Buddenbrooks: Verfall Einer Familie (Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family) was not an overnight bestseller—at first it sold slowly. The first edition of 1901 was in two volumes and was expensive for the time: it cost fourteen marks in hardcover and twelve marks in paperback; the second edition cost six marks in hardcover and five marks in paperback. When the cheaper, single-volume second edition appeared in 1903, with an attractive cover illustration by Wilhelm Schulz, sales took off. By 1910, the novel had already been translated into three languages: Danish (1903), Swedish (1904), and Russian (1910). By 1918, sales of the novel had reached a respectable one hundred thousand. However, it was only when Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, principally for Buddenbrooks, and when Fischer released a Volksausgabe attractively priced at 2.85 marks in November 1929 (predated 1930), that sales of the novel peaked, exceeding one million by December 1930. With total German-language sales of over six million to date, it is Mann’s bestselling novel. It has been turned into three films and a television series.

Buddenbrooks is one of the few novels written around 1900 to have achieved both critical acclaim and widespread popularity, canonical status and a mass audience. Richard Wagner’s operas also achieved this double success, and were one of the influences that shaped Buddenbrooks. Mann often claimed that the Buddenbrooks family saga had a kinship with Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), even if this was only “im Kleinen. Und meinetwegen auch im Komischen” (a modest relation, and perhaps even a comic one). Wagner’s “doppelte Optik” (double optic), the ability of his art to appeal simultaneously to the elite and to the masses, was denounced by Nietzsche, but it was a definite aim of Mann’s fiction. Mann’s positive reappraisal of the “doppelte Optik” occurs in a letter to Hermann Hesse of 1 April 1910, where he states: