SOURCE: Berman, Russell A. “History and Community 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. 263-80. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

[In the following essay, Berman provides a contemporary historicist interpretation of Death in Venice.]

During recent decades literary critics have increasingly chosen to approach texts by scrutinizing their historical standing. This “new” history represents a significant break with the formalist methods associated with the once “New” Criticism, which flourished during the middle of the century and directed attention to the internal structures of literature rather than to contextual matters. Critics treated such contexts, somewhat derisively, as merely “extrinsic” to the work of art. The recent historicist turn has also, however, proliferated in competition with the neoformalism of deconstructive criticism, which, when strictly pursued, addresses only the linguistic ambivalences of literary texts rather than their cultural or institutional embeddedness, the purview of historical criticism.

Yet contemporary historicist criticism is hardly blind to textual complexities. On the contrary, it continues to assimilate intellectual questions posed by a range of critical schools, and this contributes to its distinctiveness from the older historiographical methods of literary scholarship of the early twentieth century. Those positivist scholars were concerned often with the collection and ordering of manuscripts and the determination of the historical data around the production of works, which they thereby ensconced as elements of national literary historical canons. In addition, scholars studied the “lives and times” of authors with an eye to alleged “influences” that they found in the works; the underlying vision presumed a deterministic relationship between external factors and literary facts.

In contrast, contemporary historical criticism asks much more complex questions regarding a text's participation in wider cultural discourses, positing a dynamic relationship between text and context. Moreover, in the wake of reader-response theory, the historicity of the reception process becomes urgent—that is, the text is understood as implicated both in the context of its production (when the author wrote it) as well as in the context of its subsequent receptions, including our current reading. Therefore a historical reading should not only ask what a work might have meant in a temporally distant context but also why it can continue to interest us today, and what light it sheds on what has transpired in the interim. We now understand history to entail several concurrent temporalities rather than a uniform or universal time in which older historicism might have neatly shelved away a text. Criticism today explores the multiple and often conflicting levels of time within a text in order to understand both its position within contemporary discourses and its own history through the course of time.

From its opening lines, Death in Venice invites us to reflect on the multifaceted relationships between literature and history. “On a spring afternoon in 19—, the year in which for months on end so grave a threat seemed to hang over the peace of Europe, Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as he had been officially known since his fiftieth birthday, had set out from his apartment on the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich to take a walk of some length by himself” (23). Despite the conventional conceit of using an ambiguous date (“19—”), the novella has begun with a reference to time—indeed, to a very specific moment in time, although the text identifies this moment as standing at the intersection of two distinct temporal levels. On the one hand, the reference to a political threat, presumably one of the several foreign policy crises that led Europe into World War I very soon after the publication of the text, sets a larger historical context; on the other hand, we learn of the mundane fact—Aschenbach's starting out on a stroll. In addition, political time and personal time explicitly converge in the report that he “had been officially known since his fiftieth birthday” as von Aschenbach—that is, he had received a title of nobility. The “von,” of course, is part of the characterization of Aschenbach as a representative of the cultural and political establishment, and the subsequent tale involves the steady erosion of that status. At the outset, however, the issue is the confluence of personal and political temporalities and their relationship to each other, and the same problem recurs close to the end, as Aschenbach struggles to the beach on his last morning, fraught with despair, “though he could not decide whether this [feeling of hopelessness and pointlessness] referred to the external world or to his personal existence” (86). What is the relationship between the external and the personal, between the political and the private? And if Aschenbach's individual life is set, from the beginning, in an emphatic relationship to European developments, is Death in Venice therefore suggesting that Aschenbach's demise on the beach in Venice stands as a prediction for the catastrophe that would soon befall the Continent? In that case, what might appear to be a story concerned with largely literary issues—a writer with a block, his abstruse aesthetic concerns, and a private infatuation—would turn into a radical reflection on highly political matters.

To ask about Aschenbach and Europe is, of course, to ask about the relationship between literature and history, as if the early-twentieth-century novella were itself already a reflection on the new historicism of the end of the century. Needless to say, Death in Venice and this literary-critical practice are separated by cataclysmic decades, for Europe and especially for the Germany with which Aschenbach's character is tightly intertwined. The century has also witnessed dramatic changes with regard to the status of literature and culture within society: during the past eighty years, the history of modernism, the flourishing of cinema and other new media, the growth of a commercialized culture industry, and a general secularization of values have all contributed to the near extinction of the type of author, represented by Aschenbach, who commanded respect as an arbiter of public morality. Indeed, today we think of writers and artists more often as outsiders and as adversarial critics of public values rather than as their standard-bearers. Yet our own distance from Aschenbach's world can help us explore the internal logic of Death in Venice, especially when we proceed from the problem posed at the outset: the relationship between the writer and society, between subjective experience and objective structures, and—this is the philosophical theme of the novella—between aesthetics and ethics.

Aesthetics, in this context, denotes the practices of the artist in the imaginative realm, whereas ethics points to the rules of life in a social community. Death in Venice crosses back and forth between life and art in the explicit sense that there is much in the novella, particularly in the description of Aschenbach, that draws directly from Mann's own experience. We know that Mann vacationed on the Lido and that, like Aschenbach, he penned an important short essay on the beach, and a Polish aristocrat has even offered testimony that he had been the model for Tadzio decades earlier. We know that Mann, again like Aschenbach, was concerned with questions of mastery, for the detailed list of Aschenbach's writings correspond to works already published or planned by Mann. Even a quotation attributed by the narrator to Aschenbach—“that all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite” (30)—is in fact an excerpt from a minor essay by Mann himself. Has Mann merely transformed his own life into art?

For all of this aestheticizing of autobiography, there is still much in the novella of other provenance that disallows any neat equation of author and hero (or, as we will see, even author and narrator). The detailed description of Aschenbach's physiognomy evokes another Gustav, the composer Gustav Mahler who died in 1911, while the contemporary public readily recognized the site of the story, Venice, as the real location of the death of a further musical figure, Richard Wagner, in 1883. The extensive network of material from Greek mythology—in particular the association of Tadzio with Apollo and the appearance of Dionysus in the dream—stems from Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), which is both a brash history of Greek culture and a manifesto of modern art. Meanwhile, behind this network lies a further layer of cultural history, an engagement with the most prominent author of German literary history, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. At a critical moment in his career, he traveled to Italy to escape the formalism of the Weimar court and to rediscover a classical balance of beauty. Moreover, we know that the project that became Death in Venice began as a plan to treat the old Goethe's love for a young woman; in a similar vein, the early reference to Aschenbach's fiftieth birthday recalls Goethe's novella, A Man of Fifty, which describes how a mature officer falls in love with his much younger niece.

The complexity of the historical construction is beginning to become apparent. Mann appropriates and weaves his personal history into a thick intertextuality of cultural-historical references. In addition to the individual and general temporalities of the initial passage, the Nietzschean material represents the eruption of an archaic mythic time into the mundane present—a structure that bears comparison with similar archaicism in the works of other modernist authors. The combination of naturalistic description with symbolic types is both a stylistic transition in Mann's own career and evidence of a radically new temporality: the past is never completely over, for ancient Greece may suddenly protrude into everyday exchanges, and the present, a dimension of potentiality fraught with dreams, is not fully present, as its mythic symbols always point to other dimensions. Meanwhile, as the novella's analysis of Aschenbach, character and soul, approaches the equally mythological realm of Freudian psychoanalysis, it draws on a larger canon of German literary history. Goethe and Schiller are also present, and the judgment on Aschenbach, as we will see, grows into a verdict on German culture and its prospects.

The first sentence of the text has asked us to pay attention to the wider historical context of continental affairs, for this story of the paradigmatic German author takes place in a larger frame of international relations. Later we find that Aschenbach is delighted by the cosmopolitan clientele at his hotel: “Discreetly muted, the sounds of the major world languages mingled. … One saw the dry elongated visages of Americans, many-membered Russian families, English ladies, German children with French nurses. The Slav component seemed to predominate” (43). The wide horizon contrasts sharply with the insular life that Aschenbach had led in Munich or, even more so, with the isolated Alpine retreat where he would normally have spent the summer. Yet this superficially placid internationality cannot fully muffle the warning of an impending political crisis, announced at the beginning as the threat hanging over Europe and lingering like a foreboding cloud on the horizon of the narration. After all, this is the last moment before the outbreak of World War I, and while one can hardly ascribe to Mann prophetic powers, he was clearly astute enough to incorporate into the text explicit indications of the nationality crises that would soon lead to a redrawing of the map of Europe.

