The First Time as Tragedy, the Second Time as Dissertation Topic

The period we have before us comprises the most motley accumulation of screaming contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against the Constitution; revolutionaries who are avowedly constitutional; a National Assembly that wants to be all-powerful and yet remains parliamentarian; a Montagnard faction that finds its calling in tolerance and uses prophesies of future victory to parry its present defeat; Royalists who serve as the patres conscripti of the Republic and are compelled by the situation to keep the rival royal houses, on which they depend, abroad, and the Republic, which they hate, in France; an executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its respectability in the very contempt with which it is covered; a Republic that is nothing but the infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, combined with an imperial etiquette;--connections of which the first principle is schism, wars of which the first law is indecisiveness, destruction in the name of peace, meaningless agitation, celebratory predictions of peace made in the name of revolution, passions without truth, truths without passion, heroes without deeds, history without events; developments whose driving force seems to be the calendar, the tiresome and tedious repetition of the same tensions and releases; contradictions that seem periodically to drive themselves upwards, only to stumble and fall together, without being able to meet; pretentious displays of exertion and bourgeois fears of apocalyptic peril, and at the same time, on the part of the world-savers, petty intrigues and high comedies that recall less the "Youngest Day" than the times of the Fronde;--the collected official geniuses of France brought to shame by the elegant stupidity of a single individual; the collected will of the nation, that searches, whenever it holds a general election, for its corresponding effect in the outlawed enemies of the interests of the masses, until finally it finds it in the individual will of a pirate. If ever there was a chapter of history written in gray on gray, it was this one. Men and events appear as schlemihls in reverse, as shadows whose bodies have gotten lost. The revolution itself paralyses its own bearers and passionately empowers only its enemies. When the "red specter," invariably summoned up and exorcised away by the counterrevolutionaries, finally emerges, it does not emerge in the Phrygian cap of an anarchist, but in the uniform of order, in red trousers.

- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

You don't have to be a Marxist--or even a leftist--to appreciate a passage like this one. This was the first book I ever managed to read, a few weeks ago, in German, and my crude translation does a poor job of evoking the magnificent thunder of Marx's periods, but hopefully some small bit remains. (To convey the meaning I had to slip in a few eighteenth-century ";--"s, because in few places are they more needed.) How unexpected it is to find something so stunning in the third chapter of a history book! Stylistically, at least, the presentation here surpasses all of its modern successors, especially the Marxists.

This suggests a question which is perhaps obvious: are we "allowed" to like Marx as a historian, but not as a politician or political activist? Finding an answer is a bit more complicated than it looks. Because so much of the academic talk around Marx has been driven by political questions, we simply have no coherent context in which to understand Marx simply as a writer (or a historian). In other words, any attempt to compartmentalize these aspects of his historical persona will inevitably meet with the charge that one is ignoring a vital context or neglecting the interpenetration of politics with everything else in Marx's life. (And indeed, the Eighteenth Brumaire can hardly be read as an apolitical text. If it were not for revolutionary politics, it would never have even been written.)

The response that comes to my mind is this: not only can we now compartmentalize Marx in this way, we must do so if Marx is to present any continuing interest to us at all. Like it or not, the historical career of Marxism as a cluster of ideas connected tightly to the man himself is now over. (More importantly, it has become increasingly common to admit it.) That does not mean that retrospectively, politics has become less important for studying Marx--but it does mean that it has become less interesting. We are not obliged any longer, when reading James Boswell or Spinoza or Rimbaud, to keep one eye unceasingly fixed on their political identities, even though we may think it necessary to be aware of them. If we like interesting and thought-provoking ideas, we will naturally range a little wider in the biography.

The inspiration for this can come, in fact, from Marx himself. His historical texts, much more than his programmatic ones, are driven by the comedy and incongruity of contradiction. His best lines are reserved for moments when the pieces of a historical puzzle fit together loosely, when philosophically superseded strata rise up again to churn the soup of social development. When he is, in these moments, uncertain, unportentous, he seems to bring into play much more of his acute analytical skill. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, it's never quite clear what a "contradiction" betokens; for most political Marxists, clarity is an inevitable condition.

