SOURCE: Foster, John Burt, Jr. “Why Is Tadzio Polish?: Kultur and Cultural Multiplicity in Death in Venice.” In Death in Venice: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Naomi Ritter, pp. 192-210. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

[In the following essay, Foster maintains that Death in Venice begins to “look beyond the elite English and American literature of the period, glimpsing possibilities for cultural multiplicity and interaction that avoid the shackles of grandiose, self-imposed mythologies.”]

1

Aschenbach is already obsessed with Tadzio when, in chapter 4 of Death in Venice, the writer's block that sent him on his trip to Venice unexpectedly lifts. Responding, as David Luke puts it in the translation chosen for this volume, to “a certain important cultural problem, a burning question of taste,” he finds that he is able to write a short essay (62). But this moment of inspiration soon proves delusive. By chapter 5, the narrator tells us, Aschenbach's nightmarish vision of Dionysian rites in ancient Greece has left his “whole being, the culture of a lifetime, devastated and destroyed” (80). Mann's references to “culture” at both a high and low point in his character's destiny is significant. It suggests that an adequate reading of the story must come to terms with this many-faceted word—must weigh its broader implications and then try to understand their meaning for the narrative. It reveals, in short, the need for a cultural approach to Death in Venice.

Before we can undertake such a reading, however, we need to remember that the very word “culture” cannot be taken for granted. It is, as Raymond Williams remarked when summarizing his impressive work on its changing meanings, “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (87). At different times and in varied contexts, as he has shown, “culture” has bridged a startling array of contrasts, from hard agricultural labor to subtle intellectual cultivation, from the zeal of religious cults to the apparent skepticism of secular humanism, from elite exclusivity to the habits of everyday life. Nevertheless, when we read Death in Venice, we need to take into account yet another layer of complexity—the fact that the word we read has been translated from the German. Of course, in both of the passages just cited, Mann originally wrote Kultur, and it was David Luke who decided on “culture” as the best English equivalent.

Given the barriers that often face translators, who could quarrel with this choice? After all, both the German and English words come from the same Latin root, and this ancient link has been reinforced by a great deal of social and intellectual exchange between the German- and English-speaking worlds ever since. Yet other English versions of Death in Venice have sometimes used other words. For H. T. Lowe-Porter, the authorized translator during Mann's lifetime, it is “a great and burning question of art and taste” that renews Aschenbach's creativity in chapter 4, and in Clayton Koelb's recent version, the Dionysian dream leaves the hero's “whole being, the culmination of a lifetime of effort, ravaged and destroyed” (Lowe-Porter 45; Koelb 56). Whether Kultur is redefined as “art” or as the “culmination of effort,” these translations can be defended, with each choice giving further proof of the lexical richness of “culture.” But comparing Luke's version with others also reveals that no translator can avoid interpretive decisions, however small, when putting literature into another language.

As a result, every translation becomes a cultural event in its own right. Even as translators try to bridge the gap between two different worlds, the texts they produce still bear traces of the distances crossed, as the founders of the new field of translation studies (André Lefèvere and Susan Bassnett) have stressed. Indeed, because one basic meaning of the word is “movement,” we need to enlarge our sense of how often we read literature “in translation.” It is not just a matter of joining different places, such as Mann's Germany with our own English-speaking world; it is also a question of different times. From this perspective, the translator's choice of the best equivalent for Kultur resembles the information we find, for example, in footnotes to Shakespeare's plays. Often even literature in our own language comes to us with interpretive assistance from third parties.

But whatever word the translators of Death in Venice use, once we consider Mann's German more carefully, it becomes clear that nobody could convey all the relevant implications of Kultur. Over the past two centuries of German history this highly charged word has witnessed a shift just as far-reaching as the ones that Williams has described in English. Understanding one special set of tensions embedded in the German word will prove essential for a fruitful cultural reading of Death in Venice.

2

In the later eighteenth century, in the writings of the historical thinker and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), Kultur gained some of the overtones of current multiculturalism. Herder was one of the first figures in the Western tradition to insist that every people had its own Kultur—a language, religion, and set of customs that deserved respect as the basis for that people's identity. In particular, from having lived in the city of Riga on the Baltic borderlands between Germans and Slavs, Herder defended the worth of both peoples against the French elite culture that dominated Europe before the French Revolution.

During the nineteenth century, however, this generous plea for cultural diversity produced ironic results. Among both Germans and Slavs, it led to ever greater stridency and chauvinism, since each group began celebrating its culture to the exclusion of others, as Hans Kohn has discussed (12-18, 21-22). Moreover, because Germany did not exist as a nation-state until its partial unification under Bismarck in 1871, culture itself (rather than the more prosaic notion of a shared citizenship that did not yet exist) could become a special marker of German identity. In this spirit, Germans saw themselves as the Kulturvolk, as the people who took culture seriously. This sense of national selfhood was bolstered by major German achievements in philosophy, music, and literature from 1770 to 1830, as suggested by names such as Kant, Beethoven, and Goethe. A somewhat later source of cultural prestige was the German university system, with its major breakthroughs in scientific and humanistic research. Once the German empire was formed, this national pride intensified and turned harsher, most notably during the so-called Kulturkampf, or period of “culture combat.” Mann was born in 1875, at the height of this controversy, which fed on fears about the potential divisiveness of religious differences between Protestants and Catholics. In this climate, issues of cultural affiliation could become a pretext for doubting someone's loyalty and claims to citizenship. For readers of Death in Venice, an even more telling conflict during this period was the effort to “Germanize” the empire's Polish inhabitants, who had come under German rule a century earlier, following the partition of Poland. In this context, Kultur no longer evoked Herder's Germano-Slavic multiculturalism but rather an aggressive German policy of cultural domination in the East.

More than the English word “culture,” Kultur can run the gamut from cosmopolitan open-mindedness to rigid chauvinism. Mann's own career after Death in Venice bears witness to these fluctuations in meaning, for if he was known mainly as a fiction writer when the story appeared in 1912, he would soon become a culture critic in his own right. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought a crisis in his career: he stopped working on fiction almost entirely and poured his energies into Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a series of essays on cultural topics. At times these writings could suggest the more strident implications of Kultur—for example, when Mann tried to define the real meaning of the war. How else, he argued, could the depth and seriousness of the German Kulturvolk be defended against the frivolity and superficial political posturing of the French and English, neither of whom were cultured but merely “civilized”? Far from being an endowment of every people, Kultur here became a tool for scoring points against non-Germans, especially Western Europeans. From today's postcolonial viewpoint, to be sure, Mann's rhetorical strategy can seem quite ironic. For in defining “civilization” as culture's negative counterpart, he fastens on the very term so often used to justify the “civilizing mission” of the British and the French, whose overseas empires depended on similar invidious distinctions about the cultures of colonized peoples.

By the early 1920s, however, Mann's stance as a culture critic changed dramatically, partly in response to early Nazi-style terrorism and partly to genuine discomfort with some of his wartime positions. Instead of trying to defend an imperiled national essence, he began stressing intercultural communication; he took part in activities such as conferring in Paris with French intellectuals, or writing about German cultural life in The Dial, then a major literary journal in the United States. As a result, new terms such as “democracy,” “humanism,” “world-openness,” and even “civilization” entered his vocabulary. All these words are consistent with the older, more cosmopolitan sense of Kultur, but by now this keyword no longer had the same overwhelming importance for Mann, probably because events in Germany were rapidly making its meaning so problematic. Indeed, on considering the sharper chauvinistic edge that the Nazis had given to Kultur, Mann could even suggest that the word no longer meant “culture” at all but “rebarbarization” (Doctor Faustus 370).

After Hitler came to power, of course, opinions such as these made Germany too dangerous for Mann, and in 1933 he went into exile. In sharp contrast to his stance during World War I, he spent World War II in the United States, where, like the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thirty years later, he was welcomed as a heroic literary opponent to tyranny. The 1940s would mark the high point of Mann's culture criticism, for along with warning against Hitlerism in speeches and radio broadcasts, he explored the disasters of modern German history in Doctor Faustus (1947). This major novel tells the life story of an imaginary composer whose career, like Aschenbach's, raises the issue of how an artist's creativity relates to its historical setting. Among the work's many strands of culture criticism, Mann's collaboration with Theodor Adorno in describing the composer's music and its social implications stands out as especially fruitful. Adorno, a younger exile from Hitler's regime who was both a leader of the so-called Frankfurt School of German intellectuals and a friend of Walter Benjamin (discussed above in Ross Murfin's headnote), has by now become an important influence on culture criticism in the United States (Berman).

3

As the foregoing survey suggests, Death in Venice opens a period of three decades in which Mann would actually live through the perils that merely “seemed to hang over the peace of Europe” when the story begins (23). At the same time, however, the story itself stands out as a breakthrough for Mann as a writer—one that, after a period of some frustration in his career, gave him a much stronger feeling of creative release than Aschenbach ever experiences. For this reason, Death in Venice can seem uncannily prophetic of Mann's later development: it touches depths in his authorship that would only come to the surface between 1914 and 1945, as he lived through the extremities of German history. In his first enthusiasm for World War I, for example, Mann could imitate Aschenbach by writing an admiring portrait of Frederick the Great, Prussia's national hero during an earlier European war (28). Two decades later, on the other hand, like the British travel agent who breaks the conspiracy of silence about the cholera epidemic (77-79), Mann would become a lone voice warning against Hitler.

Because Death in Venice pulls together so many of its author's cultural attitudes along his path toward a hard-earned reaffirmation of diversity and interaction, no single interpretive framework can do justice to Mann's meanings. To unpack just some of the story's varied implications will require instead a deliberately multiple approach—one that is alert to several distinct cultural options within the narrative. This multiplicity, which recalls Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of polyphonic narration as a “world of consciousnesses mutually illuminating each other”, corresponds to what Murfin calls a sense of culture as “a set of interactive cultures” rather than “some wholeness that has already been formed” (Bakhtin 97). We should not, however, equate cultural multiplicity of this kind with present-day multiculturalism. As Charles Taylor has indicated, the core meaning of the latter term involves issues of public policy, educational philosophy, and curricular choice. But the cultural multiplicity of Mann's story implies something more private: the feelings of both unexpected affinity and buried tension that can arise from living among several cultural options, internalizing their diversity to some extent, and attempting to negotiate the differences in one's day-to-day experience.

Cultural multiplicity in Death in Venice challenges one common but hasty assumption of American multiculturalism. That is the charge of Eurocentrism, which is often valid when it criticizes traditional Western education for misrepresenting or slighting other cultures in the world. A brief trace of such misrepresentation surfaces early in the story, when Aschenbach's sudden urge to travel rises up in his imagination as a feverish vision of a South Asian jungle. In this passage the world has momentarily divided into two regions—a European “safe zone” and a realm of danger beyond. The Eurocentric critique goes too far, however, if it leaves the impression (perhaps encouraged by contemporary efforts at European unification) that the various European cultures have always worked together as a monolithic totality, with no major fissures or conflicts among the parts. It is this simplistic sense of identity that, as our exploration of cultural multiplicity in Death in Venice will show, simply did not exist in the early twentieth century. In fact, as already noted, the proponents of Kultur in its harshest forms tried to draw sharp boundaries within Europe, thereby instituting the same hierarchical distinctions that separated Europeans and native peoples in the colonial empires.

W. E. B. Du Bois has usefully highlighted the divisions within Europe when Mann wrote Death in Venice. As an African American living in Germany in the 1890s, Du Bois could observe, with a certain sardonic impartiality, the obstacles to placing the hypernationalistic Europeans of that time in any one cultural category. Many years later, accordingly, when he proposed eight major groups of global humanity, no fewer than four of them were European—the Teutonic, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latinate, and the Slavic, each group walled off from the others almost as much as black and white in Du Bois's United States (76-77).¹ Here, in a nutshell, we find the cultural geography of Death in Venice. In a story whose narrator can sum up Aschenbach's career by listing the vivid human portraits he has created (30-31), it is fitting that each of the story's four most memorable characters should personify one aspect of this geography. Most important, of course, is the return to Herder's original paradigm for cross-cultural contact, to what Du Bois would have called the Teutonic-Slavic tension: the border region suggested by the German writer's silent but avidly observant love for a Polish boy. Nonetheless, in the furious crescendo of events that marks chapter 5, other cultural realms play important roles as well, beginning with the Latinate and Anglo-Saxon domains of the Neapolitan street singer and the tourist agent. But then beyond the human world of the characters there appears the “stranger-god” of the Dionysian dream and his disturbing counterpart, the old-young man on the boat to Venice who anticipates Aschenbach's appearance just before his death.

This cultural geography depends on the idea of Germany as a land in the middle, expressed in the term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe. Germans are not the only people who make such claims of centrality for themselves; consider the Chinese name for their country, which means “Middle Kingdom,” or the overtones of “Mediterranean,” from the Latin for “middle” and “earth.” Nor does the conviction that one inhabits a place in the middle have to lead to an exclusionary sense of cultural preeminence. Ironically, within a larger entity that is called Western, a culture of the middle might find itself at one edge, the very place where a Germany divided by the iron curtain found itself during the cold war.

For Mann, however, as he moved from the chauvinism of Kultur to a renewed awareness of cultural multiplicity, being in the middle had another meaning. It was a cultural site that allowed for interaction in many directions. His postwar novel The Magic Mountain (1924) is perhaps the supreme expression of this outlook, but it already figures in his earlier stories. Thus a northerly impulse, along with a humorous critique of the Nordic racial mystique that would play a fatal role in Nazi ideology, is one major theme of “Tonio Kröger” (1903), whose hero harbors an impossible nostalgia for Scandinavian origins. In Death in Venice, other options come to the fore. When Aschenbach, a privileged voice of modern German culture, meets Tadzio, the street singer, and the travel agent, he encounters influences that come mainly from the East, but also from the South and West.

4

In both this volume and his earlier essay “Why Is Tadzio a Boy?,” Robert Tobin has stressed the undeniable role of homosexuality in Death in Venice, or, to be more specific, the role of what might be called a visually fixated pederastic yearning. In insisting on certain cultural overtones to Aschenbach's fascination with Tadzio, I do not mean to dispute the substance of Tobin's findings. Still, lifting the taboos surrounding the discussion of homosexuality in literature can also obscure other issues that deserve attention.

Thus despite the many Greek motifs that Aschenbach's overheated imagination heaps upon Tadzio, the fact that the boy is Polish never disappears from view. In chapter 4, Aschenbach hears Tadzio's family call him (59), using what we have already been told is the Polish vocative (50), and this “long-drawn-out u at the end” becomes a vivid feature of his Dionysian dream (81). Similarly, when he follows the boy's family into the Cathedral of San Marco in chapter 5, we are reminded that, like most Poles, they are devout Catholics (69). Perhaps the most telling incident occurs in chapter 3, when Tadzio, “glaring forth a black message of hatred,” shows his anger at the vacationing Russians (48-49). Along with the two German powers, Prussia and Austria, Russia had helped to dismantle Poland in the late eighteenth century, and at the time of Death in Venice, it ruled the largest portion of the formerly independent country. By stressing tensions between Poles and Russians, however, Mann avoids a more controversial topic for his contemporary readers: Germany's quasi-colonial rule over Poles in areas such as West Prussia and Silesia—areas that would revert to Poland after World Wars I and II. Even at Aschenbach's first stopping place, an Istrian island where the inhabitants' “wild unintelligible dialect” confronts “a self-enclosed Austrian clientele” (34), the Germano-Slavic tensions remain discreetly veiled.

Not that Death in Venice usually presents Germano-Slavic boundaries in the stark either-or manner of territorial disputes. In other works, Mann often brought members of the two groups into close contact. For example, in “Tonio Kröger,” the hero unburdens himself to his friend Lisaveta Ivanovna, a Russian artist living in Munich. In The Magic Mountain, the main character's boyhood fascination with a Slavic classmate named Pribislav Hippe forms the basis for his adult infatuation with a Russian woman. In Death in Venice, however, this intermingling is even closer, for like Mann (one of whose grandmothers was Portuguese-Creole) and like Mann's wife (whose parents were converted Jews), Aschenbach comes from an ethnically mixed background. Not only did he grow up in the German-Polish border province of Silesia, but through his mother he may be partly Slavic himself. Because his mother was “the daughter of a director of music in Bohemia,” however, it is probably a Czech element that accounts for “certain exotic racial characteristics in his external appearance” (28). Not only does this passage confirm Du Bois's insight that around 1900 the Germano-Slavic boundary amounted to a racial divide; it also artfully mimics Aschenbach's repressive personality by failing to give a name to his “exotic” facial traits. Despite the silence here, however, there are other hints that Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio includes a belated recognition of his mixed heritage. Especially striking is the fact that the boy's father never appears in the story, only his mother—who mirrors the source of “foreign” influence in Aschenbach himself.

Equally important in assessing Aschenbach's attraction to Tadzio is his repeated delight in noticing that the boy may suffer from poor health (51, 77). At first this attitude may seem odd and even ghoulish. But in fact it reveals the intensity of the man's identification with the boy, for Aschenbach, too, had been ill when young and has lived his entire life believing he would die prematurely. The extent to which Tadzio reflects aspects of Aschenbach himself thus becomes clear, and once we recognize this link, we must allow for cultural dimensions to this story of homosexual attraction. Indeed, the text itself insists on the complexity of the man's motives at this point, stating that “he made no attempt to explain to himself a certain feeling of satisfaction or relief” (51). Beyond an erotic element, which Aschenbach soon recognizes easily enough, this vaguely defined feeling leaves room for other, more obscure urges. Aschenbach's delight in watching Tadzio is thus multifaceted; it includes (along with a certain relaxation of his very will to live) the “satisfaction or relief” of acknowledging a mixed heritage previously suppressed owing to his single-minded pursuit of German Kultur.

