The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

506 chapter 48Buddenbrooks (1901), which mocks and elegizes his own North Germanmerchant ancestors, the fortune hunter Bendix Grünlich (“greenish”)flatters Frau Consul for the hand of Antonie. Frau Consul’s family isDuchamps, “of the field,” expressing a nostalgia for the pastoral aristocracy;compare Jack London’s sarcasm about “Van Weyden.”“This would be a betterworld if there were more families like them in it,” declares the ingratiatingMr. Greenish. “They have religion, benevolence, and genuine piety; inshort, they are my ideal of the true Christian spirit. And in them it is unitedto a rare degree with a brilliant cosmopolitanism, an elegance, an aristocraticbearing.” 22 It would be a better world, in other words, with Christianaristocrats and no third estate. Later he “communicated the [false] fact thathis father had been a clergyman, a Christian, and at the same time a highlycosmopolitan gentleman” (p. 79), claiming Christian-peasant and paganaristocraticvirtues in combination.The combination of peasant and aristocratic virtues cannot be genuinein a bourgeois. And so it proves in Grünlich.Christian rhetoric in Buddenbrooks is used as a mere instrument ofambition or pride, as when Johann diverts his daughter Antonie from herinfatuation with an unsuitable young man, one in fact embodying the liberalideals of 1848: “It is my Christian conviction, my dear daughter, that onemust have regard for the feelings of others,” namely, Father Johann’s. Thepassionate Christianity of the bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century,Mann implies, was a transient novelty, at least by the standard of religioussobriety in Germany after the Thirty Years’ War: “The deceased Consul’s[Johann’s father] fanatical love of God and of the Savior had been an emotionforeign to his forebears, who never cherished other than the normal,every-day sentiments proper to good citizens.” Johann has drifted awayfrom enthusiastic religion, the bourgeois or even proletarian correlate of theSentimental Revolution among the gentry and aristocracy, and uses thememory of it merely as a rhetorical trick.Aristocratic rhetoric as well, Mann implies, is false in the bourgeoisie,and dangerous. Gerda, born Arnoldsen in Amsterdam, mother of futureBuddenbrooks, is “an artist, an individual, a puzzling, fascinating creature,”thinks bourgeois Tom, who marries her. Peter Gay notes that Mann neverallows himself inside her head. She is seen ominously as “aristocratic”—though as a Dutch woman this is something of an absurdity at the outset. 23She reinforces the bohemian strain in the family, evinced by Tom’s brother,