SALON LUITPOLD | 125 Jahre "Buddenbrooks" | Christian Begemann im Gespräch mit Christian Gohlke

In the organizer's words:

Christian Begemann in conversation with Christian Gohlke

125 years ago, in October 1901, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks was published. The Decline of a Family. The author's first novel, which he published at the age of 26, is his most widely read and earned him the Nobel Prize in 1929. It owes its popularity to its rich and nuanced portrayal of a family history spanning four generations. The economic and social rise of the Lübeck family and its "decline", the numerous, psychologically accurately drawn characters, the dynamics between the generations and the siblings, the roles of men and women, the successful and unsuccessful marriages, the role of money, which overshadows everything else, the excursions to the sea that promises freedom and to a Munich described as boyish, the clash between the merchant's ethos and artistic aspirations - all this forms a social panorama of enormous plasticity that is by no means sad, but wicked and witty. Reason enough to talk once again about this novel, its fascinating power, but also its problematic aspects!

Christian Begemann studied German language and literature, history and philosophy. In 1986 he received his doctorate at the LMU Munich with a dissertation on fear and anxiety in the process of the Enlightenment, and in 1995 he habilitated at the University of Würzburg on Adalbert Stifter. From 2000 to 2008 he held a chair in Modern German Literature at the University of Bayreuth, from 2008 to 2020 at the LMU Munich. His work focuses on German literature from the 18th to 20th centuries, the history of the body, cultural anthropology and semiotics, theories of aesthetic productivity from the early modern period to the 20th century, vampirism and literary ghosts. He has written books and essays on Goethe, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Droste-Hülshoff, Mörike, Richard Wagner, Gottfried Keller, Stifter, Storm, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Fontane, Karl May, Robert Müller and Peter Greenaway.

As artistic director,Dr. Christian Gohlke is jointly responsible for the artistic design of the Salon. He teaches at Munich University of Applied Sciences and writes regularly for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.