Death in Venice

This article is about Thomas Mann's novella. For other uses, see Death in Venice (disambiguation).

Death in Venice

Death in Venice novel cover
Author	Thomas Mann
Language	German
Genre	Novella
Publisher	S. Fischer Verlag
Publication date	1912 (1925 translated to English)
Publication place	Germany
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	9780060576172
OCLC	71208736

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

Plot summary

The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early fifties who has recently been ennobled and thus acquired the aristocratic "von" to his name. He is a man dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity, who 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 Hôtel des Bains on the Lido island. While shipbound and en route to the island 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 a wig, false teeth, makeup, and foppish attire. Aschenbach turns away in disgust. Soon afterwards 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. Soon afterward, after spying the boy and his family at a beach, 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 railway station and discovers his trunk has been misdirected, he pretends to be angry, but is really overjoyed; he decides to remain in Venice and wait 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 around 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 whispers aloud, "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 unfamiliar strong odour everywhere, and later realises it is disinfectant. However, the authorities adamantly deny that the contagion is serious and the tourists continue to wander round the city, oblivious. Aschenbach at first ignores the danger because it somehow pleases him to think that the city's disease is akin to 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 – all the while stealing glances at Tadzio, who is leaning on a nearby parapet in a classically beautiful pose. The boy eventually, returns Aschenbach's glances and though the moment is brief it instills in the writer a sense that the attraction may be mutual.

Next, Aschenbach rallies his self-respect and decides to discover the reason for the health notices posted in the city. 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 serious cholera epidemic in Venice. Aschenbach decides to warn Tadzio's mother of the danger; however, he decides not to 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 Aschenbach feels the boy's guardians finally notice, and take to warning Tadzio whenever he approaches too near the strange, solitary man. But Aschenbach's feelings, though passionately intense, remain unvoiced; 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 have his hair dyed and his face painted to look more youthful. The result is a fairly close approximation to the old man on the ship who had so appalled Aschenbach. Freshly dyed and rouged, he again shadows Tadzio through Venice in the oppressive heat. He loses sight of the boy in the heart of the city; then, exhausted and thirsty, he buys and eats some over-ripe 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 in his hotel, feeling ill and weak, and discovers that the Polish family plan 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, Jasiu. A fight breaks out between the two boys, and Tadzio is quickly bested; afterward, he 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 admirer. To Aschenbach, it is as if the boy is beckoning to him: he tries to rise and follow, only to collapse 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.

Origins

Der Tod in Venedig,
first print 1912.

Mann's original intention was to write about "passion as confusion and degradation", after having been fascinated by the true story of Goethe's love for 18-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow, which had led Goethe to write his Marienbad Elegy. The death of Gustav Mahler and Mann's interest in a boy during summer vacation (more below) were additional experiences occupying his thoughts. He used the story to illuminate certain convictions about the relationship between life and mind, with Gustav representing the intellectual. Mann was also influenced by Sigmund Freud and his views on dreams, as well as by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He had visited Venice several times.

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, the god of unreason and of passion – a voluntary act of what Freud would call "suppression". Dionysus seems to have followed Aschenbach to Venice with the intent of destroying him: the red-haired man who keeps crossing von Aschenbach's path, in the guise of different characters, could be none other than Silenus, Dionysus's mythological chief disciple. Silenus' role is disputed, however, since he bears no physical resemblance to the secondary characters in the book. In the Benjamin Britten opera these characters (The traveller, the gondolier, the leading player and the voice of Dionysus) are played by the same baritone singer, who also plays the hotel manager, the barber and the old man on the Vaporetto. 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 was first proposed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and was also a popular motif of the time.

Aschenbach's name and character may be inspired by the homosexual German poet August von Platen-Hallermünde, whose poems about Venice are alluded to in the novella. The character's last name may be derived from von Platen's birthplace, Ansbach. However, it still has another clear significance: Aschenbach literally means "ash brook". The character of Aschenbach was also based partly on the composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler had made a strong personal impression on Mann when they met in Munich and Mann was shocked by the news of Mahler's death in Vienna. Mann applied Mahler's first name and facial appearance to Aschenbach but did not talk about it in public. (The soundtrack of the film based on the novella thus made use of Mahler's compositions, particularly the "Adagietto" movement from the Symphony No. 5).

The Real Tadzio

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!"

The boy who inspired "Tadzio" was 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. See also "Władysław Moes – Tomasz Mann".

Moes was born in 1900 and was aged 11 when he was in Venice, significantly younger than Tadzio in the novella. Moes died in 1986 and is interred at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. He was the subject of a biography, The Real Tadzio (Short Books, 2001) by Gilbert Adair.

Translations

It was first published in English in 1925 as Death in Venice and Other Stories, translated by Kenneth Burke. W. H. Auden called it the definitive translation.

A new translation was published in 2005 by Michael Henry Heim which won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize.

Adaptations

• A film of Death in Venice starring Dirk Bogarde was made by Luchino Visconti in 1971.
• Benjamin Britten transformed Death in Venice into an opera, his last, in 1973.
• The novella was also dramatised by Peter Wolf for BBC Radio 3 in 1997
• It was made into a ballet by John Neumeier on his Hamburg Ballet company in December 2003.

See also

• Love and Death on Long Island
• "Grey Gardens", song on Rufus Wainwright's 2001 album Poses

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).

External links

• Der Tod in Venedig at Project Gutenberg — German language version.
• Online English translation of Death in Venice
• Michael Chanan, Mahler in Venice?
• "Oh Boy. Tadzio, Adzio, and the secret history of Death in Venice" by Allen Barra. December 3–9, 2003
• Picture of real Tadzio and of a 1965 German press article
• 'Tadzio' in 1964
• Death in Venice: a study guide - plot, characters, videos, links, classical references, further reading