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Death in Venice | Introduction

Thomas Mann’s initial inspiration for his novella, Death in Venice (1912), came from German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who fell in love with a teenage girl when he was seventy-four years old and vacationing in Marienbad. However, Mann’s own trip to Venice supplied many of the details for the story. The story concerns Gustav von Aschenbach, an accomplished middle-aged writer who has dedicated his life to his art and the pursuit of beauty, and his love for Tadzio, a fourteen-year-old Polish boy vacationing with his family in Venice. Although Tadzio escapes the cholera epidemic engulfing the city, von Aschenbach does not, and he dies on the beach the day Tadzio leaves. Mann uses the story to explore the relationships between death and beauty, life and art, chaos and order—all recurring themes in his writing. Mann gives von Aschenbach German composer Gustav Mahler’s first name and physical appearance, and Tadzio evokes the Greek gods Eros and Hermes, the latter of which is Mann’s favorite Greek god. The “actual” Tadzio, the boy Mann saw in Venice and on whom he based his character, was identified years later as Baron Wladyslaw Moes.

Von Aschenbach also bears a remarkable similarity to Mann himself. Both live in the same Munich neighborhood, both summer in the Bavarian Alps, and both share the same work habits. Both are also heavily influenced by the classics. The novella itself, full of allusions to Greek mythology, is indebted to the Odyssey and Erwin Rohde’s Psyche, an influential book on Greek religion. Death in Venice remains one of Mann’s most popular works, appearing in numerous anthologies and in Mann’s Collected Works (1960). It has also become a classic of gay literature, even though the story does not explicitly address homosexuality.

Death in Venice Summary

Chapter 1
In the opening chapter of Death in Venice, von Aschenbach, physically and emotionally exhausted by his work, takes a walk by a cemetery on the outskirts of Munich and sees a red-haired stranger with a rucksack. The man wears a straw hat and has the "appearance of a foreigner, of a traveler from afar." Seeing the man awakens wanderlust in von As-chenbach, and he determines to leave Munich for a vacation. Von Aschenbach had previously shunned travel, doing so only for his health and not for any passion or desire to visit exotic places. This desire was different, however, representing an urge to get away from his work, the very thing that has consumed him his entire life.

The date of the story is unspecified, but the narrator writes that the opening scene takes place, "On a spring afternoon in 19—, a year that for months glowered threateningly over our continent " Mann refers here to the numerous diplomatic crises throughout Europe that would eventually lead to World War I.

Chapter 2
In this chapter, the narrator provides an extended character description of von Aschenbach, noting his early success as a writer, his fragile health, and his illustrious family background. All of his ancestors "had been officers, judges, and government functionaries ... devoted to the service of king and country." Von Aschenbach's devotion to his art is a way to control the destructive, darker emotional impulses that can easily overwhelm one's appetites. Von Aschenbach's disciplined nature, his adherence to will and rationality, and the life of the mind, is symbolic of middle-class Europe's repression and fear of the body's desires.

Chapter 3
Von Aschenbach leaves for a resort on the Adriatic about two weeks after seeing the traveler in the cemetery in Chapter One, but soon tires of its "provincial flavor" and journeys to Venice. On the boat, he sees a group of young people accompanied by an old fop with dyed hair and rouge in his cheeks, whose appearance disgusts the writer. Arriving in Lido, von Aschenbach is taken to Venice by a disturbed gondolier who disappears once he has dropped off von Aschenbach. At dinner, von Aschenbach first sees Tadzio and his family, and is overcome by Tadzio's beauty, noting how the boy reminds him of a Greek... » Complete Death in Venice Summary