Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Mann

Mann lands the blade where bourgeois morality pretends it isn’t: in the wallet. The line is funny in a cold way, because it takes words that are supposed to describe character - “respectable,” “decent” - and reveals them as class-coded costumes. “Respectable” doesn’t mean virtuous; it means insulated, connected, unembarrassed by bills. “Decent” doesn’t mean good; it means modest, possibly struggling, and therefore safely nonthreatening. Mann’s wit comes from making the euphemism speak plainly, then pushing it into melodrama: “I should die...” The exaggeration isn’t just a joke; it’s a diagnostic tool. It shows how reputation operates like oxygen in certain families: take it away, and they feel they can’t breathe.

As a German novelist obsessed with the rituals and rot of the upper-middle class, Mann is writing against the grain of a society that prized Ordnung and propriety while quietly worshipping status. The family’s horror at being called “decent” is a miniature of that world: fear of downward mobility disguised as fear of moral mislabeling. The irony is that “decent” should be a compliment, but in this social vocabulary it’s a downgrade, a polite way of saying you don’t matter.

The intent isn’t to praise poverty or sneer at wealth as such; it’s to expose how language becomes a border patrol. Mann shows how class maintains itself not only through money, but through the terms people accept as praise.