in 1855, and Thomas takes over the business. Christian comes home and initially goes to work for his brother, but he has neither the interest nor the aptitude for commerce. He complains of bizarre illnesses and gains a reputation as a fool, a drunk, a womanizer, and a teller of tall tales. Thomas, coming to despise his brother, sends him away, to protect his own and his business's reputation. Later, Thomas marries Gerda Arnoldsen, daughter of a wealthy Amsterdam merchant, violin virtuoso and Tony's former schoolmate.

Klara marries Sievert Tiburtius, a pastor from Riga, but she dies of tuberculosis without producing any children. Tony marries her second husband, Alois Permaneder, a provincial but honest hops merchant from Munich. However, once he has her dowry in hand, he invests the money and retires, intending to live off his interest and dividends, while spending his days in his local bar. Tony is unhappy in Munich, where her family name impresses no one, where her favorite seafoods are unavailable at any price in the days before refrigeration, where even the dialect is noticeably different from her own. She delivers another baby, but it dies on the same day it is born, leaving her heartbroken. Tony later leaves Permaneder after she discovers him drunkenly trying to rape the maid. She and Erika return to Lübeck. Somewhat surprisingly, Permaneder writes her a letter apologizing for his behavior, agreeing not to challenge the divorce, and returning the dowry.

In the early 1860s, Thomas becomes a father and a senator. He builds an ostentatious mansion and soon regrets it, as maintaining the new house proves to be a considerable drain on his time and money. The old house, now too big for the number of people living in it, falls into disrepair. Thomas suffers many setbacks and losses in his business. His hard work keeps the business afloat, but it is clearly taking its toll on him. Thomas throws a party to celebrate the business's centennial in 1868, during which he receives news that one of his risky business deals has resulted in yet another loss.

Erika, now grown up, marries Hugo Weinschenk, a manager at a fire insurance company, and delivers a daughter, Elizabeth. Weinschenk is arrested for insurance fraud and is sent to prison. Thomas's son, Johann IV ("Hanno"), is born a weak, sickly runt and remains one as he grows. He is withdrawn, melancholic, easily upset and frequently bullied by other children. His only friend, Kai Mölln, is a dishevelled young count, a remnant of the medieval aristocracy, who lives with his eccentric father outside Lübeck. Johann does poorly in school, but he discovers an aptitude for music, clearly inherited from his mother. This helps him bond with his uncle Christian, but Thomas is disappointed by his son.

In 1871, the elder Elizabeth dies of pneumonia. Tony, Erika, and little Elizabeth sadly move out of their old house, which is then sold, at a disappointing price, to Herman Hagenström, who is now a successful businessman himself. Christian expresses his desire to marry Aline, a woman of questionable morals with three illegitimate children, one of whom may or may not be Christian's. Thomas, who controls their mother's inheritance, forbids him. Thomas sends Johann to Travemünde to improve his health. Johann loves the peace and solitude of the resort, but returns home no stronger than before. Weinschenk is released from prison, a disgraced and broken man. He soon abandons his wife and daughter and leaves Germany, never to return.

Thomas, becoming increasingly depressed and exhausted by the demands of keeping up his faltering business, devotes ever more time and attention to his appearance, and begins to suspect his wife may be cheating on him. In 1874, he takes a vacation with Christian and a few of his old friends to Travemünde during the off season, where they discuss life, religion, business and the unification of Germany. In 1875, he collapses and dies after a visit to his dentist. His complete despair and lack of confidence in his son and sole heir are obvious in his will, in which he directed that his business be liquidated. All the assets, including the mansion, are sold at distress prices, and faithful servant Ida is dismissed.

Christian gains control of his own share of his father's inheritance and then marries Aline, but his illnesses and bizarre behavior get him admitted to an insane asylum, leaving Aline free to dissipate Christian's money. Johann still hates school, and he passes his classes only by cheating. His health and constitution are still weak, and it is hinted that he might be homosexual. Except for his friend Count Kai, he is held in contempt by everyone outside his immediate family, even his pastor. In 1877, he takes ill with typhoid fever and soon dies. His mother, Gerda, returns home to Amsterdam, leaving an embittered Tony, her daughter Erika and granddaughter Elizabeth as the only remnants of the once proud Buddenbrook family, with only the elderly and increasingly infirm Therese Weichbrodt to offer any friendship or moral support. Facing destitution, they cling to their wavering belief that they may be reunited with their family in the afterlife.

Major themes[edit]

One of the more 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 Wagner, 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.

Aspects of Thomas Mann's own personality are manifest 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 Buddenbrooks reflect a conflict lived by the author: departure from a conventional bourgeois life to pursue an artistic one, although without rejecting bourgeois ethics.

In any case, a central theme of Thomas Mann's novels, the conflict between art and business, is already a dominant force in this work. Music also 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[edit]

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 Capitalism) by Max Weber was published, Thomas Mann himself recognised the affinities with his own novel.[3]

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 grain 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 Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), but from a more ironic and less tragic point of view.

Mann's emotional description of the Frau Consul's death has been noted as a significant literary treatment of death and the subject's self-awareness of the death process.[4]

Thomas Buddenbrook and Schopenhauer[edit]

In part 10, chapter 5, Thomas Mann described Thomas Buddenbrook's encounter with Arthur Schopenhauer'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:

...essentially it described a dying patriarch having an epiphany in which the boundaries dissolved between himself and others. As a result he was comforted by the unity of all life and the idea that after death he would return to the life force whence he came and hence retain his connectedness with all living things.

— The Schopenhauer Cure, Chapter 32

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 and television adaptations[edit]

A silent film version directed by Gerhard Lamprecht was filmed in Lübeck and released in 1923.

Alfred Weidenmann directed The Buddenbrooks television series starring Liselotte Pulver, Nadja Tiller, Hansjörg Felmy, Hanns Lothar, Lil Dagover and Werner Hinz. Buddenbrooks – 1. Teil was released in 1959, and Buddenbrooks – 2. Teil was released in 1960.

Franz Peter Wirth directed a television series, consisting of 11 episodes, that premiered in 1979. It was filmed in Gdańsk, which had been less damaged by war than Lübeck was.

Another film version, starring Armin Mueller-Stahl, was released in 2008.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1929". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  2. ^ They can be found in this clear name directory.
  3. ^ Ridley, Hugh (1987). Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge University Press. p. 27. ISBN 9780521316972.
  4. ^ Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, Columbia University Press, 2013. T.E. Apter, Thomas Mann: The Devil's Advocate, Springer Press, 1978.

External links[edit]

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