SOURCE: Otis, Laura. “The Tigers of Wrath: Mann's Death in Venice as Myth and Medicine.” In Teaching Literature and Medicine, edited by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, pp. 243-51. New York: Modern Language Association, 2000.

[In the following essay, Otis discusses similarities between Death in Venice and Robert Koch's 1884 articles on germ theory.]

While reading Robert Koch's articles on germ theory, I made a startling discovery. In 1884, Koch described the Ganges delta, the area he envisioned as the origin of cholera, as follows: “Luxuriant vegetation and abundant animal life have arisen in this uninhabited area. This area is shunned by humans, not only because of floods and tigers, but principally because of the pernicious fever that befalls everyone who remains there even for a short time” (166). The passage seemed familiar to me, and, turning to Death in Venice (1911), I compared Thomas Mann's description with Koch's: “His desire acquired vision. […] He saw, saw a landscape, a tropical swamp under a vaporous sky, moist, luxuriant, and monstrous, a sort of primitive wilderness […] saw the eyes of a lurking tiger sparkle between the gnarled stems of a bamboo thicket; and felt his heart pound with horror and mysterious desire” (5).¹ Both writers, one a bacteriologist who wrote no fiction, the other a novelist who never studied science beyond the high school level, use the word üppig (“luxuriant”) to convey what they perceive as a dangerous overabundance of life, and both specifically refer to tigers. What might this mean?

Mann's Death in Venice has been praised as a work of genius for its ability to describe sexuality and disease on realistic, psychological, and mythological levels simultaneously (Gronicka; Luke; Reed).² Besides re-creating the invasion of Europe by a foreign god, it describes the literal, physical action of a real pathology. Often it is taught in conjunction with Plato's Phaedrus, Euripides's The Bacchae, and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, texts on which it builds. At the same time, Death in Venice incorporates contemporaneous medical discourse and at moments owes as much to Koch as it does to Plato or Nietzsche. Koch's writing, like Euripides's or Nietzsche's, is a strand from which Mann has woven his story, a strand that will lead students into his text and help them consider how stories are made. Until now, this bacteriological dimension of Mann's story has remained largely unexplored. Presenting students with Koch's scientific article on cholera while they are reading Death in Venice has proved extremely valuable to me as a way to study how the most highly esteemed scientific and literary texts deal with the same cultural fears and rely on the same metaphors and images. The juxtaposition suggests that Koch's article, like Death in Venice, is a story that has been made.

Koch and Mann may be using the same metaphor because the culture of European imperialism offered its language and mythology to artists and scientists alike. In the late nineteenth century, bacteriological discoveries provided Europeans with a new focus for long-standing colonialist fears. The fear of native reprisal merged with the fear of native microbes, which threatened to colonize Europe as Europeans had colonized Africa and Asia (Latour; Arata).³ In Koch's and Mann's descriptions the tiger becomes what Stephen Arata has called “imperial ideology mirrored back as a kind of monstrosity” (634); the violent beast waiting to attack, studying its prey, represents both the imperial conquest and the repressed desires of European invaders.

Koch discovered the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882 and became a hero of the German empire in 1884 with his triumphant journey to India and identification of the comma bacillus that causes cholera. His bacteriological discoveries and the hygiene plans they inspired quickly became a matter of national pride (Brock 167; Genschorek 115). Between 1896 and 1906, he represented the Reich on numerous missions both in Germany's new African colonies and at home, seeking the bacteria that caused diseases and trying to stop their spread. Because the government promoted Koch's achievements as evidence of German superiority in science, his activities received great attention in the press, so that Mann need not have gone to scientific journals to learn about the latest developments in bacteriology.⁴ Examining newspaper articles from 1892, one sees that the comparisons Mann would make in 1911 were already being made by writers around him. One journalist wrote: “The Fleete [waterways] in Hamburg are worse than the canals in Venice, and Venice, too, is a preferred city of pestilences and all diseases” (Kleiner Journal 30 Aug. 1892).⁵

Mann's notes for Death in Venice reveal a genuine interest in the comma bacillus, its spread, and its action in the body. Although there is no proof that Mann read Koch's article, his notes on cholera's spread from India to Europe follow Koch's 1884 account so closely that Mann must have been working either with the original report or with a journalistic synopsis of it. Mann mentions that microscopic examination of the intestines of cholera victims uncovers “numerous bacteria, among them the specific causative organisms” (Reed, Thomas Mann 109, my trans.).⁶ The bacteria move from one person to another, he notes, either by direct contact or through contaminated water, so that those who distributed food presented a particular danger: “[I]f there is a vegetable salesman or a milk saleswoman among those taken ill then comma bacilli can infect the wares” (Death 87).

Frequently Mann's versions of Koch's theories provide ironic echoes of newspaper accounts.⁷ By comparing Mann's description of how one catches a disease with descriptions by Koch and contemporary journalists, students can discuss how—if at all—creative writing may be distinguished from “objective” writing. By looking for differences, they can begin to consider what irony and fiction are. The degrees of freedom available in fictional writing, particularly the opportunity to develop ironic resonances, allow creative writers to question cultural and scientific assumptions even as they use the same words employed by scientists and journalists. Mann's story encourages readers to rethink a fundamental principle of germ theory and colonialism: that cholera—and the rage, violence, and decay associated with it—is a foreign disease, with its “homeland” in Asia.⁸

Mann emphasizes the disturbing closeness of Europe and Asia, of Venice and India, by using the same word to describe each. Üppig, connoting an exotic, overgrown luxuriance, recurs throughout the story, tying Aschenbach's initial vision not just to Koch's description of the Ganges delta but also to the Italian city, the beckoning of death, and the nature of art. Mann's choice of the tiger as symbol also links his text to Koch's but invites readers to interpret this symbol on multiple levels. Native to India, known for its stealth and the ferocity of its attacks, the tiger suggested to Europeans of 1911 the oppressed colonials and foreign bacteria lying in wait in jungles, ready to devour them not just in the colonies but even on European soil. Mann's two descriptions of the tiger express the anxiety of the imperial age, that of being watched and studied by a hungry and ultimately more powerful life-form. The inevitable attack is all the more deadly because Aschenbach's “European soul” has suppressed and denied the stalker—the tiger, the microbe, the choleric native, or, more likely, the internal threat of his own libido—for so long (Death 5). Aschenbach, who planned to travel “not quite all the way to the tigers,” finds that the tiger comes to him (Death 6).

Even as the tiger suggests India, the “homeland” of cholera, its appearance makes Aschenbach's demise mythological. According to Greek mythology, the tiger was a sacred animal to Dionysus; Zeus once sent a tiger to help Dionysus cross the Tigris River in his journey from East to West (Bell 254; Krotkoff 448; Parkes 78). In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche invites his readers, “[P]ut on wreaths of ivy, put the thyrsus into your hand, and do not be surprised when tigers and panthers lie down, fawning, at your feet. […] You shall accompany the Dionysian pageant from India to Greece” (124). Besides suggesting a tiger, Mann's description of cholera's movement to Europe echoes Euripides's account of Dionysus's journey to Greece, particularly in Mann's phrase “shown its grim mask” (Death 54) and in the reference to Persia (see Dierks 22-29; Parkes 77-78). Mann's reference to Dionysus in his notes as “a foreigner invading from without by force” indicates that from the outset he conceived of the bacterium and the god as analogous conceptions of an extrinsic, penetrating force (Dierks 208; my trans.).⁹

The belief that Dionysus and the wild, libidinal impulses associated with him come from Asia and the belief that cholera has a homeland in the Ganges delta can be read as two incarnations of the same idea: the conviction that evil or destructive forces must originate outside the self. But even as Mann's tale of disease incorporates Koch's vision of cholera as a foreign, invasive force and interweaves that vision with a mythological Dionysian invasion, Death in Venice presents the chaos, luxuriance, and wrath associated with cholera as intrinsic to its German protagonist. With the words “desire acquired vision,” Mann introduces a psychological landscape in which the Ganges delta—which Aschenbach, Mann, and Koch have never actually seen—epitomizes “horror and mysterious desire” projected onto it by the German mind (Mann, Death 5; see Cadieux 59; Krotkoff 448). Mann's story mocks the assumption that sexual drives or foreign peoples can be controlled and excluded from one's definition of self.

While Koch and Mann use the same animal to depict the origin of a disease, Mann's story is much more than a fictional adaptation of a scientific idea. His writing, unlike Koch's, encourages readers to question the ideology on which it builds. In providing this cultural and scientific context in the classroom, teachers should avoid implying that the bacteriology explains the story, gives it its meaning. I have found that this impression of explanation tempts students from all fields, and one way to undermine it is to ask why Koch takes the trouble, in an otherwise straightforward article tying a disease to a particular microorganism, to describe cholera's homeland in such a vivid way. Why mention the tigers?

Koch's determination to conquer an “Asian” disease by traveling to its geographical source can be compared to contemporary attempts to pinpoint the origin of AIDS or Ebola in Africa, as depicted in Richard Preston's Hot Zone. The quest for the origin of a disease might be an attempt to attribute blame, yet from an epidemiological standpoint such a search could yield information that saves lives. Students can discuss how practical and humanitarian concerns and cultural prejudices merge in decisions about how best to spend money to understand and defeat epidemics.

In an undergraduate course on literature and medicine, Death in Venice and Koch's writing can provide a valuable opportunity to create dialogue between students of literature, trained to analyze the “form” of texts, and science students who will be heading for the laboratory right after class, trained to read for “content.” Koch's and Mann's tigers provide powerful evidence that narratives we read for style and narratives we read for content incorporate the same images and ideas. Should we therefore read all texts the same way? Encouraging students to discuss the similarities between texts classified as literary and texts classified as scientific can lead students to question the ways in which they themselves are classified as readers and scholars.

Notes

1. I prefer Clayton Koelb's translation of Death in Venice because it is direct and literal and brings out the strongly sexual implications of Mann's phrasing. For a more thorough analysis of Mann's and Koch's representations of cholera, including comparisons of the original German texts, please see my study Membranes.

2. In a letter to Carl Maria Weber in 1920, Mann refers to “the naturalistic attitude of my generation, which is so alien to you younger writers: it forced me to see the ‘case’ as also pathological and to allow this motif (climacteric) to interweave iridescently with the symbolic theme” (Death 203).

3. The German colonial drive in the mid 1880s coincided with the heyday of bacteriological discoveries, and German colonialists quickly found that unicellular natives provided a much greater threat to their occupation than did human ones. It is particularly interesting, in this light, to compare Death in Venice with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, another text of the same period that explores the relation between the jungle and the “European soul” (Mann, Death 5; see McIntyre; Vidan).

4. In August 1892, a cholera outbreak in Hamburg killed thousands in just a few weeks, attracting international attention. The government sent Koch to investigate, and the national press provided widespread coverage, offering a great variety of preventive measures. It is impossible that the seventeen-year-old Mann, then finishing school in nearby Lübeck, could have failed to hear of the outbreak.

5. This statement and the one in note 7 about the 1892 cholera epidemic are taken from the Zeitungsausschnittsammlung 3006, Rudolf Virchow Nachlaß, Archiv der Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. The statements are from articles that have no titles or authors, and the translation is mine.

6. Koelb's translation, “countless bacteria, among them those that carry the specific virus” (Mann, Death 84), is misleading, since the bacteria do not carry a virus; they themselves produce the toxin that causes the disease.

7. Mann's choice of overripe strawberries as the vehicle through which the cholera penetrates Aschenbach reveals the author's determination to make the story work both on realistic and mythological levels. The Leipziger Zeitung had warned that “one must take care with raw fruits and vegetables, which often, unfortunately, are eaten when still unripe” (26 Aug. 1892). While the blackened corpse of “a woman who sold vegetables” makes the infection plausible, according to contemporary scientific findings, the “overripe and soft” fruit, suggesting an eroticism past its prime, implies that Aschenbach dies as much from his own fermenting libido as from a foreign disease (Mann, Death 54, 60).

8. In positing the agents of infectious diseases as living organisms, bacteriologists believed that each species of bacteria must have a Heimat (“homeland”), a native habitat.

9. The original German, “ein Fremder, von draußen gewaltsam Eindringender”—literally, “a foreigner pushing violently inward from without”—has strongly sexual connotations and suggests that Aschenbach—and, by association, Europe—is being raped by the foreign force. In the nineteenth century, both bourgeois scientists and politicians defined the individual as a distinct, bounded, independent, self-willed, and responsible social unit (Goldberg 9). Bacteria, associated with other continents and other people, threatened to penetrate these boundaries. The collapse of the boundaries, brought on either by hygienic or moral laxness, would leave the self open to foreign forces of all kinds. Death in Venice depicts just such a collapse. More accurately, the story depicts Aschenbach's discovery that belief in self-defining barriers is merely a comforting illusion. The imagery of piercing and violation becomes most vivid in Aschenbach's dream, when the protective boundaries he has maintained all his life fall to pieces. The Dionysian experience, literally “a mixing with no regard for borders” (“eine grenzenlose Vermischung”), mocks the very ideas of boundaries and individual independence demanded by the new science (Mann, Der Tod 90; my trans.). Koelb's translation, “an unfettered rite of copulation” (Mann, Death 57), does justice to the powerful sexuality of Mann's passage but detracts from the possibility of multiple readings by focusing on only one type of mingling.

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