Nowhere does this element of potential multiplicity emerge more clearly than in the fateful scene in which Aschenbach tries to talk to Tadzio but fails. One might have expected the forging of direct personal relations to mark a deepening of Aschenbach's infatuation. Such is the case, for example, with the growing homosexual bond between Michel and Moktir in André Gide's The Immoralist (1901), a story that otherwise has many affinities with Mann's (Foster). In Mann, however, it is the refusal of speech that is decisive, because it prevents what the narrator says could have been “a wholesome disenchantment” (63). Instead, across the now-definitive silence of a linguistic-cultural barrier, the staring man and the Polish boy experience the “uneasiness and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate” (65). This comment closely echoes the accounts of life in racially segregated or colonial societies, where members of different groups might see each other daily but could rarely speak. So in the end, Aschenbach's growing infatuation requires that he uphold and maintain the Germano-Slavic boundary that he refused to cross when he proved incapable of talking with Tadzio. In chapter 5, this refusal continues to resonate in the peremptory “I shall say nothing” with which Aschenbach reacts to the cholera epidemic (80). In Aschenbach's case, the erotic depends on a carefully nourished but entirely artificial exoticism.

5

The flip side to what might fairly be called a troubled flirtation with cultural multiplicity is Aschenbach's dedication to Kultur, his emphatic but ultimately questionable commitment to German literature as a form of public service. When the story opens, he has recently been ennobled for his writings, and we later learn that certain passages from his books have even appeared in school readers (33). He has become a classic—or, in current parlance, he has achieved canonization. In thus winning official recognition, Aschenbach reveals that he is far from being an aesthete, the writer as “arty” individualist and seeming rebel who is often a conformist in reverse, a type that Mann pilloried with gusto. Instead, Aschenbach conceives of authorship in the mold of his dominant heritage, as the child of “military officers, judges, government administrators, men who had spent their disciplined, decently austere life in the service of the king and the state” (28). Literature, in this view, is not a spontaneous and unpredictable product of poetic inspiration but the expression in another, purportedly “higher” sphere of the basic habits and attitudes of his society's recognized authorities. Not for nothing is it said that Aschenbach writes as if he were Frederick the Great fighting the Seven Years' War (30).

What emerges from the story, however, is the cost of this attitude: a dangerous and probably untenable narrowing of one's sympathies. In the sketch of Aschenbach's career in chapter 2, the fateful turning point comes with “A Study in Abjection” (in German, “Ein Elender”),² the story that repudiates “the laxity of that compassionate principle which holds that to understand all is to forgive all” (32). In his rise to fame, it is clear, Aschenbach has started to advocate a certain hardness of heart, though the full significance of this choice is cloaked by a vague and euphemistic slogan, the “miracle of reborn naiveté” (32). Indeed, given the affinities that the story explores between the “heroism of weakness” of Aschenbach's earlier works and the society at large, this change hints at a corresponding development in official German culture (31). Has Aschenbach's society also begun to lose patience with the ideals of fellow feeling or humane understanding? The full consequences of this shift in attitude lie far in the future, with a statement such as Heinrich Himmler's in a notorious speech to the men who ran the Nazi death camps: “To have stuck this out and—excepting cases of human weakness—to have kept our integrity, this is what has made us hard” (Dawidowicz 200). “Human weakness” toward Jews and other people cast into situations of total ostracism and abjection, or (to use Mann's strong German word) into worlds of Elend, means letting one's heartfelt instincts of human solidarity interfere with the Holocaust.

Although far from foreseeing Himmler's brand of “integrity,” Death in Venice does take great pains to reveal how Aschenbach's new hardness turns against him with a vengeance. Thus his well-honed invectives against moral “laxity” fail utterly to prevent his own collapse—indeed, may even encourage it. As the narrator pointedly asks in chapter 2, Does not “moral resoluteness at the far side of knowledge … signify a simplification, a morally simplistic view of the world and of human psychology, and thus also a resurgence of energies that are evil, forbidden, morally impossible?” (32). Near the end as well, when Aschenbach sits in the deserted square, exhausted from following Tadzio, and eats the infected strawberries that will kill him, the narrator hails him with sarcastic venom as “the author of ‘A Study in Abjection’” (85). A similar but more subtle criticism emerges from the reading experience itself: people who get involved in the story will probably grant Mann's character at least some of the sympathy that he so vigorously denied to his own abject hero. Consequently, not only does Aschenbach's path as a writer lead to a literal dead end, but by refusing to approach his own creations with the same understanding spirit that we take in responding to him, he forges his career on principles that clash ironically with the very method of Mann's story.

