Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Name: Death in Venice
Author: Thomas Mann

Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated and disciplined German writer well past fifty, takes an evening walk through Munich and, after an encounter with a strange red-haired foreign-looking wanderer near a cemetery, is seized by an unfamiliar urge to travel to distant, exotic places. He resolves on a modest compromise: a trip south, not to the tropics he envisioned but to a pleasant resort. His career and temperament are sketched: a man whose entire life has been built on willpower, self-discipline, and the pursuit of dignified, classical form in his art, who has subdued a more passionate, sensuous inheritance from his mother in favor of tireless, scrupulous production, and who has been ennobled for his achievements, including his prose epic on Frederick of Prussia and other acclaimed works. He travels first to an Adriatic island, finds it unsatisfying, and continues to Venice by ship. Aboard he is disturbed by a grotesquely made-up old man pretending to be young among a group of boisterous youths, and by an insolent, unlicensed gondolier who rows him toward the Lido against his stated wishes, murmuring to himself, and vanishes without collecting payment. At his hotel on the Lido, Aschenbach notices a Polish family at dinner, especially the mother's strikingly beautiful adolescent son, Tadzio, dressed exquisitely and set apart from his more severely dressed sisters. Aschenbach is captivated by the boy's beauty, likening him to Greek sculpture. Oppressive, humid weather and the city's strange atmosphere unsettle Aschenbach, and after a wearying excursion into Venice he decides to leave. At the station, a mishandled trunk, mistakenly sent to Como, gives him an excuse to return to the Lido hotel, and he realizes with a rush of relief and joy that it is Tadzio who has made him reluctant to leave. Settled back in, Aschenbach falls into a consuming, half-worshipful fascination with Tadzio, watching him constantly on the beach, framing his beauty through the figure of Eros and the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus on beauty and desire, and even composing a short prose piece inspired by the boy's presence. He attempts once to approach and speak to him but loses his nerve. A smile Tadzio gives him one evening overwhelms him, and alone in the garden he whispers "I love you" to himself. Rumors circulate of a sickness afflicting Venice; officials deny it, disinfectant smells pervade the streets, German guests begin leaving, and newspapers offer evasive reports. Aschenbach, unwilling to risk Tadzio's departure, says nothing to warn the Polish family, even as he learns from an English travel agent the full truth: Indian cholera has reached Venice via trade routes, and authorities are concealing it to protect tourism and commerce. Despite knowing the danger, he resolves to stay silent and remain in Venice near Tadzio, feeling a dark, complicit satisfaction in the city's hidden corruption mirroring his own secret passion. He begins following Tadzio obsessively through the city's alleys, loses him near a well in a small square, and afterward has his hair dyed and his face given cosmetic color by the hotel barber, achieving a garish semblance of youth. He has a violent, degrading dream of orgiastic revelry devoted to "the foreign god" that leaves him spiritually shattered. Thereafter he grows increasingly careless of appearances, eating tainted overripe strawberries, and continues shadowing the boy through diseased, carbolic-smelling streets, reciting to himself an imagined dialogue on beauty, art, and the perilous, sensuous road of the artist addressed by Socrates to Phaedrus. In the final scene given, on a nearly deserted, autumnal beach, Aschenbach watches Tadzio struggle in a rough game with another boy, then walk off alone along a sandbank into the sea and mist, turning back to glance over his shoulder in a gesture Aschenbach perceives as a beckoning summons. Rising as if to follow, Aschenbach collapses in his chair. He is carried to his room, and news of his death is reported to a shocked world that same day.

By Thomas Mann · First published 1912 · Genre: Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction · 75,021 words

First lines

On a spring afternoon of the year 19 -- , when our continent lay under such threatening weather for whole months, Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as his name read officially after his fiftieth birthday, had left his apartment on the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich and had gone for a long walk. Overwrought by the trying and precarious work of the forenoon -- which had demanded a maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigour of the will -- the writer had not been able even after the noon meal to break the impetus of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus which constitutes, according to Cicero, the foundation of eloquence; and he had not attained the healing sleep which -- what with the increasing exhaustion of his strength -- he needed in the middle of each day. So he had gone outdoors soon after tea, in the hopes that air and movement would restore him and prepare him for a profitable evening.

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Death in Venice is listed on Textopian as a novella by Thomas Mann, dated 1912 CE.

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Work type: Novella
Author: Thomas Mann
Date: 1912 CE
Language: English
Genres: Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Character Study, Tragic Fiction
Length: 75,021 words
Structure: 1 section, 382 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)

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Genres

Psychological Fiction — The entire narrative traces Aschenbach's psychological descent into obsession, delusion, and mental deterioration, with deep exploration of unconscious desires and internal conflict dominating the work.
Literary Fiction — Exemplary of high literary achievement through sophisticated narrative technique, refined prose style, dense symbolism, and exploration of complex aesthetic and philosophical themes.
Philosophical Fiction — Engages deeply with questions of beauty, morality, art, discipline, decay, and the nature of human excellence through the protagonist's meditation on these themes.
Character Study — The work is fundamentally an intensive psychological portrait of a single consciousness, tracing the minute fluctuations of Aschenbach's thoughts, emotions, and moral rationalizations.