Leaving Munich, Aschenbach first chose to vacation on an island in the Adriatic off the Istrian coast, an Austrian territory “with colorful ragged inhabitants speaking a wild unintelligible dialect” (34). The imperialist character of the regime emerges clearly by the distinction between tourists and locals and even more so by the otherwise unnecessary reference to a naval base (35). The European summer vacation transpires on a militarized continent. Aschenbach quickly leaves the island and travels by boat to Venice. In this passage he encounters “the goat-bearded man” (35), a satyr figure anticipating the later Dionysian eruption, as well as an old man among the youths, foreshadowing Aschenbach's own pedophilic obsessions. Yet the youths themselves are the important indicators of the historical situation. They appear at first merely out for a pleasant trip with no further intention, innocence at play: “The company on the upper deck consisted of a group of young men, probably shop or office workers from Pola, a high-spirited party about to set off on an excursion to Italy” (35). On their arrival, however, an unexpected metamorphosis takes place: “The young men from Pola had come on deck, no doubt also patriotically attracted by the military sound of bugle calls across the water from the direction of the Public Garden; and elated by the Asti they had drunk, they began cheering the bersaglieri as they drilled there in the park” (38). Ethnic Italians from Istria, resentful of Hapsburg domination, arrive in Venice, applaud the Italian soldiers, and celebrate the signs of the newly established Italian nation. Thus the text lays the groundwork for the bitter fighting that would soon take place between Italy and Austria during the war. Moreover, this historical material, with its weighty political implication, interlocks with mythic time: Italian nationalism is fully Dionysian when it emerges as music and with the help of sparkling wine.

Furthermore, another ethnic war is under way. Aschenbach watches Tadzio's reaction to a group of Russians on the beach:

scarcely had he noticed the Russian family, as it sat there in contented concord and going about its natural business, than a storm of angry contempt gathered over his face. He frowned darkly, his lips pouted, a bitter grimace pulled them to one side and distorted his cheek; his brows were contracted in so deep a scowl that his eyes seemed to have sunk right in under their pressure, glaring forth a black message of hatred. He looked down, looked back again menacingly, then made with one shoulder an emphatic gesture of rejection as he turned his back and left his enemies behind him.

(48-49)

Just as the Austro-Hungarian empire controlled much of the Balkans in 1911, czarist Russia occupied large parts of what would become an independent Poland after World War I and the establishment of new nation-states in the wake of the Versailles Treaty. Hence the Polish youth appears hateful toward the colonizing power; indeed, given the grace and beauty he radiates throughout the text, it is quite striking that Mann so underscores the nationalist enmity that distorts Tadzio's handsome features. Evidently the text is not particularly sympathetic to the representatives of national liberation, for the Italians are drunk, and Tadzio's Polish patriotism appears exaggerated, given the hardly critical account of the Russians.

Whatever the “political correctness” of those judgments, the text conveys evidence, albeit indirectly, of the tensions underlying the discreet cosmopolitanism of the hotel. The same tensions fueled the political crisis surrounding the narrative. Nevertheless it is remarkable that after the opening reference to those political tensions, neither the narrator nor Aschenbach elaborates on them, even though the author has filled the text with so much documentation of their urgency. This discrepancy highlights Aschenbach's refusal to consider politics, despite the fact that he has been introduced as a direct beneficiary of the political establishment; he is preoccupied with other matters, while a war is about to break out around him. Political indifference represents tacit support for the status quo, whatever it may be. Mann would later describe this “unpolitical” character as a constitutive element of German conservatism, part of the bourgeoisie's predemocratic accommodation with the power of the authoritarian state.

Death in Venice encodes another important aspect of the erosion of the prewar European order. Otherwise so enamored of Tadzio, Aschenbach refrains from siding with his Polish patriotism against the Russian “enemies”; in fact, in the context of the beach scene, this derogatory term (“enemies”) has the rhetorical status of an overstatement that conveys an ironic distance from the boy's political passion: Mann or the narrator is holding Tadzio's politics at arm's length. This neutrality is deeply self-interested, however, for it was not only Russia that partook of the division of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. Prussia—the core of what would later become unified Germany under Bismarck in 1871—also carved out a piece of Polish territory, and Aschenbach's writings implicate him in this imperial undertaking. His most prominent work is, after all, a biography of Frederick II, king of Prussia, who consolidated the nation's military primacy in the middle of the eighteenth century and directed a crucial stage of the expansion into areas of Central and Eastern Europe. Aschenbach's personal genealogy compounds this ideological sympathy; born in the province of Silesia, precisely the area Frederick had conquered, he came from a family implicated in the political order: “His ancestors had been military officers, judges, government administrators; men who had spent their disciplined, decently austere life in the service of the king and the state” (28). In his own way, Aschenbach carries on this tradition; he is a German author not only by virtue of his language and public but also because of his ideological involvement with the agenda of German imperialism. Given the predominance of Prussia within prewar Germany and especially the proliferation of a historiography that ascribed German ascendancy to the legacy of Prussia and Frederick, this offspring of Prussian officials in Silesia was certainly not predisposed to sympathize with Polish independence. Hence Aschenbach notices Tadzio's political aspirations only in order to repress them. The aestheticization of Tadzio as a symbol of beauty proceeds on the basis of the displacement of the political discussion.

The imperialist horizon reaches much farther than Silesia and Istria. When Aschenbach first recognizes his desire to travel, he sinks into a vision of a tropical jungle, more exotic than anything he will encounter later. We may take the swampy landscape as an anticipation of the discovery that the cholera has spread from India. Similarly, his imagination of the “glinting eyes of a crouching tiger” (26) might point toward the iconography of Dionysus, frequently depicted on a tiger-drawn chariot. Above all, however, the passage gives significant evidence of a fascinated desire with the typical imagery of the non-European world during the age of colonialism: “his heart throbbed with terror and mysterious longing” (26) as he contemplates a primeval and barbaric landscape beyond the borders of civilizational order. Even in the provincial setting of Munich and its city park, a global process of imperialism intrudes in order to rip the author out of his repetitive routines and carry him off to confrontations with the unexpected. The text locates Venice less securely within Europe than at its border, open to foreign influences stretching far afield.

A latecomer to colonialist policies, Germany had recently acquired extensive possessions in Africa (including today's Namibia, Togo, and Tanzania) and in the South Pacific. This imperialist expansion was driven to a large extent by a competition with the other European powers, especially England, whose presence in India the text indicates in a British clerk's report on the cholera's origin in the Ganges delta. Eventually the same Versailles Treaty that would grant independence to Tadzio's Poland and push Austria out of the Adriatic also stripped defeated Germany of its colonies, redistributing them among the victorious parties in the war. The competition for colonies had certainly contributed to prewar political tensions and led some to see it as a crucial factor in unleashing the war. Writing in 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois commented on the militarization of Europe by arguing that “the only adequate cause of this preparation was conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europe gird herself at frightful cost for war” (Du Bois 46). Opponents of colonialism such as Du Bois felt bitter to see the war waged in the name of democracy leading to a redivision of colonial spoils, rather than to independence and self-government for the colonized nations. One major accomplishment of Death in Venice is to demonstrate the extremely labile network of national identities on the eve of World War I. The text also places this network within a contested structure of global imperialism, simultaneously analyzing a personality remarkably unwilling to reflect on precisely these political matters.

We may mine from the text still more elements of historical and political significance. For example, the class structure evident on the boat to Venice suggests that Italian nationalism was a solely middle-class phenomenon—a position quite comfortable for a German ally of the Austo-Hungarian empire. Even more critical of the Italian situation is the account of the political process associated with official efforts to deny the danger to public health just to protect the profitable tourist trade: “such corruption in high places, combined with the prevailing insecurity, the state of crisis in which the city had been plunged by the death that walked its streets, led at the lower social levels to a certain breakdown of moral standards, to an activation of the dark and antisocial forces, which manifested itself in intemperance, shameless license and growing criminality” (79). The mendacity of the state induces a cultural crisis, which in turn stands as a metaphor for a Europe ripe for collapse.

Yet as important as such a passage is to decipher the political thematics of the text, Death in Venice is surely not a tendentious text concerned primarily with political corruption. It is not protest fiction, and to the extent that one focuses solely on these sections, one is open to the criticism of having restricted the reading to framing material while avoiding the evident core of the story, the vicissitudes of the writer and his aesthetic concerns. Unless one would want to concede that historical matters are really only extrinsic—surely not my position—one must focus on Aschenbach himself, now that we have established the imperialist setting of the narrative.