Aschenbach's scandalous fate, moreover, raises larger questions about the process of canonization itself. At one level, there is the sardonic discrepancy between his edifying image before the world at large and the disreputable facts. The narrator remarks, “It is well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins” (62). More broadly, there is Aschenbach's confused memory, toward the end, of Plato's recommendation that poets should be banished from the ideal republic. This condemnation he now endorses from personal experience, insisting that “the use of art to educate the nation and its youth is a reprehensible undertaking” (86). Kultur, as a state-sponsored program to exploit the arts for moral uplift and communal glorification, seems to be flawed from the start.

Even more dubious, however, is the role that classical Greek culture as a whole plays in the story. Without the euphoric glow of Greek myth and the alluring contours of Greek statues, would Aschenbach have ever become so obsessed with Tadzio? Indeed, in a crowning irony, even Plato has a hand in his seduction, for earlier in Death in Venice, in two playful passages that contrast sharply with the later rejection of poetry and art, Aschenbach could fondly recall Socratic dialogues alluding to man-boy love in ancient Greece (50, 61-62). Like the cholera epidemic that insidiously attacks the famous city of art that is Venice, an unrelenting “canonization anxiety” infects Mann's story, placing in doubt the cultural process that selects a few human artifacts for special veneration. It is not only Aschenbach's role as a major German writer or just the value of literature and art in a nation's system of education that come into question: even the prime model for Western ideals of classical achievement has fallen prey to a treacherous duplicity.

6

The longing gaze of an elderly German writer at a Polish boy: this basic situation in Death in Venice has raised a host of cultural issues. They range from experiences of multiplicity in border regions to the attempted repression of a mixed heritage, from the simplifications and falsifications of celebrity to anxieties about the real effectiveness of both German and broader Western traditions and values.

Within this array of concerns, Aschenbach's fascination with Tadzio puts a special premium on the Slavic East. From today's more worldwide perspective, and especially after the work of Edward Said, this version of the East may seem limited. But when Death in Venice was written, Germany's eastern border did seem to mark a major cultural divide, one whose full meaning would become apparent in the 1940s, with the catastrophic events that occurred during Hitler's war across Poland into Russia. To this East, Mann then adds a wider, more free-floating “Orientalizing” cultural geography, which includes the South Asian jungle already noted along with some Greek motifs, as we shall see. Another major item on this imaginary map would be Venice's historic role as a gateway to the Middle East, emphasized as early as chapter 1 by the Byzantine mortuary chapel where Aschenbach sees the stranger with a rucksack. All these “Eastern worlds” eventually merge in the cholera epidemic, which takes two routes from India to Europe—a Venetian one by sea from Syria to Italy and a Slavic one by land into Russia (77-78).

The present-day Venice of Mann's story, however, introduces several other cultural options, for it does not suggest the East so much as an uneasy blend of well-bred European cosmopolitanism and inflamed Italian nationalism. The first option is suggested by Aschenbach's elegant resort hotel, a site where many cultures can meet with a minimum of friction. Unlike the Adriatic island, it offers a “large horizon … tolerantly embracing many elements” (43). Yet these elements, said to include “the major world languages,” turn out to be limited to representatives of Du Bois's four European groups: the English, German, French, and Slavic. Still, it is a telling sign of German cultural narrowness that Aschenbach must leave his own country to encounter this variety, even though Germany is closer than Venice to all these peoples. On the nationalistic side, there are Aschenbach's traveling companions from Pola to Venice. These young Italians still live in Austria, the country that dominated northern Italy from 1815 until the unification of Italy in the 1860s, and are taking an excursion to their homeland. Pleasure is foremost on their minds, but when a delay in passing through customs reminds them of their displaced status, they show their patriotism by cheering a squadron of bersaglieri, the crack Italian troops training for possible war against Austria (38). This moment of insistent nationalism looks ahead to Mario and the Magician (1929), Mann's great story of manipulated and corrupted loyalties in Fascist Italy.

In chapter 5 of Death in Venice, both the stubbornly local and the cosmopolitan aspects of the Venetian setting become vivid secondary characters. First the Neapolitan street singer defies the international realm of the resort hotel, which is set apart from the city on a separate island, and where even the employees speak French. His performance, though not actually Venetian, represents an “exhibition of folk culture,” two sides of which are explored in Mann's wonderfully precise account (73). Along with recalling traditions of traveling musicians, of market-place mountebanks, and of Naples as a city of song, the passage evokes a present-day Italy of hit tunes and ambiguous feelings about foreign tourists. This last trait leaves the strongest impression, owing to the disturbing vacillation in the lead singer's behavior. Humble and even cringing while taking money from the audience, he turns insolent in performance, especially in his mocking but infectious last song, which tricks the guests into laughing at themselves. Class and ethnic tensions have forced their way into the leisured and carefree atmosphere of an exclusive hotel. As a vivid reminder of the tenacity of popular culture, moreover, this scene points up the elitist implications of Aschenbach's Kultur. This elitism had also conditioned his preference for Tadzio over Jashu, the other, less aristocratic Polish boy who in the end rebels against Tadzio (87).

As a character, the British travel agent who embodies European cosmopolitanism and who tells Aschenbach the real meaning of the city's “routine precautionary measures” seems rather dull. The contrast between his “sober, honest demeanor” and the “glib knaveries of the south” (77) comes close to a facile stereotype, while praise of his English as “a straightforward comfortable language” borders on condescension. The phrase suggests good common sense and even the power of articulate speech to dissolve error, but little glamour, passion, or charisma. There is also something hollow about the man's criticisms of the Venetian tourist trade, given that he makes his living from it himself. Such ambivalences help explain why Mann could criticize both English and French “civilization” so strongly during World War I.

The travel agent's speech, however, is arguably the climactic moment in Death in Venice. At long last we get one possible explanation for the mystery with which the story began, the abrupt hallucinatory vision of the Asian swamp that launched Aschenbach on his travels. In his plain, matter-of-fact English, the travel agent provides a scientific, even starkly medical interpretation of the event: it was a premonition of the cholera epidemic that will strike Venice, traced back to its point of origin. Equally striking is the fact that this key passage depends on information in a foreign language. The British travel agent thus reaffirms the vital importance of cross-cultural communication and cultural multiplicity, but (because Aschenbach disregards his advice) he does so at a level beyond the protagonist's limited point of view. In the process, this scene hints at Mann's own path, during the 1920s and 1930s, beyond the national exclusivity of German Kultur.

7

For many readers, however—and perhaps especially for English-speaking readers of modern literature—the most significant moment in Mann's story does not come when the travel agent reveals the truth but a bit later, when the Dionysian dream overwhelms Aschenbach. This powerful passage moves the reader abruptly to a new plane, away from the harsh medical facts of contemporary Venice into a realm of myth, specifically of the same ancient Greek myths that have already entranced Aschenbach. Such abrupt transitions have often been seen as paradigmatic for the so-called modernist literature of the early twentieth century (Eysteinsson 9). Thus, in an influential discussion of James Joyce's use of Greek materials in Ulysses, T. S. Eliot could speak of the “mythical method” and its potential for “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Eliot 177). By a telling coincidence, this statement appeared in The Dial in November 1923, just months before Kenneth Burke's version of Death in Venice came out in the same American journal in March, April, and May of 1924. Readers who had seen Eliot's comparison of Joyce's new literary technique with a major scientific discovery would thus find Mann's use of a similar approach in a story written more than a decade earlier. This convergence between Death in Venice and two major modern writers in English undoubtedly helped to make Mann's story a classic in translation.

Beyond the mythical method as a literary technique, however, and even beyond the central role that myths play in defining specific cultures, Aschenbach's Dionysian dream should interest the cultural critic for several specific reasons. First there is the key phrase, which Mann italicizes for further emphasis, that refers to Dionysus as “the stranger-god!” (81). The historical Dionysus cult was in fact foreign to ancient Greece—indeed, was sometimes thought to have come originally from India, just like the cholera epidemic. But the phrase also bears directly on Aschenbach's character. For “his culture of a lifetime,” based on his sense of Germanic uniqueness and exclusivity, has been shaken throughout the story by a variety of overfamiliar or aggressive strangers. Beginning with the traveler at the mortuary chapel in Munich, the series continues with the young-old man on the boat, the unlicensed gondolier whom Aschenbach encounters in Venice, and the street singer at the resort hotel. But the most unsettling stranger of them all has been Tadzio. As we have seen, he exposes the falsity of Aschenbach's public persona, not just as a morally edifying figure who could never indulge in a scandalous sexual adventure but as the voice of a German Kultur that felt itself utterly distinct from the Slavic East. This boundary, so powerful in the official discourse of the time, turns out in Aschenbach's case to be artificial and untenable. As the Dionysian dream reveals with utmost clarity precisely because it is a dream, the cultural stranger is in fact no stranger; he is lodged deep within Aschenbach himself.

In making this point, and here is the second key feature of the Dionysian dream, Mann's story overlaps with the cultural analysis in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (1870). Nietzsche is still a highly controversial figure, whose full significance cannot be explored in this essay. But by the time of the composition of Death in Venice, Mann had been reading Nietzsche with intense fascination and ambivalence for twenty years. The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, had focused on issues drawn from his original training in the Greek classics, especially the meaning of the Dionysus cult for ancient Greek drama and, by extension, for the general interpretation of culture. Mann often disagreed with Nietzsche, but, for both of them, an interest in the Dionysian led to similar views on several basic issues: that culture was mixed and multiple, not pure and single; that it was open in major ways to outside influence, not closed off in splendid isolation; and that it was psychologically complex, not morally simplistic.

All of these points, we have seen, enter into Mann's portrayal of Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio. They are rounded off, moreover, by one further convergence with Nietzsche. In his last year of sanity, at the height of efforts to Germanize the Poles, Nietzsche declared (probably with no basis in fact, but certainly with the desire to goad German hypernationalists) that his family name was Polish (Nietzsche 1968b, 681). With Aschenbach and Tadzio, Mann returns to this polemic but presents it from a different angle. Rather than hyperbolically proclaiming the fact of cultural connection across a rigid boundary, Mann portrays an abrupt, overwhelming outbreak of hidden links—an outbreak whose very force depends on a prior situation of stern repression. This outbreak is all the more important because it anticipates Mann's own route, over the next thirty years of turmoil and disaster, beyond the confines of cultural chauvinism. Indeed, at our present moment of heightened and often polarized views of cultural identity, this affirmation of cultural multiplicity is well worth recalling.

For English-language readers, however, Mann has one further twist in store. If Burke's translation of Death in Venice invites us to place the story in close proximity to the “mythical method” of Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses, Mann nonetheless differs from these two classics of Anglo-American modernism, for he responds more critically to myth. One notable expression of this critique is the jarring image of the young-old man who welcomes Aschenbach to Venice and whose outer appearance Aschenbach later mimics (36, 82-83). This figure is, of course, a vivid reminder of age differences both in Aschenbach's man-boy love and in similar heterosexual relationships. (Before writing Death in Venice, Mann had toyed with the idea of retelling the elderly Goethe's infatuation with a young woman.) Yet just as the barber's cosmetics have turned the aging writer into a stylish, young-looking dandy, so the present-day cholera epidemic and the ancient Dionysian orgy dissolve into each other in the last pages of the story. Aschenbach's uncanny masquerade thus functions as a disquieting analogy for the mythical method and its startling juxtapositions of the antique and the contemporary.

Indeed, because the young-old image is so discordant—at its first appearance, it could even awaken “a spasm of distaste” in Aschenbach (36)—Death in Venice conveys a deeply ironic attitude toward the mythical merging of different time layers. Although Mann himself exploits the method, he refuses to present it as a purely positive breakthrough for modern art. This ambivalence persists in Aschenbach's final vision of Tadzio as a mythlike “pale and lovely soul-summoner” (88), even as we know from the travel agent that he is experiencing the final symptoms of the gentler, less virulent form of cholera (78-79). In the years to come, the space opened up by this mixed attitude toward myth would give Mann a sharpness of insight about the myth-driven politics of Hitler and other fascists that many Anglo-American modernists would lack. As a major work of world fiction translated into English, Death in Venice does anticipate some of the most daring works of early-twentieth-century modernism. In several important ways, however, it also begins to look beyond the elite English and American literature of the period, glimpsing possibilities for cultural multiplicity and interaction that avoid the shackles of grandiose, self-imposed mythologies.

Notes

1. We should realize that in German, as in English, the words for “Slav” and “slave” are closely related, reflecting the fact that before the rise of the African slave trade in the Renaissance, the medieval European experience of slavery had centered on the sale of Slavs to the Muslim world. Mann's text is more explicit than Luke's translation in reminding readers of this historical linkage. Thus in describing the Russian family's servant in chapter 3, he emphasizes her “Sklavenmanieren” (“slavish manners” instead of “the manner of the born serf” [48]). Similarly, when Jashu fights with Tadzio near the end, he does so in retaliation for what is called “eine lange Sklaverei” (“a long period of slavery” rather than a “long servitude” [87]).

2. If translating Kultur as “culture” seems deceptively easy, this title shows how translators can be baffled by a word with no obvious English equivalent. In German “Ein Elender” is simple and vigorous, but choices like “The Wretch” (Burke), “The Abject” (Lowe-Porter), and “A Man of Misery” (Koelb) show no consensus about how to put it into English. Given the German word's root connection with social ostracism, something like “An Outcast” or “Beyond the Pale” might be preferable. The latter choice would bring out the ironic analogies between Aschenbach's story and his own scandalous infatuation with Tadzio, which would certainly place him beyond the bounds of respectability if the infatuation became known. It would also suggest the point I argue later, that the story obliquely addresses moral issues later raised by the Holocaust, as Jews in Eastern Europe were not supposed to leave the so-called Pale of Settlement.

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