Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks (unabbreviated audiobook, german, 22CDs)
Read by Gert Westphal | Deutsche Grammophon / Norddeutscher Rundfunk 1980
Artwork & eBook incl. | MP3@128kbps Stereo | 27 hours 38 minutes | 1.49 GB
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. The publication of the 2nd edition in 1903 confirmed that Buddenbrooks was a major literary success in Germany. It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society throughout several decades of the 19th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic ironic and detailed style, and it was this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, although according to Mann's wife this achievement would not have occurred without the publication of The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann started 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 October 1901.

His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between business and artist's worlds, respectively, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of 19th century works such as Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black). More personally, he wanted to surpass the literary status already achieved by his eldest brother Heinrich Mann, who met relative success with the novel In einer Familie (1894, In a Family), and who was working at that time on another novel about German bourgeois society, Im Schlaraffenland (1900, In the Land of Cockaigne). It can be said that both of Thomas Mann's objectives were satisfied. The novel stands today as one of his most popular, especially in Germany, and is considered by many to be the novel that best captures the 19th century German bourgeois atmosphere.

The Author
Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.


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