Germany Guide
Schleswig-Holstein
Buddenbrookhaus
Address: Mengstrasse 4
Opening time: Daily: April– Dec 10am–6pm; Jan– March 11am–5pm
Price: €7
Website: www.buddenbrookhaus.de
Perhaps inevitably, plain old Mengstrasse 4 no longer exists and in its place there is forever Buddenbrookhaus. Thomas Mann housed the declining merchant family of his Nobel Prize-winning debut Buddenbrooks in this, his grandparents' house – he was born and lived nearby at Breite Strasse 38. All that remains of the original is its late Baroque facade, but that hasn't stopped its postwar replacement from becoming a shrine to Mann and his novelist brother Heinrich, with a museum about the family and their exile during the Nazi years, and above, the Landschaftsimmer (landscape room) and Speisesaal (dining room) furnished as Mann saw in his mind's eye. Such veneration is a far cry from the outrage expressed by Lübeck citizens upon the book's release in 1900. Many perceived themselves in his cast of decadent characters and Mann's description of Lübeck as a "mediocre trading centre on the Baltic Sea" probably won few friends.