Schwartau is a town on the Au River, introduced through Thomas Buddenbrook’s explanation of the stream’s course during an outing to the Riesebusch. In his account, the town’s river is not merely a point on a map: its name recalls an old childhood game of teasing and pinching, giving an ordinary place-name an intimate, painful family association.

Setting and Geography

The Au rises at a spring that Thomas identifies as the source of the river. He explains that Schwartau lies on the Au, and situates the stream within a broader local geography: the Buddenbrooks’ own town, he says, had once stood on the Au before burning down and being rebuilt on the Trave. The excursion’s route crosses a bridge over the Au before the party reaches the Riesebusch, placing Schwartau within the countryside traversed on their day out.

A Place-Name in Family Memory

As the party approaches the base of the wooded hill, Thomas begins recounting the Au’s history, then interrupts himself to point out that the Möllendorpfs and Hagenströms have arrived ahead of them. His explanation turns from geography to childhood memory. When the Buddenbrook boys were young, they would pinch one another and ask the name of Schwartau’s river; because the pinches hurt, the answer was reluctantly given. Thomas calls the memories attached to the river’s name painful, though the anecdote also preserves the rough, teasing intimacy of the boys’ game.

Narrative Significance

Schwartau appears briefly, but its mention joins landscape, civic history, and private recollection. Thomas describes the town through the river, then uses the river to recall the Buddenbrooks’ own earlier history: their town’s former position on the Au and its destruction by fire. The episode places such remembered family experience alongside the present excursion, where the party encounters other prominent local families. Schwartau thus enters the narrative as a real geographical reference and as a trigger for Thomas’s compressed account of place, loss, and childhood familiarity.