The Magician

The grand homes in which Thomas lives constitute a recurring motif in the novel. His grandparents’ house in Lübeck, which Thomas once hoped to inherit, is Thomas’s Ur-home, or ideal home, as its structural grandness is inseparable from its sure place in time and history. It’s on this house that he bases Buddenbrooks, signifying a lost ideal. After losing this ideal, Thomas searches for homes that can help him reclaim a sense of security, a search that illustrates the theme of Identity Amid Displacement. Like Poschingerstrasse, the homes that Thomas and Katia buy or build tend to be grand, which makes Thomas simultaneously proud and self-conscious. He’s aware that the display of wealth may be seen as ostentatious or mercantile in his bohemian, intellectual environment, yet the narrative suggests that for Thomas, the generous structures represent the roots he feels he lost in Lübeck. The houses thus symbolize the loss of Lübeck.

Though the grandeur of the Poschingerstrasse house makes Thomas uncomfortable, the home that he and Katia build in Pacific Palisades is just as impressive. When Monika arrives in Los Angeles, she comments on the house’s scale: “This house is far too big.