BuddenbrooksMann's semi autobiographical and sweeping family epic. The book that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature Discover Mann's Nobel Prizewinning semi autobiographical and sweeping family epic. The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth century German merchant family wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks