ABSTRACT
Beginning with a detailed examination of Thomas Mann’s bestselling novel Buddenbrooks (1901) this chapter moves outward to a wider examination of fin de siècle Germany. It draws on influential novels and plays of the period as well as the thought of Max Weber, Georg Lukács, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. In the process, it traces the growing sense of disorientation and despair that engulfed German society at the turn of the twentieth century. Key themes examined include early twentieth-century responses to Nietzsche’s Death of God thesis, anxieties surrounding the decline of the Protestant work ethic and the bourgeois martial ideal, as well as how the experience of rapid social and economic development shaped early twentieth-century German social and cultural thought.
