Goethe-Kino: Buddenbrooks by Gerhard Lamprecht

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s birth, we are presenting adaptations of two of his novels. A newly restored digital version of Gerhard Lamprecht’s silent-era Buddenbrooks (1923) will be screened in our cinema, while Egon Günther’s Lotte in Weimar (1975)—the first DEFA film to compete at Cannes—will be available on Goethe on Demand through June 2025.

Lamprecht’s adaptation of Mann’s 1901 novel—the first ever brought to the screen—is a powerful silent chamber drama. Framed by striking documentary footage of Lübeck’s harbor, the film offers a fresh perspective on the decline of the titular merchant family.

Published in two volumes in February 1901 and spanning over 1000 pages, Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann’s debut novel, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Inspired by his own family history and set in his hometown, the Hanseatic city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, the novel traces the economic, social, and psychological decline of a well established merchant family across four generations, from 1835 to 1877.

Thomas Mann was just 25 years old when Buddenbrooks was published—the same age as Gerhard Lamprecht when his film adaptation, the first in cinematic history, premiered on 31 August 1923 at the Tauentzien-Palast in Berlin. It was an ambitious undertaking to condense the novel’s expansive narrative and large cast of characters into a two-hour long silent film. Collaborating with Alfred Fekete and Luise Heilborn-Körbitz, Lamprecht crafted a screenplay that focused on the generation of Thomas Buddenbrook and his siblings, Christian and Tony. Of the family’s various business ventures, the film centers on the grain trade. The story was also transposed from the 19th century to the early 1920s—a time of social upheaval and economic crisis, culminating in the hyperinflation of 1923.

As the eldest son, Thomas Buddenbrook takes over the family business. With some hesitation, the Senate of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck entrusts him with a major grain deal. A delayed delivery could result in severe penalties—and financial ruin. His younger brother Christian, more of a bon vivant than a businessman, is called back into the firm by their mother—a decision that proves economically disastrous. Meanwhile, their sister Tony is married off against her will to the dubious insurance agent Bendix Grünlich, while Thomas marries Gerda, the daughter of the respected merchant family Arnoldsen—a union intended to benefit both families.

Buddenbrooks established Gerhard Lamprecht as a skilled and confident director, launching a career that would extend well beyond the silent era into the late 1950s. His best-known film is probably the 1931 adaptation of Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, for which Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay. Buddenbrooks was a success, though Thomas Mann initially dismissed it as an “indifferent merchant drama” and described it as “stupid and sentimental.” Yet, in a newspaper article published in 'Der Montag Morgen' on 3 July 1923, he also remarked—perhaps with a touch of irony:
“That the popular world power of film has cast its eye on one of my works flatters me not a little […].”

We are presenting the new digitally restored version, featuring a newly composed score by Marco Brosolo, which had its world premiered, opening the Gerhard Lamprecht retrospective Losers & Winners at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 2024.
 

Germany, 1923. 108 minutes. Silent. With English-subtitled intertitles.
Directed by Gerhard Lamprecht with a new score by Marco Brosolo. With Peter Esser, Alfred Abel, Mady Christians, Hildegard Imhoff.



Please note that we do not show any advertising and that the programme starts on time.