Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

After reading Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 90 year-old man, 14 year-old girl) and Lolita, (Vladimir Nabokov: 37 year-old man, 12 year-old girl), I decided to read one more example of this specialized genre.

Death in Venice is the story of Gustave Aschenbach, a fifty-something writer, at the top of his career, living in Munich, who takes a holiday in Venice and becomes infatuated with a 14 year-old boy. Then, spoiler alert, he dies. It was published in 1912. Mann, like Aschenbach, was already an accomplished and recognized writer, but 37 in 1912, and 36 (not fifty-something) when the true-life events that inspired his novella took place. Mann had made his name with Buddenbrooks, which had come out in 1901. Immediately following Death in Venice Mann would begin writing The Magic Mountain which was published in 1924. He won the Nobel Prize in 1929. In 1933 he and his Jewish wife fled Germany for Switzerland, and then in 1939 came to the United States, first to New Jersey, and then, in 1942, to Los Angeles.

Death in Venice opens in Munich. Aschenbach is proud of his career but he fears his writing has become a task he produces by discipline, rather than an art connected to the spirit of beauty. He decides to refresh his inspiration by taking a trip abroad. Although he initially imagines a tropical location (islands, “hairy palm-trunks”) he ends up briefly at Pula on the coast of Croatia, and then dissatisfied, goes from there to Venice, where the remainder of the book takes place.

In Venice he stays at the Hotel-des-Bains on the Lido. The first evening, as he waits to go into dinner, he notices a family of children, three girls and a boy who he guesses to be about 14, waiting for their mother to arrive before they go in to dinner. He is struck by the boy’s beauty. The next morning he is disappointed when he sees the three girls at breakfast without the boy and then is made glad when the boy arrives late. That afternoon he watches the boy play with other children on the beach as Aschenbach sits alone. He overhears the name, “Tadzio.”

But the weather in Venice doesn’t agree with Aschenbach. There’s a hint of ill-health in the hot wind coming off the lagoon. After the second day he decides to try yet another spot for his vacation. He arranges to have his trunk sent to the train station and he follows after. But when he arrives at the station he discovers that his trunk has been put on the wrong train. He realizes that the mistake has saved him from leaving town when he really wants to stay. He rushes back to the hotel and resumes his observations of Tadzio. He remains in Venice even after his trunk is returned.

That’s really the whole story. This is, after all, merely a novella. Aschenbach’s infatuation with Tadzio grows more and more obsessive. Eventually Aschenbach takes to stalking Tadzio around the city as well as watching him on the beach in front of the hotel, but the closest they ever come physically is sharing an elevator together with a group of other children. He never actually meets the boy, touches him, or even speaks to him. Though his attraction is plainly erotic, there is no sex. Meanwhile the hint of ill-health in the city becomes an actual outbreak of cholera. The tourists begin to depart. The authorities attempt to cover it up. Aschenbach learns the truth but cannot bring himself to leave, nor to warn Tadzio’s family. The holiday extends into a month. Finally, Aschenbach sees Tadzio’s family’s suitcases stacked in the hotel lobby. They are leaving that afternoon. Aschenbach watches Tadzio play at the beach a final time. Aschenbach dies of cholera as he sits in his beach chair.

The successful, diligent, intellectual author/artist feels dissatisfied with an art disconnected from beauty and passion. So he pursues the romantic aspect of life, loses his mind, makes tragic decisions, feels love (He says to Tadzio, but to himself, “I love you”) and destroys himself. Both paths, detachment and excess, knowledge and desire, lead to “the abyss”. (I read the translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter)

All the events, save the death from cholera, are based on true experiences Mann had the year before writing the story. He visited Venice with his wife, Katia, and his brother Heinrich. They tried Pula before going on to Venice. There are three brief, ominous encounters at the beginning of the story that all happened to Mann: a man who glared at him in Munich, an effeminate old man surrounded by younger men they encounter on the boat to Venice, a surly gondolier who transports them to the Lido then leaves before being paid because he doesn’t have a boating license and is afraid of being caught. All three increase the foreboding as the story begins but are irrelevant to the plot. The incident of the mis-directed packing trunks happened to Heinrich, not Thomas.

And the boy, Tadzio, has been identified as Wladyslaw Moes, Tadzio being a common nickname. A book about him, The Real Tadzio by Gilbert Adair was published in 2001. When Thomas Mann saw him in Venice in 1911 Wladyslaw was not quite 11, not 14 as he is in the story. Death in Venice was published in 1912 and was popular but it didn’t come to Wladyslaw’s attention until 1924 when a cousin read it and recognized the family. Wladyslaw fought in the Polish-Russian war, spent World War II in a German prisoner of war camp, married and made a modest living after the war. In 1971 he saw Visconti’s movie version of Death in Venice and made himself known. He died in 1986.

I’ve always felt a connection to Thomas Mann. I saw Visconti’s movie when I was about 14 myself and read the book for the first time shortly after. As a gay kid in the 1970s I was always desperate for any kind of homosexual content although Death in Venice was neither a satisfactory nor healthy model. I was excited to learn that Mann had lived in the Pacific Palisades, just up the coast from Santa Monica where I lived. I read Buddenbrooks in high school and The Magic Mountain in my 20s. I read Doctor Faustus more recently. And then, when I served as Minister at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles from 2009-2017, I discovered a closer connection. After emigrating to the United States, Mann became an outspoken supporter of free speech and anti-fascism. In Los Angeles he found a natural ally in the then minister of the First Unitarian Church, the Rev. Stephen Fritchman, who served the church from 1948 to 1969. I suspect Fritchman sought him out. Mann was never a member of the church but he did speak from our pulpit a few times, speaking against Joseph McCarthy and in support of the Hollywood Ten. In 1950, Rev. Fritchman officiated at the funeral of Mann’s brother, Heinrich, who had also emigrated to Los Angeles. The service was at the Unitarian church in Santa Monica. Thomas Mann left the U.S. two years later, in 1952, for Switzerland, where he died in 1955.