First published: Der Tod in Venedig, 1912 (English translation, 1925)

Type of work: Novella

Type of plot: Symbolic realism

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: Italy

The Story:

Gustav von Aschenbach is a distinguished German writer whose work brings him world fame and a patina of nobility from a grateful government. His career is honorable and dignified. A man of ambitious nature, unmarried, he lives a life of personal discipline and dedication to his art. In portraying heroes who combine the forcefulness of a Frederick the Great with the selfless striving of a Saint Sebastian, he believes that he speaks for his race as well as for the deathless human spirit. However, his devotion to the ideals of duty and achievement bring him close to physical collapse.

One day, after a morning spent at his desk, he leaves his house in Munich and goes for a walk. His stroll takes him as far as a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. While he waits for a streetcar to take him back to town, he suddenly becomes aware of a man who stands watching him from the doorway of the mortuary chapel. The stranger, who has a rucksack on his back and a walking staff in his hand, is evidently a traveler. Although no word passes between watcher and watched, Aschenbach feels a sudden desire to take a trip, to leave the cold, wet German spring for the warmer climate of the Mediterranean lands. His impulse is strengthened by the fact that he encountered a problem of technique that he is unable to solve in his writing. He decides to take a holiday and leave his work for a time, hoping to find relaxation for mind and body in Italy.

He goes first to an island resort in the Adriatic but becomes bored with his surroundings before too long and books passage for Venice. On the ship, he encounters a party of lively young clerks from Pola. With them is an old man whose dyed hair and rouged cheeks make him a ridiculous but sinister caricature of youth. In his disgust, Aschenbach fails to notice that the raddled old man bears a vague resemblance to the traveler he saw at the cemetery in Munich.

Aschenbach’s destination is the Lido. At the dock in Venice, he transfers to a gondola that takes him by the water route to his Lido hotel. The gondolier speaks and acts so strangely that Aschenbach becomes disturbed. Because of his agitation, he never notices that the man looks something like the drunk old scarecrow on the ship and the silent stranger at the cemetery. After taking his passenger to the landing stage, the gondolier, without waiting for his money, hastily rows away. Other boatmen suggest that he might have been afraid of the law because he has no license.

Aschenbach stays at the Hotel des Bains. That night, shortly before dinner, his attention is drawn to a Polish family, which consists of a beautiful mother, three daughters, and a handsome boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach is unaccountably attracted to the youngster, so much so that he continues to watch the family throughout his meal. The next morning, he sees the boy playing with some companions on the beach. His name, as Aschenbach learns while watching their games, is Tadzio.

Disturbed by the appeal the boy has for him, the writer decides to return home. On his arrival at the railroad station in Venice, however, he discovers that his trunks were misdirected to Como. There is nothing for him to do but wait for his missing luggage to turn up, so he goes back to the hotel. Although he despises himself for his vacillation, he realizes that his true desire is to be near Tadzio. For Aschenbach there begins a period of happiness in watching the boy and anguish in knowing they must remain strangers. One day, he almost summons up enough courage to speak to the boy. A moment later, he becomes panic-stricken for fear that Tadzio might be alarmed by an older man’s interest. The time Aschenbach set for his holiday passes, but the writer almost forgets his home and his work. One evening, Tadzio smiles at him as they pass each other. Aschenbach trembles with pleasure.

Guests begin to leave the hotel; there are rumors that a plague is breaking out in nearby cities. While loitering one day on the Piazza, Aschenbach detects the sweetish odor of disinfectant in the air, for the authorities are beginning to take precautions against an outbreak of the plague in Venice. Aschenbach stubbornly decides to stay on despite the dangers of infection.

A band of entertainers comes to the hotel to serenade the guests. In the troupe is an impudent, disreputable-looking street singer whose antics and ballads are insulting and obscene. As he passes among the guests to collect money for the performance, Aschenbach detects on his clothing the almost overpowering smell of disinfectant, an odor suggesting the sweetly corruptive taints of lust and death. The ribald comedian also bears a strange similarity to the gondolier, the rouged old rake, and the silent traveler whose disturbing presence gave Aschenbach the idea for his holiday. Aschenbach is torn between fear and desire. The next day, he goes to a tourist agency where a young clerk tells him that people are dying of the plague in Venice. Even that confirmation of his fears fails to speed Aschenbach’s departure from the city. That night, he dreams that in a fetid jungle, surrounded by naked orgiasts, he is taking part in horrible, Priapean rites.

By that time his deterioration is almost complete. Even though he allows a barber to dye his hair and tint his cheeks, he still refuses to see the likeness between himself and the raddled old fop whose appearance disgusted him on shipboard. His behavior becomes more reckless. One afternoon, he follows the Polish family into Venice and trails them through the city streets. Hungry and thirsty after his exercise, he buys some overripe strawberries at an open stall and eats them. The odor of disinfectant is strong on the sultry breeze.

Several days later, Aschenbach goes down to the beach where Tadzio is playing with three or four other boys. They begin to fight, and one of the boys throws Tadzio to the ground and presses his face into the sand. As Aschenbach is about to interfere, the other boy releases his victim. Humiliated and hurt, Tadzio walks down to the water. He stands facing seaward for a time, as remote and isolated as a young Saint Sebastian, then he turns and looks with a somber, secret gaze at Aschenbach, who is watching from his beach chair. To the writer, it seems as though the boy is summoning him. He starts to rise but becomes so giddy that he falls back into his chair. Attendants carry him to his room. That night, the world learns that the great Gustav von Aschenbach died suddenly of the plague in Venice.