I don't mean to keep making the "post-Marxist" point. The revolution will not be won on the comment pages (in fact, there it has long ago been lost). But it does seem to me that the historical legacy of Marxism is not only one of grand politics and equally grand failure, or, for that matter, the transformation of weighty debates into idle in-crowd burbling, but also of interesting adaptations and contexts. Marx and his followers, like anyone else, lived in a complicated intellectual ecosystem in which The Struggle was far from the leading component. As historians or readers of history, we'd do well to listen to the din more closely.

In All the Wrong Places

Narcissus smiled weakly. "The goal? Maybe I will die as a school principal, or as an abbot or bishop. All the same. The goal is this: to place myself where I can serve best, where my skills, my gifts and characteristics, can find the best soil, the greatest field for work. There is no other goal."

Goldmund: "There's no other goal for a monk?"

Narcissus: "O yes, there are goals enough. For a monk it can be a life goal to learn Hebrew, to produce commentaries on Aristotle, or to decorate the cloister church, or to close himself in and to meditate, or to do a hundred other things. For me these are not goals. I want neither to increase the riches of the cloister, nor to reform the order, nor the Church. I want to serve the possibilities of the spirit [Geist] within me, as far as I understand them, nothing more. Is that not a goal?"

- Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

As an idea, Narcissus and Goldmund seems magnificent. Two equally sympathetic, articulate characters, one dedicated to the solitary life of the mind, the other to wandering and creation: how many opportunities could this schema present for a subtle, unprejudiced investigation of such weighty problems! One can just imagine the fiery arguments, debates, and confrontations, along with the inevitable understanding of the issue's ambiguities that the characters would undoubtedly acquire. Such a book would have something new and interesting to offer to the poet as well as the scholar.

Unfortunately, Narcissus and Goldmund is not that book. Where its goal requires complexity and nuance, it relies on lazy stereotypes and convenient, unmotivated resolutions. Where it needs fine characterization, it substitutes cardboard cutouts and plot tokens. Where it seeks for intellectual engagement, it offers only crude, vaguely seedy "eroticism." (The book's characteristic move, which it repeats again and again for what must be two hundred pages, is to document in detail Goldmund's pursuit of undifferentiated women, none of whom have anything resembling a real personality, and then to dump the accumulated episodes into a big bucket labeled "Life Experience Necessary for Creative Labor." The result is unbelievably tedious and unconvincing.) While Narcissus does act as something of a foil for Goldmund, he brings even less intellectual substance to the book than the latter's various sidekicks and love interests. Predictably enough, what we're left with in the end is the painfully familiar story of the Heroic Artist and the Agonies of Creation.

Part of the problem is the novel's Bildungsroman format, which is so formulaic it's almost funny. It's not enough for Hesse to narrate the symbolic processes of leaving home, growing up, and so on: he also has to lard each episode with a flashing signpost in the form of a soliloquy. What these passages serve ultimately to underscore is the constricting monologism of the Bildungsroman as a form, at least in Hesse's hands. (He certainly was responsible for enough of them in his time.) With the Hesseian Bildungsroman, no real conflict is in fact possible, because the central character always ends up in the right. He might learn and grow and develop, but he never really changes, since the novel is a kind of apologia for his outlook on life. All other events, characters, and ideas end up being brutally processed into "experiences," which deprives them of any power or credibility for the reader.

Contemporary "cultural critics" who like to talk about the narcissism of my generation (the "Millennials") rarely remember the narcissism of past generations, but Hesse's once enormous popularity as a writer is a powerful reminder of it. It wasn't just his dabbling in "Eastern" something-or-other that kept him popular into the '60s; it was also, it seems to me, his ability to use protagonist-identification to make his reader feel like he had learned a Major Life Lesson About Art while stroking his ego enough to make the experience pleasant. This kind of thing, married to pop psychology and pop existentialism, was as significant as helicopter parenting and social networks for reshaping the way people thought about their place in the world. Written by a different author, Narcissus and Goldmund could have been a great book; as it is, it's simply a document in the ever-growing annals of self-help.

The Mirror of Preferans

Once there was a game of cards at the home of the Cavalry Guard Narumov. The long winter night went by unnoticed; the company sat down to dinner after four in the morning. Those who had won ate with great gusto; the rest, distractedly, sat before their empty table-settings. But the champagne arrived, the conversation became livelier, and everyone took part.