Not only Aschenbach's Silesian background links him to Prussia; his very character as a writer epitomizes a Prussian ethic of discipline. He thinks of himself repeatedly as a soldier, and the text makes clear that Frederick is both a topic for Aschenbach and a model of rigor, order, and a willingness to endure—a man whom the artist Aschenbach strives to emulate. Despite disadvantages, “he would ‘stay the course’—it was his favorite motto, he saw his historical novel about Frederic the Great as nothing if not the apotheosis of this, the king's word of command, ‘durchhalten!’ which to Aschenbach epitomized a manly ethos of suffering action” (29). Therefore, the text's concern with the nature of art parallels an investigation of a Prussian legacy, epitomized by the trenchant comment of Aschenbach having always lived like a tightly closed fist, never allowing a moment of relaxation: “Aschenbach did not enjoy enjoying himself. Whenever and wherever he had to stop work, have a breathing space, take things easily, he would soon find himself driven by restlessness and dissatisfaction … back to his lofty travail, to his stern and sacred daily routine” (58). This perpetual effort, a never-ending labor, required a “constant harnessing of his energies [which] was something to which he had been called, but not really born” (29). This effort is a duty, like a soldier's, which he has accepted, and which he fulfills no matter what the cost. Moreover, this manner of work is also the topic of much of his fiction, concerned with heroes who carry on, despite greatest difficulty, out of sheer tenacity, rather than out of any deeply felt substantive ideal. It is a “heroism of weakness,” as it lacks any internal value except the obligation to duty, and in this unwavering soldierliness—a sort of internal militarization—Aschenbach embodies the bourgeois ethic of his age: he

was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness. There are many such, they are the heroes of our age.

(31)

The morality of achievement means that heroism lies in the sheer fact of persistent labor, not in the substance or quality of its results. The refusal to yield in the pursuit of one's calling exemplifies the cultural structure that the German sociologist Max Weber discussed in his study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1904-1905. Weber argues that the Protestant Reformation upset traditional medieval forms of behavior by establishing a new mode of individuality dependent on the primacy of faith, election, and divine calling. The result is a mode of labor Weber describes as rational because it excludes all considerations irrelevant to its perpetuation. The point of work is not the enjoyment of its products but only further work, as evidence of a vocation—that is, one's feeling called and chosen by God. Even though explicit religious belief gradually waned, the originally Protestant structure became essential to capitalist behavior, according to which regular labor implies a refusal of pleasure and an increasing specialization in order to pursue ever greater efficiency. Yet this morality of achievement, Weber feared, would lead to an internal impoverishment and a reduction in the subjective experience of the individual:

One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born … from the spirit of Christian asceticism. … This fundamentally ascetic trait of middle-class life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any, was what Goethe wanted to teach. … For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian culture of antiquity.

(Weber 1976, 180-81)

The comment is striking, as it recalls Aschenbach's anachronistic desire for the beauty of ancient Greece.

While Mann suggests the possibility of archaic elements exploding onto the modern scene, Weber asserts the irreversible separation between the two ages. Nonetheless, his further comments go straight to the heart of Aschenbach's dilemma:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate world morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In [Richard] Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

(Weber 1976, 181)

The metaphor of the “iron cage” implies that the rationalized structure of labor that has spread throughout society—even to writers—derives from an asceticism that simultaneously leaves little room for the naive pleasures of life and limits the scope of individual experience. This situation portrays Aschenbach trapped in a Prussian Protestant culture, which forces him to stay the course, no matter what the cost. This connection in turn leads to the conclusion that despite many critics' fixation on Mann's frequent distinction between artistic and bourgeois modes of existence, Aschenbach embodies the artist precisely as a bourgeois in the sense of the work ethic. He is a moralist of achievement, and indeed he must be so.

As Harvey Goldman has noted, “The true artist has to adopt the model of the bourgeois calling and a mode of service that demands and provides self-conquest; this model equips the self, through ascetic denial, for the ‘conquest’ of the world. But the adherent of the calling adopts as well, however unintentionally, the perils of the calling and the personality constructed on it” (Goldman 172). Aschenbach is trapped in an “iron cage” that is withering his creative powers; his decision to travel entails an effort to escape the cage and to find “an expansion of his inner self” that his regulated life otherwise denied him (25).

