“Pain in th’ ol’!”

“Pain in th’ ol’!” is Herr Permaneder’s rough, recurring expression of bodily discomfort and resigned acceptance. Across a visit to the Buddenbrook household, a business conversation, and the aftermath of his infant daughter’s death, the phrase shifts from social awkwardness to a comic marker of his manner and finally to a refrain through which he seems to muddle on after grief. Its repetitions make the words at once distinctive and evasive: a complaint that acknowledges pain without dwelling on it.

First Use and Social Setting

During Herr Permaneder’s visit, he feels obliged to fill a pause after Madame Buddenbrook has amiably acknowledged that she must have been surprised. He bends forward, draws circles in the air, and says, “A pain 'n th' ol'!” When she asks him to repeat himself, he gives the phrase again in his loudest, roughest voice. The words arrive not as a considered explanation of pain but as a conversational sound he cannot resist supplying.

The phrase recurs while he waits for Frau Grünlich to come downstairs. After turning his easy chair toward the door and then back again, he examines the wallpaper, furniture, and a large Sèvres inkwell, rubs his knee, sighs, and repeats variations on the complaint. Its persistence occupies the interval before her arrival, making his idiosyncratic speech part of the scene’s social texture rather than a single passing joke.

That texture is especially conspicuous in the Buddenbrooks’ rooms. The household is unaccustomed to his pipe fumes, easygoing manners, and sounds; Mamselle Jungmann is so astonished that she forgets to chew, while Madame Buddenbrook falls back into amiable incomprehension. The refrain belongs to the same pattern of rough informality that unsettles this carefully ordered domestic setting.

A Refrain in Business Talk

At dinner, Herr Permaneder’s talk turns to the difference between Munich and the northern business world. He complains that Munich is not a town for business, that competition is plentiful, and that the export trade is poor; he also says his partner, Noppe, wants to move to Nuremberg, while he himself refuses to leave Munich. In this account, the phrase punctuates a practical discussion of trade and place, surfacing between remarks about work, beer, and the burdens of competition.

His description is not simply one of failure. Herr Permaneder explains that he and Noppe have extended credit and provided cash at four percent to help a brewery director expand. They sell the brewery their hops and also receive interest, which gives the business a useful income. The abrupt return of his complaint amid these specifics sets his grumbling idiom against an enterprise that, by his own account, is doing well.

The expression also appears alongside other exclamations when conversation lags: he sighs heavily and says, “ 't's a hard pull!” or “Ain't that somethin'.” The narrative presents these utterances as recurring habits, not as precise reports of a new crisis each time. Their force comes from repetition: the phrase turns discomfort into a ready-made response, whether the subject is a knee, business, or simply a pause that needs filling.

Grief and the Return of the Phrase

After the death of his infant daughter, the same formula takes on a more painful context. Herr Permaneder is deeply shaken by the sight of the lifeless child; tears run down his swollen face and into his frayed moustache. He sighs and repeats, “Oh my, what a pain, what a pain in th' ol',” so the familiar expression now accompanies unmistakable grief rather than an empty stretch of conversation.

The return to the refrain also marks a change in how that grief is carried. Tony sees him take up “takin' things easy” again before long, and his evenings at the Hofbräuhaus help him through his suffering. The narrative describes his subsequent manner as contented and kindly, half-grumpy and half-doltish, with the phrase expressing a fatalism through which he “muddled” on. The words do not erase the loss—the tears and the dead child remain plain—but they signal how quickly his life resumes its habitual ease.

Tony’s letters, by contrast, keep their sense of hopelessness. She lists the misfortunes that have accumulated in her life, from Grünlich and bankruptcy to Permaneder’s retirement and the death of the child, and asks what she has done to deserve them. Her account gives the refrain a revealing counterpoint: Permaneder compresses pain into a repeated exclamation, while Tony gives each calamity its own place in a lament. The phrase’s comic familiarity therefore coexists with the real bereavement it accompanies.

Function and Significance

The refrain’s meaning depends on where it returns. In the drawing room it fills silence; while Herr Permaneder waits, it accompanies restless movement, knee-rubbing, and sighs; at dinner it breaks into business and political talk; after the child’s death it names pain that cannot be dismissed as mere conversational awkwardness. The words stay substantially the same, but the circumstances around them make their limits and uses visible.

Its comic effect comes partly from the mismatch between the Buddenbrooks’ formal surroundings and Herr Permaneder’s loud, rough idiom. Yet the repetition also prevents the phrase from being only a caricature. After the loss, he has genuinely been shaken, and the habitual complaint is the language through which the narrative shows his return to ordinary life. The expression thus holds discomfort and avoidance together: it registers hurt, then turns it into a familiar formula that lets him continue.