The story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity—seductions that are at variance with its own traditions—its downfall becomes certain. In scope, richness of detail, and humanity, "Buddenbrooks" surpasses all other modern family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them.