By this point in our reading, the political intertwining of Death in Venice with its historical context has become quite complex. In addition to the material pertaining to the international order on the eve of World War I, at least three ideologically laden constellations have emerged: the turn to aesthetics as a specific displacement of political materials, the Prussianism of the good soldier Aschenbach, and the Protestant work ethic as a description of all modern labor, including the labor of the artist. Yet before we can tie these strands together, we must evaluate the course of the narrative, Aschenbach's passage from Munich to Venice and to death. Critics typically approach Death in Venice as a narrative of decline, the story of the writer's fall from public acclaim to degradation and humiliating defeat. Thus, for example, Erich Heller's summation: “He, the classical writer of his age and country, who has ‘rejected the abyss’ and entered into a covenant with Apollo, determined as he is to let his art do service in the humanization of man, unwittingly goes out in search of Dionysus and dies in his embrace” (Heller 1958, 105). Such a reading insinuates a causal connection between Aschenbach's succumbing to Dionysus and death, which Heller takes as a disqualification of the writer's project. In other words, the critic views the writer's demise as a negative verdict on some aspect of his being. Hence the reader must consider Aschenbach implicitly guilty and condemn him. Indeed, several parts of Aschenbach's identity come into question: his Prussianism, his work ethic, his repressed homoeroticism, and his classical aesthetics. Whatever issue critics such as Heller might select, they must all cast Aschenbach as an embodiment of an order so internally flawed that the encounter with the strange god precipitates a well-deserved collapse.

This sort of moralizing judgment on Aschenbach—and on the orders of existence he supposedly represents—is, however, inadequate for reasons that the text itself makes clear. The first critic to judge the writer is of course none other than the narrator of Death in Venice, and, as Dorrit Cohn has shown persuasively, the relationship between the narrator and Aschenbach undergoes an important shift in the course of the text:

In briefest summary the relationship of the narrator to his protagonist … may be described as one of increasing distance. In the early phases of the story it is essentially sympathetic, respectful, even reverent; in the later phases a deepening rift develops, building an increasingly ironic narratorial stance. … [T]he protagonist does not rise to his narrator's ethical and cultural standards but falls away from them. … The narrator meanwhile … remains poised on the cultural pinnacle that has brought forth his protagonist's own artistic achievement.

(Cohn 226)

As the writer's infatuation with Tadzio grows, the narrator becomes increasingly critical, culminating in the harsh and bitter condemnation when the exhausted Aschenbach is resting by a well in an out-of-the-way square. Yet here, at the very latest, the overstated moralizing of the narrator—the prototype of subsequent judgments on Aschenbach in the novella's reception history—must become questionable, even for a reader not previously put off by the earlier sententiousness and pomposity. Now the narrator introduces with obvious disgust the “strange dream-logic” of Aschenbach's second Socratic reverie, even though precisely in this passage Aschenbach revises the seduction scenario articulated earlier. Here he explicitly announces a renunciation of the impermissible desire: “And now I shall go, Phaedrus, and you shall stay here; and leave this place only when you no longer see me” (86).

The imminent separation from Tadzio, announced immediately afterwards, underscores the significance of this passage. It also highlights the inadequacy of the narrator's verdict, which has ignored Aschenbach's ultimately ethical decision to refrain from acting on a desire incompatible with social norms and “the moral law” that the narrator has just accused him of abandoning (82). Hence the text demonstrates the inappropriateness of the narrator's evaluation of the writer. Yet if the narrator's unfounded judgment on the writer can be appealed, we might similarly question the interpretations that treat Death in Venice primarily as a narrative of decay. In that case the evaluation of Aschenbach's death, the final scene on the beach, urgently needs reconsideration.

Heller errs in claiming that Aschenbach “dies in the embrace of Dionysus, the wild deity of chaos, abandon, and intoxication” (Heller 1976, 178). On the contrary, Aschenbach has overcome the Dionysian temptation, or rather, having sunk into the chaos, he has reemerged capable of recognizing the ethical necessity of a separation from Phaedrus/Tadzio. Far from signaling an ultimate condemnation, the concluding passages point to a transfiguring salvation as a reversal of the journey through degradation. Tadzio seems to share a similar fate in his own story in the text. Just as Aschenbach's “enslaved emotion” (27) took vengeance on him, Tadzio's subordinate companion Jaschu, “his particular vassal and friend” (50), “this lesser and servile mortal” (60), also rebels: “as if in this hour of leave-taking the submissiveness of the lesser partner had been transformed into cruel brutality, as if he were now bent on revenge for his long servitude, the victor did not release his defeated friend even then, but knelt on his back and pressed his face into the sand so hard and so long that Tadzio, breathless from the fight in any case, seemed to be on the point of suffocation” (87).

