5 - Buddenbrooks as Bestseller

Summary

Buddenbrooks: Verfall Einer Familie (Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family) was not an overnight bestseller—at first it sold slowly. The first edition of 1901 was in two volumes and was expensive for the time: it cost fourteen marks in hardcover and twelve marks in paperback; the second edition cost six marks in hardcover and five marks in paperback. When the cheaper, single-volume second edition appeared in 1903, with an attractive cover illustration by Wilhelm Schulz, sales took off. By 1910, the novel had already been translated into three languages: Danish (1903), Swedish (1904), and Russian (1910). By 1918, sales of the novel had reached a respectable one hundred thousand. However, it was only when Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, principally for Buddenbrooks, and when Fischer released a Volksausgabe attractively priced at 2.85 marks in November 1929 (predated 1930), that sales of the novel peaked, exceeding one million by December 1930. With total German-language sales of over six million to date, it is Mann’s bestselling novel. It has been turned into three films and a television series.

Buddenbrooks is one of the few novels written around 1900 to have achieved both critical acclaim and widespread popularity, canonical status and a mass audience. Richard Wagner’s operas also achieved this double success, and were one of the influences that shaped Buddenbrooks. Mann often claimed that the Buddenbrooks family saga had a kinship with Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), even if this was only “im Kleinen. Und meinetwegen auch im Komischen” (a modest relation, and perhaps even a comic one). Wagner’s “doppelte Optik” (double optic), the ability of his art to appeal simultaneously to the elite and to the masses, was denounced by Nietzsche, but it was a definite aim of Mann’s fiction. Mann’s positive reappraisal of the “doppelte Optik” occurs in a letter to Hermann Hesse of 1 April 1910, where he states:

Nietzsche spricht einmal von Wagners “wechselnder Optik”: bald in Hinsicht auf die gröbsten Bedürfnisse, bald in Hinsicht auf die raffiniertesten. Dies ist der Einfluß, den ich meine, und ich weiß nicht, ob ich je den Willen finden werde, mich seiner völlig zu entschlagen.