The Magician

One of the novel’s main characters is Katia, Thomas’s beautiful, witty, and self-assured wife. She has black hair, “large, expressive eyes” (58), and a slim, boyish figure. For Thomas, Katia and her family of birth are “the sort of people he want[s] to be” (59). The only sister among several brothers, Katia is a natural leader. Thomas notes that when she sits with her family at the opera, she occupies a place in the front of the box with her brothers, while the parents sit in the back.

When Thomas first proposes marriage to Katia in a letter, she replies that she’s “[p]erfectly happy as she is […] She [has] no desire for a husband or for a role as manager in the domestic sphere” (68). Her response indicates that though she’s eight years younger than Thomas, she has great clarity of thought. Thomas recognizes this quality in Katia, which is why he increasingly leans on her opinions throughout their marriage. Not only does he first share all his works with her, soliciting her criticism, but he also leaves the building of their homes largely to her. Katia is especially close to her twin brother, Klaus, and the two are often sealed in their bubble of irony and banter. However, Katia becomes more serious after the birth of her first child, Erika.

Although Katia is of Jewish origin, she isn’t religious. However, the events of the 1930s and 1940s force Katia to contend with her heritage. As the daughter of wealthy parents and the wife of a famous writer, Katia existed in a relatively safe bubble before the rise of Nazism. Now, she’s jolted out of her sanctuary, making her break with Germany even more emotional. In an important sequence, Katia calls out her American hosts for ignoring her Jewish heritage and reminds them that “[t]he thought that I ever might have been German fills me with shame” (342). Katia also has an acerbic, sharp wit. When an overbearing archduchess annoys Katia, Thomas, and Heinrich during their Italian holiday, Katia notes, “I would like to see her in the water […] Water has a way of splashing on the mighty in a way that does them no favors” (94).

One of Katia’s most endearing qualities is her deep compassion for Thomas. Realizing her husband’s undisclosed (and possibly unconsummated) attraction to men, she gives Thomas space to interact with the men he likes. Like Thomas, Katia’s biggest weakness may be her snobbery, as interactions with Heinrich’s second wife, Nelly, reveal: When Nelly puts on a jazz record, Katia scolds her for ruining the evening’s mood. Despite these human flaws, Katia is a compassionate and rounded character, growing into wisdom as the plot progresses.

Heinrich, Thomas’s older brother, is also a writer. Presented as a foil to the more measured Thomas, Heinrich is fiery, expressive, and radical in his political views. He’s fiercely competitive with Thomas, even trying to quash his brother’s writing aspirations at the beginning of the novel. Thomas is heartbroken when he discovers that Heinrich wrote to their mother, Julia, that Thomas’s verses were “[e]ffeminate, sentimental poeticizing” (39). Later, when Thomas asks Heinrich for his opinion on Buddenbrooks, Heinrich tells him that novels should be less concerned with private life.

Amplifying Heinrich and Thomas’s professional rivalry are their political differences. Heinrich is an unabashed socialist, prescient about Germany’s slide toward fascism as early as the first years of the 20th century. He tells Thomas that Germany’s ambition “[w]ill end badly” (50). Thomas, conversely, is initially a nationalist, a great believer in the loftiness of his home country. The brothers’ professional and personal differences are reflected in the chasm between their personalities. Thomas notes that, unlike him, Heinrich is surer of himself, more eager to take chances, more loved by their mother, and taller and fairer of complexion than Thomas.

However, the brothers have one point of similarity. Like Thomas, Heinrich has a rich inner life, driven by eroticism. When the brothers are living together in Italy, Thomas discovers drawings of naked women underneath Heinrich’s notebook, indicating that, like Thomas, Heinrich has deep desires that power his work and imagination. In Thomas’s eyes, Heinrich is more expressive than him. Their younger sister, Carla, is like a daughter to Heinrich, and her death plunges the emotional Heinrich into grief. Thomas wishes he could access his grief as easily as Heinrich. As the novel progresses, Thomas’s professional decline matches Heinrich’s decay. Though Heinrich was feted in Europe in the 1930s for his prescient warnings about Nazism, by the time the war ends, interest in Heinrich’s work has declined. By the time Heinrich moves to the US, he’s living in penury. Despite the brothers’ adversarial relationship, Heinrich’s death hits Thomas hard. It becomes clear to him that Heinrich’s criticism was crucial to his development. Thus, Heinrich is a catalyst for Thomas’s development.

Heinrich and Thomas’s mother, Julia Mann (née da Silva-Bruhns), is beautiful, elegant, and dramatic, her mannerisms drawing attention in the constrained atmosphere of Lübeck. Thomas often refers to Julia as “foreign and mysterious” (16), which establishes her as an outsider figure. Because she was born in a Catholic country and loves art, Julia is a slightly suspicious figure, not just to the people of Lübeck but to her husband, the senator, Johann Mann. In an act of betrayal, the senator appoints financial guardians for Julia after his death. The narrative establishes that Lübeck’s patriarchal milieu thwarts Julia. An accomplished pianist, Julia encourages her children to learn music.

Julia’s escape to Munich is a journey toward liberation. In an ironic sequence, Thomas mimics his father’s censoriousness toward Julia when he returns to Munich. Thomas is “taken aback” that his mother is dressed like a “much younger woman” (35). Julia’s free-spiritedness and independence only grow from this point on, and she ultimately settles down by herself in Polling, becoming the most popular hostess in the small village. Despite his concern about what he considers capriciousness in his mother, Thomas credits her for his artistic temperament. However, he recognizes that his mother’s great flaw is that she tends to play her children against each other. Nevertheless, Julia’s biggest contribution to her children’s development is igniting their imagination, as is obvious in Thomas’s recounting (at the novel’s end) of the story of Buxtehude, which Julia used to tell him and his siblings.

Thomas and Katia’s oldest son and second child, Klaus, is a tragic figure in the novel because of his untimely death at age 42 in 1949. Handsome, argumentative, and radical in his thinking, Klaus is open about his attraction to men. He’s extremely close to his sister Erika, who is a year older, and their relationship mimics the close ties between their mother, Katia, and her twin, Klaus. Thomas is intrigued by his son’s intelligence and beauty, and even writes in his journal about his uneasy attraction to the teen Klaus. However, as Klaus grows into his thirties, Thomas and Katia become increasingly concerned about his use of drugs. During this period, Klaus has trouble sleeping, often moving around at night and bumping into objects. Because of Klaus’s insistence that his father make openly radical political stances, he and Thomas develop a strained relationship.

Outspoken, sensitive, and courageous, Klaus enlists in the US Army and reports on Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Klaus is stricken by the blasé attitude of some intellectuals in Germany who still refuse to condemn Hitler, such as Gustaf Gründgens, a stage actor who was Erika’s first husband and Klaus’s former lover. Thomas notes Klaus’s tendency to get aggravated by political matters at the expense of his health. Instead of focusing on his heartbreaks and well-being, Klaus spends his time “[g]etting into a state of fury over public events” (372). Klaus dies by overdose, leaving Thomas and Katia bereft. Despite his tumultuous life, Klaus leaves behind a body of important work, such as the novel Mephisto (1939) and Escape to Life (1939), a book of essays coauthored with Erika about the lives of German intellectuals in exile.