The marginal story of Tadzio and Jaschu provides a miniature model of Aschenbach's trajectory: the servile friend, like the enslaved emotions, rises up, overcoming the master. But—and this is precisely the important turn—in the wake of defeat, a vindication takes place, the suggestion of a final consonance between the writer and youth. Tadzio appears as a “soul-summoner,” inviting Aschenbach “into an immensity rich with unutterable expectation” (88). A death both profoundly Platonic and Christian summons Aschenbach's soul: hardly the description of a humiliating demise or damnation of the sort that the narrator's verdict might have warranted. Indeed, the very term the prosecutorial narrator had earlier thrown at Aschenbach, alleged to have contemplated “monstrous things” (82) (“das Ungeheuerliche”), recurs now as the redemptive immensity to which Tadzio points (“ins Verheißungsvoll-Ungeheure”). If there is a defeat at the conclusion, it is surely not Aschenbach's but that of the authoritarian narrator, who emerges as deeply mistaken in his moralizing judgment.

The historical significance of this reversal is profound, for it shifts attention back to the problem of the iron cage, the work ethic, and the form of bourgeois life in the modern world—a form deeply rational but simultaneously devoid of meaning. Weber was enormously concerned with the consequences of this sense of meaninglessness and, interestingly in this context, he describes extramarital sexual life as one of the rare alternatives to the isolating alienation of modernity: “The lover realizes himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor. He knows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine” (Weber 1958, 347). Such a beckoning possibility of a moment of meaning is surely a strong explanation for Aschenbach's passion, given his otherwise deeply lonely life. In Death in Venice, Mann is exploring the alternative to loneliness in a context where it seems as if one can only choose between either empty routine or destructive chaos, between the meaningless order of Prussian rationality or the orderless meaning of Dionysian destruction. The conclusion points toward a solution without resolving the contradictions: Aschenbach and Tadzio separate, art and life part ways, as do form and content, aesthetics and ethics, but the soul-summoning coda maintains their reconciliation as a utopian hope for human community.

Reading this investigation into the mind of an imaginary writer so tightly associated with the Prussian ideology, one can surely wonder how Death in Venice fares in the light of subsequent German history. Mann was an outspoken critic of Hitler and spent the Nazi years in exile in the United States. But what of Aschenbach, whose repression, loyalty, orderliness, and efficiency are stereotypes often associated with Germany? Much depends on the evaluation of the conclusion. If we read the story as portraying the writer's moral failing (as the narrator suggests), then we might take Aschenbach as anticipating the psychology of the German unwilling to resist Hitler's criminal regime. The Dionysian chaos would represent the potential for an irrational revolt against civilized order. If we focus on Aschenbach's renunciation, however, then we would surely have an example of the ability to reject immorality, thanks to an internal strength of character derived from the same Prussian-Protestant tradition, which now appears in quite a different light. In this case, Aschenbach's final renunciation represents a transition beyond the “heroism of weakness” and the “ethics of achievement,” beyond an emptied morality of production in order to act for the first time in the interest of a moral community.

In the wake of the considerable illiberalism of twentieth-century Germany, it is equally interesting to rethink the narrator's verdicts. We recall that the narrator condemned Aschenbach harshly, even though he had, after all, done nothing criminal; indeed, he had never even addressed Tadzio. On the contrary, the condemnation rests solely on intention, belying a confusion between intention and deed, or perhaps treating mere intent as if it were already a forbidden act. Yet that sort of proscription on imagined acts would quickly stifle all creativity, especially the artist's, for precisely such a stifling atmosphere led Aschenbach to escape his routinized life and to set off into the unknown. His trip to Dionysus is therefore not at all an escapist flight from his vocation (as the narrator would have it) but the most radical and consistent pursuit of the vocation—an orphic descent into Hades in search of the wellsprings of creativity that his heavy routine has crushed. Death in Venice does not show that the ethic of duty, Prussian soldierliness, is wrong; the point is rather that when duty degenerates into meaningless routine, it crushes the spirit, while the genuine and most dutiful pursuit of a calling that has not hardened into an iron cage requires not only discipline but also courage and imagination. Perhaps the good soldier Aschenbach was the best soldier only when he dared to travel to Venice, plumb the depths of his soul, and face an ultimate temptation and overcome it with grace.