"What did you do, Surin?" asked the host.
"I lost, as usual. I must admit that I am unlucky: I play mirandola [without increasing the stakes], never get overexcited or thrown off by anything, but still I lose!"
"And you've never given in to temptation? Never played routé [sharply increasing the stakes]?... Your firmness astonishes me.
"And won't you take a look at Hermann!" said one of the guests, pointing to a young engineer, "He's never held a hand of cards in his life, never bent a single parole [doubled the stakes], and yet he stays up with us till five a.m. and observes our game!"
"The game fascinates me strongly," said Hermann, "but I am in no position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of acquiring the excessive."
"Hermann's a German: he's just calculating, that's all!" observed Tomsky.
- Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades"

The games they play in this story do not include preferans, but it was that same milieu that produced the enduring Eastern European dedication to this singularly long-lived game. Some Russians spell its name, in roman script, as "préférence," as if the game were French. The word is, yes--but the game is not. (And it's not clear what préférence has to do with preferans anyway.) I haven't done enough research to figure out what the true origin of the game may have been; the German Wikipedia page, at least, claims it to be of late eighteenth-century Austro-Hungarian origin. Perhaps the origin is unimportant, anyway, for Eastern Europe is the only place it actually survives. (The monumental Russian Wikipedia page, with its enormous glossary, testifies to that. And the English one is honest with its spelling.)

What is preferans? It's a card game, similar to bridge, in which one always plays for money (though often for small stakes). The game is centered around the making of contracts and one's ability to fulfill them; thus, if I make a contract that I will take six tricks, I must take six tricks or pay a penalty. If I order eight tricks, the penalty, and the potential reward, is correspondingly larger. The usual method of play is to define a fixed number of points, say, 30, which each player must reach before the game can end. (A six-trick contract gets you 2 points; seven tricks, 4, and so on up to 10, the total number of cards in each hand.)

It's always masturbatory to indulge in cultural generalizations on the basis of isolated cultural facts, but in the case of preferans the temptation is irresistible. It's easiest to start with some basic moments. The library of folk wisdom that every preferans player keeps in his head includes some subtle sociopolitical insight (which is accessible, alas, only to players of the game). Even the rules are suggestive. When one player "closes," or earns all the necessary points, any points she earns from then on go to the player that is closest to closing. But this isn't some kind of allegory for krugovaia poruka or the Russian commune: each point increases the debt owed by the receiving player to the giver. This is called "American aid."

In fact, there is something quintessentially Russian about the way the game is even played. In bridge, its closest analogue, each contract must actually be played (as far as I know). In preferans, with experienced players, most are not. One sees the cards that one is dealt and knows immediately the limits to one's possible success. To struggle against this fate is pointless--and one risks even losing money in the process. A good preferans player knows exactly what risks to avoid; the big risks are the domain of clueless newbies.

Then there's the raspasy, when no one offers a contract. Then your goal is to take as few tricks as possible, and to break out of raspasy into an actual game becomes harder and harder (the penalties for taking tricks get higher and higher, and the contracts necessary to break out move to seven, then eight, and so forth). The result is a nightmare, in which submission and fate break down and each player struggles not to get stuck with a series of ever more toxic tricks. Getting ahead is impossible. The only thing one can do is not to get drowned. (It is hard not to associate this with Russian society in its worst moments.) The logical conclusion of this aspect of the game is the mizer, which is a contract not to take any tricks at all. Characteristically, it is the second-most-valuable contract in the game. It is the intellectual's solution to the inability for anyone to get ahead: throwing the ticket back in God's face. (The stakes here are high: each trick you take puts you as much in the hole as you would be if had taken only 1 trick on a 6-trick contract. One must be willing to carry the project through if one takes the intellectual's path.)

But the best contract is still the 10: the claim to take all the cards in play. Rarely is it ordered; rarely is it successfully played. At least the aspiration remains, and few are the players who, bogged down in failed misers and six tricks in raspasy, don't dream of pulling off a tenner or two. The dream, it seems, keeps the whole machine going.

