Death in Venice

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**Title** **Death in Venice**

Author	Thomas Mann
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre(s)	Novella
Publisher	S. Fischer
Released	1912 (1925 translated to English)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

For other uses, see Death in Venice (disambiguation).

The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig.

1 Plot Summary
2 Allusions
3 References
4 See also
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] Plot Summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early fifties who has recently added the aristocratic "von" to his name. He is a man dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity, and was widowed at a young age. As the story opens, while strolling outside a cemetery, he sees a coarse-looking red-haired man who stares back at him belligerently. Aschenbach walks away, embarrassed but curiously stimulated. Soon afterwards, he resolves to take a trip.

He decides on Venice, reserving a suite in the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido island. While en route to the island by vaporetto (motor boat), he sees an elderly man, in company with a group of high-spirited youths, who has tried hard to create the illusion of youth with dyed hair, false teeth, makeup, and foppish attire. Aschenbach turns away in disgust. Soon afterward he has a disturbing encounter with an unlicensed gondolier — another red-haired man — who keeps repeating "I can row you well" when Aschenbach orders him to return to the wharf.

Aschenbach checks into his hotel, where at dinner he sees an aristocratic Polish family at a nearby table. Among them is an adolescent boy in a sailor suit; Aschenbach, startled, realizes that the boy is beautiful. His sisters, however, are so severely dressed that they look like nuns. Aschenbach overhears the lad's name, Tadzio, and conceives what he tells himself is an abstract, artistic interest.

Soon, the hot, humid weather begins to affect Aschenbach's health, and he decides to leave early and move to a more salubrious location. On the morning of his planned departure, he sees Tadzio again, and a powerful feeling of regret sweeps over him. When he reaches the station and discovers his trunk has been misdirected, he pretends to be angry, but is really overjoyed; he decides on the spot to remain in Venice, waiting for his lost luggage. He happily returns to the hotel, and thinks no more of leaving.

Over the next days and weeks, Aschenbach's interest in the beautiful boy develops into an obsession; he watches him constantly, and secretly follows him about Venice. One evening, the boy directs a charming smile at him, looking, Aschenbach thinks, like Narcissus smiling at his own reflection. Disconcerted, he rushes outside, and in the empty garden says, "I love you!"

Aschenbach next takes a trip into the city of Venice, where he sees a few discreetly-worded notices from the Health Department warning of an unspecified contagion and advising people to avoid eating shellfish. He smells an unpleasant odor everywhere, and later realises it is disinfectant. However, the tourists continue to wander the city, apparently oblivious. Aschenbach at first ignores the danger because it somehow pleases him to think that the city's disease is like his own hidden, corrupting passion for the boy. During this period, a third red-haired, disreputable-looking man crosses Aschenbach's path; this one belongs to a troupe of street singers who entertain at the hotel one night. Aschenbach listens entranced to songs that, in his former life, he would have despised, while stealing glances at Tadzio, leaning on a nearby parapet in a classically beautiful pose.

Aschenbach decides to discover the reason for the health notices posted in the city so he can warn Tadzio's mother. After being repeatedly assured that the sirocco is the only health risk, he finds a British travel agent who reluctantly admits that there is a terrible cholera epidemic in Venice. Aschenbach, however, funks his resolution to warn the Polish family, knowing that if he does, Tadzio will leave the hotel and be lost to him.

One night, a dream filled with orgiastic Dionysian imagery reveals to him the sexual nature of his feelings for Tadzio. Afterwards, he begins staring at the boy so openly and following him so persistently that his boy's mother finally notices, and takes to warning Tadzio whenever he approaches too near the strange, solitary man. But Aschenbach's feelings, though intense, are silent; he never touches Tadzio, or even speaks to him, and, while there is some indication that Tadzio is aware of his admiration, the two exchange nothing more than the occasional surreptitious glance.

Aschenbach begins to fret about his aging face and body. In an attempt to look more attractive, he visits the hotel's barber shop almost daily, where the barber eventually persuades him to let his hair be colored and his face painted to look less pale and more youthful. The result is a fairly close approximation to the old man on the vaporetto who so appalled Aschenbach. Freshly dyed and rouged, he again shadows Tadzio through Venice, despite the oppressive heat. He loses sight of the boy in the heart of the city; then, thirsty and exhausted, he purchases and eats some overripe strawberries, and rests in an abandoned square, contemplating the Platonic ideal of beauty amidst the ruins of his own once-formidable dignity.

A few days later, Aschenbach goes to the lobby feeling ill and weak, and discovers that the Polish family plans to leave after lunch. He goes down to the beach to his usual deck chair. Tadzio is there, unsupervised for once, and accompanied by an older boy. A fight breaks out, and Tadzio is quickly bested; he then angrily leaves his companion and wades over to Aschenbach's part of the beach, where he stands for a moment looking out to sea, then turns halfway around to look at his "lover." To Aschenbach, it seems as if the boy is beckoning him, and he tries to rise, only to fall back into his chair.

His body is discovered a few minutes later. When news of his death becomes public, the world decorously mourns the passing of a great artist.

[edit] Allusions

The novella is constructed on a framework of references to Greek mythology, and Aschenbach's Venice seems populated by the gods. By dedicating himself to Apollo, the god of reason and the intellect, Aschenbach has denied the power of Dionysus, god of unreason and of passion. Dionysus seems to have followed Ashenbach to Venice with the intent of destroying him: the red-haired man who keeps crossing von Aschenbach's path is none other than Silenus, chief follower of the god of unreason. The trope of placing Classical deities in contemporary settings was popular at the time when Mann was writing Death in Venice: in England, at almost the same time, E.M. Forster was at work on an entire short-story collection based on this premise. The idea of the opposition of the Apollonian and Dionysian seems to have been introduced by Nietzsche, and was also a popular motif of the time.

Gustav von Aschenbach's name seems to be inspired by the homosexual German poet August von Platen. The character's last name may be derived from von Platen's birthplace, Ansbach. The character of von Aschenbach may have been based in part on the composer Gustav Mahler (the film soundtrack makes use of Mahler's compositions, particularly the "Adagietto" movement from the Symphony No. 5). Mann claimed to have based Aschenbach's physical appearance, but not his character, on Mahler.

Thomas Mann's wife Katia recalls that the idea for the story came during an actual holiday in Venice, which she and Thomas took in the spring of 1911:

All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice — that he didn't do — but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: "What a story! And a married man with a family!" ^[1]

Mann himself mentioned this story in a letter to his friend Phillipp Witkop on 7/18/1911, as he was working on it:

I am in the midst of work: a really strange thing that I brought with me from Venice, a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist. You say, "Hum, hum!" but it is quite respectable.^[2]

The real boy who inspired "Tadzio" is said to be Baron Władysław Moes, whose first name was usually shortened as Władzio or just Adzio. This story was uncovered by Thomas Mann's translator Andrzej Dołęgowski around 1964, and was published in the German press in 1965. Some sources report that Moes himself did not learn of the connection until he saw the 1971 film version of the novel. Moes was born in 1900, making him a few years younger than Mann guessed. Moes died in 1986 and is interred at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.

[edit] References

Frank Donald Hirschbach, The Arrow and the Lyre: A Study of the Role of Love in the Works of Thomas Mann (The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1955), passim (but especially the section ‘The Loves of Two Artists: Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice’, op. cit., pp. 14ff.).
T.J. Reed, Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.
Lee Slochower, ‘The Name of Tadzio in Der Tod in Venedig’, German Quarterly, vol. 35, No. 1 (January 1962).