The novella raises the question of the possibility of an ethical community, and it maps two equally undesirable answers: a Prussian obedience, maintaining the law no matter what the content (“moral resoluteness at the far side of knowledge” [32]), and the chaos of formless experience in the Dionysian crowd, with disregard for any “moral law” (82). Aschenbach begins with the inadequacy of the former and recoils from the violence of the latter, but the dissatisfying choice corresponds to two equally unattractive models of Germany. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt describes the trial of a Nazi official who played a key role in the organization of the Holocaust. A major point of his defense, and of many other Nazis, was the imperative to follow orders, without any substantive examination of these orders. Arendt labeled this behavior the “banality of evil,” which has become a major paradigm to describe individuals' complicity with authoritarian regimes. More recently, Daniel Goldhagen has presented a different model of participation in the Holocaust in his study Hitler's Willing Executioners. Goldhagen argues that Germans supported and participated in the killing of Jews because of their heartfelt belief in an “eliminationist antisemitism” and not at all because of a blind acceptance of duty. His evidence includes descriptions of systemic cruelty to the victims that

gives lie to the perpetrators' postwar assertions that they were obliged to follow orders either because orders are to be followed or because they were in no position to evaluate the morality and legality of the orders. The systemic cruelty demonstrated to all Germans involved that their countrymen were treating Jews as they did … because of a set of beliefs that defined the Jews in a way that demanded Jewish suffering as retribution, a set of beliefs which inhered as profound a hatred as one people has likely ever harbored for another.

(Goldhagen 389)

The two explanations cannot be further apart. For Arendt, it is a matter of formal legality blind to content, whereas for Goldhagen, it is a content of uninhibited hatred, with no appeal to legal forms. Aschenbach, representing Germany, must grapple with this same polarized alternative: rigorous ethics that exclude meaning, or chaotic desire beyond any morality.

To identify the historical ramifications of his quandary, we need to think not only of the question of German morality in the twentieth century but also of the aesthetic problem inherited from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. The tension between Apollo and Dionysus in Aschenbach's Venice derives from Nietzsche's commentary on the history of ancient Greek culture. Greek tragedy arose originally, he argues, in musical rituals to celebrate Dionysus—rituals such as Mann evokes in the dream sequence—but these plays achieved aesthetic form through the Apollonian principle of representing individuals, the heroes of the myths. Nevertheless, the core of the work remains in the Dionysian element of the chorus, not in the brief illusion of the characters on stage. As a commentary on art, The Birth of Tragedy is less concerned with the polarity of the gods than with their synthesis. Nietzsche recounts how Socrates, deeply hostile to Dionysus, initiated a rationalist attack on myth. But Nietzsche also insists on claiming that a reconciliation between Socrates and Dionysus ultimately took place, leading to “the Socrates who practices music” (Nietzsche 98).

After the distinctly Apollonian imagery of the fourth chapter of Death in Venice and the largely Dionysian fifth chapter, the final passages, introduced by the second Socratic interlude, also point toward a reconciliation. The transfigurative conclusion suggests a community in which form and content, ethics and aesthetics, Apollo and Dionysus, could coincide. There are small hints of such a world in the “human solidarity” (48) of the Russian family or the “air of discipline, obligation, and self-respect” (45) among the Poles, indications of a good life with room for both community and dignity, pleasure and meaning, music and Socrates. These are examples, brief to be sure, but they suggest the ability to imagine a society in which people can live with order but without repression—a modest utopia, but one that has remained elusive for many. A decade after the publication of Death in Venice, Mann would disappoint his politically conservative public by arguing that the new democratic Germany, the Weimar Republic, could harbor such a society. Weimar ended after only a decade and a half, overthrown by the Nazis, who soon plunged the world into another war. Those German struggles with political form cast shadows backward across time onto Death in Venice, a text concerned perhaps even more with the form of community than with the form of art.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963.

Cohn, Dorrit. “The Second Author of Der Tod in Venedig.” Probleme der Moderne: Studien zur deutschen Literatur von Nietzsche bis Brecht. Ed. Benjamin Bennett, et. al. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983. 223-45.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Schocken, 1969.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executions: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Goldman, Harvey. Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Heller, Erich. The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann. Boston: Little, 1958.

———. The Poet's Self and the Poem: Essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann. London: Athlone, 1976.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Basic Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1992.

Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. and trans. H. H. Geerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford UP, 1958.

———. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribners, 1976.