Guide to Reading Western Reporting on Russia--Without Reading It

Scott G. Frickenstein (USAF): The Resurgence of Russian Interests in Central Asia. From Gottingen Journal of International Law, a special issue on Russia and international law, from the North Pole to the Caucasus. From EJSS, Scott Nicholas Romaniuk (Carleton) and Joshua Kenneth Wasylciw (Calgary):Russia’s Authoritarianism in Strategic Perspective; and Помаранчева революція: The Disintegration of Ukrainian Political Identity. From History Today, three hundred years ago, Russia emerged as a major power after a clash of armies in the Ukraine — Peter the Great’s victory had repercussions that last to this day. Is Russia doomed to be always the part of the European jigsaw that doesn't fit or, to put it another way, to what extent is Russia part of Europe? Russia's new diplomatic strategy is cheap and counterproductive, but playing the pest is the only way for Moscow to claim relevance. Russia’s attempts to reassert influence over its neighbours are understandable and inevitable; such behaviour is hardly unique among former empires, including our own. From World Politics Review, a look at why Russia still matters in the Asian Century. An interview with Andrei Maylunas on books on pre-revolutionary Russia. A hidden history of evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? An interview with Lyubov Vinogradova on books from the KGB archives. Even before the first effects of glasnost kicked in, Soviet artists influenced by pop art but driven underground by censorship began to show new confidence as western collectors flocked to buy their work. Russia has been accused of abandoning its literary past after it emerged that the Kremlin has no plans to mark the centenary of Tolstoy's death, and an acclaimed film of "Anna Karenina" has failed to find distributors.

- from Bookforum.com, May 18, 2010

This singularly awful collection of links prompted me to write this little guide, just in case you are confused about what it all means. Why is there so much written about Russia, and why does it all sound the same? How can you tell reliable articles from unreliable ones? Interesting ones from uninteresting ones? Follow these simple guidelines and you're sure to succeed!

1. If the author's last name is Russian, don't read it.

All Russian who write in English about Russia are either a) shilling for the government, b) expressing their inchoate quasi-nationalistic intuitions with little English and even less sense of perspective, or c) angling for a cushy spot in a Western foreign-policy think-tank, where they will work the Russia beat to the bone, writing the same article over and over again, propping up their Bush Doctrine-era ideas (and just a touch of Realpolitik) with the "ov" or "vsky" or "in" at the end of their names. There is also a slight possibility that you're dealing with a bitter former hardliner or a bitter former dissident, although, God be thanked, alcoholism and senility are rendering this less and less likely as you read this. (The bitter current dissidents are either dead, in prison, or have sold out in some obscure but soon-to-be-revealed way.)

2. If the author's last name belongs to a former Soviet nationality, but especially Georgia (-dze, -shvili), Ukraine (e.g. -enko), or the Baltic States (-as, -is, something Finnish-sounding with lots of Us and Os), don't read it. This also goes for certain former Warsaw Pact nations, notably Poland (-ski).

All members of former Soviet nationalities hate the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, and think that when Russia objects to their joining NATO, this has something to do with its imperial legacy. Who'd-a thunk it? In any event, the article is most likely just a thinly-disguised plea for more American military bases. The shortest route there is, apparently, always to paint a picture of the Evil Empire that would have George Lucas shitting his pants. EXCEPTION: Eastern Ukrainians. In that case, see a) and b) for Russians above.

3. If the author's capsule biography discloses an affiliation to a human rights organization, don't read it.

Come on, what are you expecting to get from this article? You already know about how shitty it is to be a dissident/Chechen/dissident Chechen. Nothing ever changes in the Amnesty world. Wouldn't you rather go have a beer or something? Oh, okay, fine. Here, sign this petition. I hope you're proud you made an effort.

4. If the author's capsule biography discloses affiliations to the National Review, Heritage Foundation, etc., don't read it.

These articles come only in two flavors. a) "Russia is trying to expand and protect its sphere of influence. What outdated, nineteenth-century thinking! We must expand and protect the sphere of influence of liberty and democracy by expanding NATO and building American military bases." b) "Communism was evil. Boy, communism sure was evil. Why doesn't anyone care? Communism! Evil! STALIN=HITLER! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" (Naturally, this rule also goes for people whose cited books are subtitled "Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.")

5. If the spelling is British, or the article is published in a major British publication, don't read it.

All British writing about Russia will leave your metaphorical desktop drenched with the many, many salty tears it sheds for '30s intellectuals whose half-assed Orientalist alexandrines about Ancient Egypt no one has ever read or will read. If you drink a thimbleful of Zubrovka every time the word "gulag" is employed, you can be sure of one thing: by morning you'll wish you'd been sent to the White Sea Canal instead.

