Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in Buddenbrooks with a note of reference.

The conversation coalesced again when Jean Jacques Hoffstede began to speak on a favorite topic, the trip to Italy he had taken with a rich Hamburg relative some fifteen years before. He talked about Venice, Rome, and Vesuvius; he talked about the Villa Borghese, where the recently deceased Goethe had written part of his Faust; he waxed enthusiastic about Renaissance fountains lavishing cool refreshment, about pleasant strolls down tree-lined avenues . . .”

One evening Christian Buddenbrook and one of his good friends were permitted to attend a performance of Schiller’s William Tell at the municipal theater.

One day the consul surprised her (Tony), much to her annoyance, reading Clauren’s Mimili with Mamselle Jungman; he thumbed through the book—and it was closed for good.

Dr. Neumann is such a fine lecturer. He just walks into the classroom, stands beside the desk, and starts rattling away about Racine.

Tony was reading Hoffman’s Serapion Brethren, while Tom tickled the back of her neck very circumspectly with a blade of grass, which she wisely chose not to notice.

And what are you reading, Master Buddenbrook? Ah, Cicero! A difficult text, the work of a great Roman orator.

. . . returning home one afternoon from a visit with other young ladies, she found Herr Grunlich ensconced in the landscape room, reading Walter Scott’s Waverley aloud to her mother —in impeccable English, because, as he explained, his flourishing business had meant many trips to England.

. . . in his (Siegismund Gosch) dark, narrow office there was a large bookcase filled with poetical works in all languages, and it was rumored that for the last twenty years he had been working on a translation of the complete plays of Lope de Vega. On one occasion he had played Domingo in an amateur production of Schiller’s Don Carlos.

. . . the way he (Thomas) would slip in those quotes from Heine and other poets, even when talking about the most practical matters, about business or civic issues.

“To my . . . garden. . . I will go,” Hanno mumbled, “Onions and sweet peas to sow . . . .”

“He’s reciting a poem,” Ida Jungmann explained, shaking her head. “Now, now, that’s enough, lad, go to sleep.”

“How strange,” Frau Permaneder said as Ida sat back down at the table. “What sort of poems were those?”

“They’re in his reader,” Fraulein Jungmann replied, “and right underneath it says ‘The Youth’s Magic Horn.’ They’re very old poems. . . . “

Hanno stood up straight. He ran his hand over the smooth polished surface of the piano, let his eyes glide shyly over the faces of all those present, and, encouraged a little by the gentleness shining in his grandmother’s and Aunt Tony’s eyes, he began in a low but slightly hard-edged voice: “ ‘The Shepherd’s Sunday Song’ . . . by Uhland.

—Papa was stretched out on the chaise lounge reading his paper and Hanno was reading the story about the Witch of Endor in Gerok’s Palm Fronds—

She (Madame Kethelson) did not have the means to buy much, and so each year she gave away another portion of her modest possessions and set under her tree whatever she could possibly do without: knickknacks, paperweights, pincushions, glass vases, and scraps of her library, old books with odd shapes and whimsical binding —The Secret Journal of a Student of Himself, Hebel’s Alemmanic Poems, Krummacher’s Parables. Hanno had already been given an edition of the Penees by Blaise Pascal, which was so tiny that you could not read it without a magnifying glass.

“I take it you don’t have the passage from the Metamorphoses down cold yet?”

Lying open before Kai Mollo was not only the Bible, but also Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque, and he read it, his head propped on one aristocratic but slightly dirty hand.

Kai was lost in his own thoughts. “Roderick Usher is the most marvelous character ever invented,” he said suddenly out of nowhere. “I was reading it all during class. If only I could write a story as good as that someday.”

Finally Herr Modersohn found a student who was neither dead nor mad and was willing to recite the poem in English. It was called “The Monkey,” a childish bit of hokum that they demanded be memorized by young men whose main interest was to get on with the serious things in life, whether on the high seas or in the office.

Monkey, little merry fellow,
Thou art nature’s punchinello . . .

And since they could not read “The Monkey “ directly from their books with the director present, the recitation was a fiasco; and when they moved on to Ivanhoe, only young Count Molly could translate a little of, because he actually had some interest in the novel.