Elisabeth Mann (Tony Buddenbrook)

Elisabeth Mann in her youth

Maria Elisabeth Amalia Hippolite Mann (born August 26, 1838 in Lübeck , † March 18, 1917 in Dresden ) was the aunt of the writer Thomas Mann and the archetype of the character Tony Buddenbrook in his novel Buddenbrooks .

Elisabeth Mann married the merchant Ernst Elfeld from Uetersen on May 7, 1857 , who, like the fictional character Bendix Grünlich , went bankrupt . However, unlike in Thomas Mann's novel, there was no fraudulent background, but rather the first world economic crisis of 1857 . Elisabeth Mann left him with their two children Olga and Siegmund and were divorced from him on June 24, 1864. In order to make Elisabeth's aversion to Elfeld clear, her lawyers said that she was "more likely to go into the water than into the plaintiff's house". Her daughter Olga died during the divorce process. Thomas Mann's sister Julia reports that the aunt then tried to take a position as a partner in England , but failed because the photograph she was sent in was found to be too pretty and thus represented a danger for the adult son of the house - an episode that Thomas Mann used in his novel.

In 1864 Elisabeth Mann moved to Esslingen am Neckar . There she lived at first in the house of the publisher Rudolf Julius Chelius, who came from Lübeck, and his brother Heinrich Chelius. The latter was the first owner of the house at Roeckstrasse 7, in which the Mann family last lived in Lübeck and which appears as the last place of residence of Hanno and Gerda Buddenbrook in the novel. Chelius' wife is likely to have mediated Elisabeth's acquaintance with the Esslingen merchant Gustav Haag, whom Elisabeth Mann married on April 28, 1866. According to the marriage contract of January 1, 1867, she had significantly fewer assets than her husband at that time. Julia Mann's later claim that Gustav Haag was a dowry hunter can at least be doubted. In addition to the dowry , Haag received favorable loans from the Johann Siegmund Mann company for his business, the JL Bahnmayer hardware store at Webergasse 2. In addition to his share in this building, Gustav Haag also owned and lived in half of his parents' house at Webergasse 1.

Elisabeth Mann's daughter Alice (actually Elisabeth) was born on March 17, 1867. In 1869 Gustav Haag left the hardware store and soon afterwards moved with his family, first to Stuttgart , then to Cannstatt . The son Ewald Siegmund Henry was born there, who later tried to become a bookseller, but failed and was looked after by his mother for the rest of his life. When she died, he took his own life.

Gustav Haag tried his hand at a wine merchant in Cannstatt and was clearly more unsuccessful than the Munich hop trader and brewery shareholder Permaneder in the novel. The Mann company increased its credit for Haag and later withdrew the sum from Elisabeth's inheritance from her mother Elisabeth Marty's assets , but the company went downhill. For reasons that are unclear today, Gustav Haag even ended up in prison. Elisabeth Mann initiated a second divorce process, citing the main reason that her husband had had sex with prostitutes during the marriage - in the novel, however, Permaneder once approaches the pretty servant Babette and is surprised by his wife. In 1881 the marriage was divorced and Elisabeth Mann moved to Dresden , then Johannstrasse 15 (today Regerstrasse 27). Her daughter Alice, who had married a gentleman named Guido Biermann - Hugo Weinschenk in the novel - divorced again in 1894 on the advice of her mother. Apparently Biermann also had to serve a prison sentence.

Elisabeth Mann was initially - just like her brother Friedrich Mann - outraged by the exploitation of her family history in Buddenbrooks; she commented: "Such a stupid goose ... I guess I wasn't." Later, however, she was addressed as Tony with a certain pride. Her basically indestructible nature, which Tony Buddenbrook also allows her sad fate to survive with a certain naivety, is portrayed similarly in Viktor Mann's memoirs We were five .

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  Elisabeth Mann with her daughter Olga and her son Siegmund. Photo by Hermann Linde , around 1862

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  Ernst Elfeld that as a model for the figure of the Bendix Greenish served

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  Elisabeth Mann with her second husband Gustav Haag

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  Elisabeth Mann with her children Henry and Alice

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  Excerpt from the marriage contract with Gustav Haag

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  Webergasse in Esslingen with house no.1

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  The "Stairway to Heaven", which in the Buddenbrooks appear

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  The Bahnmayerhaus

See also

• Husband (family)

literature

• Ulrich Dietzel: Tony Buddenbrook - Elisabeth Mann. A contribution to the history of the "Buddenbrooks" work. In: Sense and Form . Vol. 15, 1963, No. 2/3, pp. 497-502.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Thomas Schneider: The literary portrait. Sources, role models and models in Thomas Mann's “Doctor Faustus”. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2005, p. 41 .