6. If the article uses the word "totalitarianism," don't read it.

This should knock out a good half of them. No matter how many times they invoke Hannah Arendt, just keep in mind: "totalitarianism" is the pseudo-scholarly equivalent of "Amerikkka" and "Micro$oft." And using it to refer to the era of Khrushchev and his successors--that is, half of Soviet history--is like calling Washington the Whig Occupational Government. So click the X if you know what's good for you.

For the remaining, more obvious giveaways, I have created a handy pictorial guide. Enjoy!

(In fact, you should probably stop reading Western reporting on Russia altogether.)

Urban Legends

Maintaining the army at such a high level was, of course, extremely expensive. So, too, was the reconstruction of the battered state and its buildings. To pay for it all, Friedrich imposed even higher taxes and excise duties. The state monopolies in tobacco, coffee, and salt, were three of his biggest milch cows--he raised both the prices and the duty. Illicit coffee drinkers were denounced to the authorities by official 'coffee sniffers'. Citizens were obliged to buy large quantities of salt, and every household had to keep a 'salt book', to show that it had bought the required amount. Searching desperately for ways of using the salt, Berliners created several culinary innovations that have become staples of Berlin cuisine: the pickled gherkin, sauerkraut, and Kassler Rippchen--smoked pork chops cured in a salt solution to a recipe created by a butcher named Kassler--are just three examples.

Friedrich took a cynical attitude to the Berliners' reputation for disrespectful talk and subversive humour. 'They can say what they like, as long as they let me do what I like,' he declared. And he was not averse to bolstering his reputation as 'Alte Fritz', 'Old Fritz'. Once, riding through the city, he spotted a crowd laughing at a placard on a rooftop. On discovering that it was a cartoon of himself with a large coffee-grinder between his knees--a satirical protest at the tax on coffee--he ordered it to be hung lower, 'so that the people should see it properly'. The delighted crowd cheered him as he rode away. As he grew older, he became increasingly eccentric, going about in stained and patched old clothes, receiving the worship of war veterans and citizens with his customary skepticism: 'They would cheer just the same for an old monkey in a uniform.' he observed.

- Anthony Read and David Fisher, Berlin: The Biography of a City (1994)

While this book is for the most part quite adequate to its purpose, its insistence on using formulas like the one above--Berliners are this, Berliners are that--quickly becomes surprisingly grating. They all boil down, effectively, to one idea: that some abstract entity known as "Berliners" has the personality of a Jewish folk hero and never thinks of anything besides sassing people in authority and concocting zany schemes to survive in its zany city. "Berliners" never undergo any change over time; they react in identical ways to Frederick the Great and Erich Honecker, yet somehow manage to have feelings of surprise and pleasure (measured how?) at things like the cruciform sun-reflection in the Fernsehturm.

I don't mean to be po-faced--of course a mass-market history book has to have a character to whom people can relate. But I'm in Berlin now, and I've seen not a trace of the fabled Berliner Till Eulenspigels. Berliners, as far as I can tell, are artsy and political--yes; neat and "ecological"--certainly; likely to eat blini at my funeral--undoubtedly. But sarcastic and irreverent? Not really. And this isn't even a Berlin question: not many of the New Yorkers I've met fit the even more preening and pernicious "New Yorker" stereotype either. Only Parisians, in fact, have even come close.

That self-serving stereotypes can often be untrue is hardly big news. What is perhaps more interesting is why we insist on formulating and then perpetuating them. Even people who hate Berliners, apparently, make use of the Berliner stereotype, and likewise with New Yorkers. It would not be difficult to find analogies, like the medieval penchant for making up stories about the folks from the next village over (this is amusingly discussed in the New York context in the beginning of Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace's Gotham). How, though, can such a thoroughly local fragment of culture find its way into so many international mass-culture artifacts? Towns all over the US (e.g.) think the nearest town is full of snotty preppies or white trash, but to find such information in a book would probably be a rather eerie experience.

The process is more complex than it appears at first glance. I would propose a roughly two-stage model. In Europe, at least, only the largest and most culturally-significant cities (Berlin, London, Paris, for instance) have truly well-defined and distinct sets of associated stereotypes. It is no coincidence that many of these stereotypes have cognate characteristics: commercialism, restiveness, political unreliability. These characteristics came to be linked with them, it seems to me, because of the leading role these cities played in the development of capitalism and the urban resistance to feudal and royal power. (Massive city-versus-state revolts, for instance, took place both in Berlin and Paris at the end of the Middle Ages.) In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, these tropes were then dug up and repurposed by various literary figures as they attempted to portray the pulse of life in the new urban environment--and the concentration of labor activism in large cities only reinforced these ideas.

This is in many ways an uncompelling explanation, but at least it demonstrates my point: that urban stereotypes cannot be treated either as homely experiential truths or nasty ideological lies. They are as old as the city they belong to, and should be seen as facts susceptible to explanation. If we don't at least make an attempt, we'll never know what we mean by "Berliners."

Within History

The consul paged back and forth in the notebook. He read, at the very end, the little entries about his own children, when Tom had had the measles and Antonie, jaundice, and how Christian had survived chickenpox; he read about the various trips to Paris, Switzerland, and Marienbad that he and his wife had taken, and then opened to the torn and foxed parchment pages that old Johann Buddenbrook, his father's father, had filled with elaborate curlicues executed in pale gray ink. These entries began with an extensive genealogy, tracing the family's main line--how at the end of the sixteenth century the oldest known Buddenbrook had lived in Parchim and his son had become an alderman in Grabau. How, later, another Buddenbrook, a merchant tailor by trade, had married a woman from Rostock, "had done very well"--this was underlined--and sired a remarkable number of children, some of whom, as fate would have it, lived, others of whom did not. And how another, who called himself Johann, had remained in Rostock as a merchant. And finally how after many years the consul's grandfather had arrived thre to found their grain business.
- Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks

If the "prosopographic" chronotope presupposes a story of organic development, then how can it really be realized in the form of a novel? Neither human evolution nor world history as such are enough to provide a compelling story, and the conventions of the novel are such that relationships between human beings cannot always tend in a specific direction. The prosopographic novel, then, must constantly struggle against its dual inheritance--from the novel, with all its archetypal Joseph Campbellesque plot elements, and from history, for which the answers are a lot more difficult to fix precisely. (Hayden White, on such a rudimentary level, is no help.)

Buddenbrooks is of course one of the archetypal prosopographic novels. Deleuze once argued, rather idly, that the characteristic question of the novella form was "What happened?"; the equivalent for this genre, and especially this book, is "Whom did it happen to?" The work offers us three possibilities, one obvious and two less so. The obvious one is announced in the very subtitle: the work's subject is "a German Family" and the narrative is the story of its "Decline." But there is something unsatisfactory about this, especially because that the book is far too personality-driven to really be the study of a family. Most of the action deals with only one generation; it is as if this were the third volume in a four-volume saga. Given the book's events, it is hard not to feel that it itself militates against the family-centered perspective.

The second possibility is that this is just a book about Thomas Buddenbrook, the grandson of the man who heads it at the beginning. Much of the action is centered around his own apprehension of the arc of his family history, the need to move or reposition the family along it--to turn back the clock in a very literal way. Mann returns to Thomas again and again, fascinated, evidently, by the conflict in his personality between the acute sense of historical responsibility and the diminishing sense of his own powers. The remainder of Buddenbrooks, in this view, would be the prologue and background to Thomas's failure. This seems an interesting explanation, but it remains plagued by the collapse of context it entails. How does one deal with the multitude of historical levels, of which the book is so keenly aware, if they are nothing but stage-sets for Thomas?

The most compelling, to me, possibility is that in effect, the novel's characters are simply abstractly conceived human beings living in a historical context (making their own history, as Mann's older contemporary would put it, but not in conditions of their own choosing). There is a "character"--namely, the problem of reconciling the sense of progress and decline inherent to human thinking about history with the course of history itself, which resists the imputation. In this view all the Buddenbrooks (except, perhaps, for Hanno) are trapped in a mindset that would be suicidal even if the family were to progress; they've tied themselves too tightly to history and cannot but suffer for it.

While tastes may differ, it seems to me that Mann was successful in answering this question with a good yarn. The book's success--as opposed to the Buddenbrooks'--depends on its ability to keep immediate events in tension with the obvious arc of the narrative, defined so forthrightly in advance. One knows the family will fail, but not what will happen next. The sense of imminent surprise, no doubt, owes much to Mann's keen sense of history--but also to its fidelity to the prosopographic structure, which is stately and measured even in this midst of chaos and surprise.