Critical Evaluation:

Together with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann is often considered one of the great writers of the early twentieth century. Mann, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1919, was born into an upper-middle-class German family and left his country in 1933 because of his opposition to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. He later came to the United States, where he taught and lectured. A scholar as well as an artist, Mann shows in his works the influence of such diverse thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud. The problem of the artist’s role in a decadent, industrialized society is a recurring theme in many of his works, including Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kröger (1903), Death in Venice, and Der Zauberberg(1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927).

Death in Venice, Mann’s best-known novella, is a complex, beautifully wrought tale dealing with the eternal conflict between the forces of death and decay and the human attempts to achieve permanence through art. Mann portrays the final triumph of death and decay, but not before the hero, Gustav von Aschenbach, has experienced an escape into the eternal beauty created by the imagination of the artist. The escape of the famous writer is accomplished, however, not by his own writings but by the art of his creator, Mann. Form and order do finally impose themselves on the chaos of his life; corruption and death are transformed into the purity of artistic beauty.

The characterization of a literary hero of his age is subtle and complex. Author of prose epics, philosophical novels, novels of moral resolution, and aesthetics, Aschenbach has created the hero for his generation. He is aware that his success and talent rely on a basis of physical stamina as well as of moral and mental discipline, and his work is a product of strain, endurance, intellectual tenacity, and spasms of will. He recognizes, however, that his writing has been to some degree a “pursuit of fame” at the expense of turning his back on a full search for truth. As the novella opens, Aschenbach is exhausted and no longer finding joy in his craft; he has become aware of approaching old age and death and is faced with the fear of not having time to finish everything he desires to write. Restlessly walking in the beauty of the English Garden of Munich, Aschenbach is inspired to leave his relatively rootless life on a pilgrimage for artistic renewal in Venice, the perfect symbol of human art imposed on nature’s chaos. This journey motif begins with his glimpse of a stranger in a cemetery, a foreigner with a skull-like face and a certain animal ruthlessness.

Arriving at the port of Venice, he discovers that his gondolier is taking him out to sea rather than into the city; the gondolier’s physical description ominously echoes that of the stranger of the cemetery. The gondola itself is specifically compared to a black coffin. The trip becomes the archetypal journey of life to death and of a man into the depths of himself. Aschenbach discovers Venice, the symbol of perfect art in his memory, to be dirty, infected, corrupt, and permeated by the odor of the human disease and pollution spread in the natural swamp on which the artifice is built. Aschenbach’s own transformation to a “foreigner,” one who belongs in Venice, is accomplished at an increasingly mad tempo after the moment when, turning his back on the possibility of escaping Venice by train, he collapses at a fountain in the heart of the city. His death becomes almost self-willed; he dies not because of the plague, not because of his love of Tadzio, but because of his will to live and to create atrophy.

The exterior events of the story, which are minimal, can be properly explained only in terms of the inner conflict of the artist. To produce art, Aschenbach believes he must practice absolute self-denial, affirming the dignity and moral capacity of the individual in the face of a world of self-indulgence that leads to personal abasement. However, he is also a man and, as such, has drives connecting him to the chaos of the formless elements of nature. This inner conflict is objectified in the boy Tadzio, who embodies all that Aschenbach has rejected in fifty long years of dedication to Apollonian art. As his desire for Tadzio becomes obsessive and drives him to neglect his body and dignity, disintegration sets in and death becomes irrevocable. Subconsciously, Aschenbach is choosing to pursue the basic sensual, Dionysian side of himself that he has always denied.

Mann uses dream visions to underline and clarify Aschenbach’s subconscious conflicts. His first hallucination of the crouching beast in the jungle is evoked by the glimpse of the stranger at the Byzantine chapel in Munich. This vision literally foreshadows the trip to Venice and metaphorically foreshadows the inner journey during which Aschenbach discovers the jungle and beast within himself. The second vision on the beach in Venice, in the form of a Platonic dialogue, explores the interrelatedness of art, love, and beauty with human bestiality. In a third major dream hallucination, Aschenbach is initiated into the worship of the Dionysian rite and finally glimpses “the stranger god” of sensual experience, formless chaotic joy, and excesses of emotion. The most striking vision occurs at the end of the novella, when Aschenbach, viewing the amoral beauty of perfection of form in Tadzio silhouetted against the amoral, formless beauty of the sea, accepts the promise inherent in the sea’s chaos as the equivalent of the beauty produced by order and moral discipline. Readers assume the vision to be objective reality until brought sharply and suddenly into the present reality of Aschenbach’s dead body. Ernest Hemingway used this same technique later in his own novella-length study of death and art, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1961).

Mann’s use of natural, geographical symbols also underlines the central conflicts of the novella. Aschenbach identifies the discipline of his art with Munich, a city of northern Europe, and with the snowy mountains. These places are associated with health, energy, reason, will, and Apollonian creative power. Against them, Mann juxtaposes the tropical marshes, the jungle animal and plant life, the Indian plague, the sun and the sea, which are associated with Dionysian excesses of emotion and ecstasy in art. The beast, the jungle, the plague, chaos lie within the nature of humanity and art just as clearly as do mountains, self-denial, will, and reason, qualities that enable human beings to construct artifice upon the chaos of nature. Great art, Nietzsche says in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1909), is a product of the fusion rather than the separation of the calm, ordered, contemplative spirit of Apollo and the savage, sensual ecstasy of Dionysus. This is what both Aschenbach and the reader discover in Mann’s Death in Venice.

Further Reading