Autumn 1876

Autumn 1876 is the season in which Gerda Buddenbrook and her son leave the family’s Fischergrube residence for a smaller villa beyond the Burg Gate, and Ida Jungmann’s forty years of service to the Buddenbrooks come to an end. The move gathers private grief, household reorganization, and the departure of a long-serving retainer into one moment that Hanno understands as part of a wider pattern of dissolution.

The Move Beyond the Burg Gate

The new home was a pleasant little villa on a chestnut-lined street beyond the Burg Gate, set among orchards and flower gardens. Herr Kistenmaker arranged the purchase for Gerda, who wanted the house, even though he may have paid somewhat too much for it. In autumn 1876 she and Hanno moved there with the servants and some of the old furnishings; many other possessions had to be left behind and became the property of the house’s new owner, an aging bachelor who had decided to settle in Lübeck after long travels.

For Tony, the loss of household furnishings was not an abstract consequence of a property transaction. She had already been distressed by the breakup of her mother’s household in 1872 and by the removal of its furniture from Meng Strasse. The new move renewed that sense of loss: the family could carry some familiar objects forward, but not the household intact.

Ida Jungmann’s Departure

The move coincided with the end of Ida Jungmann’s long place in the family household. She had served the Buddenbrooks for forty years, helping raise one generation and then caring for the young Johann: she nursed him, read him Grimm’s fairy tales, and told him the story of her uncle who died of hiccups. By the time Hanno was fifteen, Ida could no longer help him as she had when he was little.

Her departure was not simply a voluntary retirement. She was dismissed after years of strain with Gerda, whom Ida had never regarded as a full member of the family because she had entered the household later. In her old age, Ida assumed an increasingly authoritative manner as a family retainer and intervened beyond what Gerda considered her proper role. Their disagreements became ugly scenes. Tony pleaded for Ida as she had pleaded for the family homes and their furnishings, but the household conflict ended with Ida’s dismissal and her return to her relatives in West Prussia.

Hanno’s View of Loss

Ida wept bitterly as she said farewell to Hanno. He embraced her, then stood with his hands behind his back, his weight on one leg and the other foot balanced on its toe, watching her go. The posture and inward, brooding look recalled earlier moments when he had stood beside his grandmother’s corpse, when his father died, and when the old family home was broken up.

To Hanno, Ida’s departure belonged to the same sequence of endings as those other losses. He was no longer astonished by the repeated dissolution around him; the outward changes of household life confirmed a pattern he already recognized. The move therefore signifies more than a change of address: in Hanno’s perception, it is another severing of the ties through which family life had once seemed continuous.