Thomas Mann’s first novel, "Buddenbrooks", is drawn from his own life and experience. Subtitled "The Decline of a Family", his story of a prosperous Hanseatic merchant family and their gradual disintegration is also an extraordinary portrayal of the transition from the stable bourgeois life of the nineteenth century to a modern uncertainty. Published in 1902, "Buddenbrooks" was already a classic in Germany before it was banned and burned by Hitler. In it Mann’s psychology is exact and incisive, his ironic and leisurely style already developed.