Gerhard Lamprecht’s film is the first adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize-winning literary classic about the rise and fall of the merchant family from Lübeck. In contrast to the original novel published in 1901, the film is not set in the 19th century but in the 1920s. With impressive visuals and lavish sets, the film depicts the change of generations, personal destinies and the decline of traditional values. Lamprecht’s BUDDENBROOKS film is regarded as an ambitious project of Weimar-era cinema which helped him achieve his breakthrough as a director.
The future founder of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Gerhard Lamprecht, was twenty-five years old when he took over the direction of BUDDENBROOKS. He wrote the script together with Luise Heilborn (later Heilborn-Körbitz). Her interventions in the material were considerable: she radically reduced the story from four generations to one, condensed scenes, added others, and was not afraid to rewrite the ending. At the request of the production company and against the wishes of the director, the material was consistently modernized and brought into the present.
Thomas Mann wrote to Heilborn that he had great confidence in the seriousness with which she approached the task – and asked her for advice about his royalties: Should he have it paid out in dollars instead of Reichsmarks? […] When Lamprecht and Heilborn read the script page by page to the author, he agreed to all the changes. Nevertheless, Thomas Mann publicly distanced himself from the film adaptation, calling it a “stupid and sentimental cinema drama,” an “indifferent merchant drama” of which “my soul knows nothing.”
Mann’s ambivalent relationship to film in general must be taken into account here. A few years later, in a 1928 interview, he called almost all feature films “silly and sentimental,” but at the same time confessed that he went to the cinema “very often” and that it was a “cheerful passion” of his. He both despised and loved the cinema, and many films moved him to tears.
Kristina Jaspers, in: German Film. From the Archives of the Deutsche Kinemathek. Berlin, 2024
