Flashback, May 1911: Mahler, Venice Spark Mann’s “Death in Venice”

The place of the artist in society was even more on the mind of German novelist Thomas Mann than usual when he departed for Venice with wife Katia and brother Heinrich. Just before leaving, he’d read in the newspapers about the death of Europe’s most famous conductor, Gustav Mahler, whom he had met several times before (including a dress rehearsal for Mahler’s Eighth Symphony only the year before).

The memory of the composer, along with what Mann was about to see in Italy’s famed gondola city—misplaced luggage, a cholera epidemic, dismal weather, a heavily rouged, dissolute old man, and most of all, a youth whose good looks seemed like something out of Greek mythology—coalesced into Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), a masterly portrait of an artist—an entire civilization—yielding, after decades of strenuous effort, to disintegration and death.

The plot of Mann’s work is wispy: A Munich novelist, a fiftyish widower left with all the time he wants to commit to his craft, is suddenly seized by a desire to travel. He journeys to the Lido, a resort across the lagoon from Venice, where he falls in love with a beautiful Polish boy whom he eyes from afar but never speaks to. That obsession is so strong as to lead the novelist to disregard well-founded rumors of a cholera outbreak in the city. Just as the boy and his family are due to leave the hotel, the novelist dies while watching him on the beach.

The novella hardly matched Mann’s Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain in size, but what it lacked in heft it more than made up in density. Nearly every sentence in Death in Venice feels heavy—with symbolism, with philosophy, with the author’s barely suppressed desires, with the weight of Western history.

Consider these three sentences, in the middle of the very first paragraph:

“It was a spring afternoon in that year of grace 19--, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months. [Author Gustav von Aschenbach] had sought the open soon after tea. He was overwrought by a morning of hard, nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact his uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the meal found himself powerless to check the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides.”

Let’s take this apart:

* The “menace that hung over its head for months” was the Second Moroccan Crisis (also known as the Agadir Crisis), an incident involving gunboat diplomacy which put Germany at odds with both France and Great Britain. Suddenly, the political order that Prince Metternich had fashioned nearly a century before at the Congress of Vienna had become hopelessly frayed, so that now the very thing he feared—a continental bloodbath involving a militaristic regime with Napoleonic instincts—had become all too thinkable. Europe was about to yield to its deepest, most troubling, atavistic instincts.

* The walk in “the open soon after tea” was Mann’s daily ramble, which he felt strengthened him for answering his correspondence at night.

*The “hard, nerve-taxing work” resembled Mann’s own, which sometimes left him so exhausted that he had to travel abroad for rest.

* “Powerless to check” is used ironically here—suggesting in this context the author’s creative powers, but coming to mean, by the conclusion of the story, irrationality and disease.

Mann particularly admired Leo Tolstoy for his early, realistic work, and you can see this influence in that no detail seems to have escaped the him. In the late 1960s, a full decade after the death of the Nobel Prize laureate, a 68-year-old Polish count convinced Mann’s daughter that he was the inspiration of the Polish youth, Tadzio. The count, who, after a number of years, had finally come across this famous story in translation, marveled at the exactness with which Mann rendered his clothing, his family, even a fight with a companion.

Yet Tadzio and everyone else in this story fades in comparison with Aschenbach himself. Much of this three-dimensional character derives from multiple sources: philosophy, music, Mahler, and Mann himself.

Begin with his name: "Gustav" comes from the composer, as does the character's aquiline features. "Von," we learn from the first sentence of the book, came to him only at age 50--meaning the author does not come from the aristocracy but has now been ennobled, because of his literary reputation. "Aschenbach" means "stream of ashes," an allusion to the desire-driven death that the character is about to undertake.

An interesting question comes to the fore concerning Aschenbach's state of mind: Is he simply a believer in the ancient Greek ideal of love for a younger man--an ultimately chaste affection--or is something else at work here? I think Mann means us to see this as something darker.

The question, as with so much else surrounding this work, takes on additional dimensions because of what we now know about Mann. His diaries, made public a couple of decades after his death, reveal that he was a closeted homosexual--or, as he put it, in the grip of an "inversion." Marriage and the presence of four sons allowed him, to an extent, to sublimate these feelings, but they never left. The novelist knew he had to master them, or he would risk disgrace.

Aschenbach's fate can be seen, in part, as Mann's warning to himself about where his instincts might lead if given free rein. Upon his arrival in Venice, he recoils at the presence of a man with a rouged face and dyed hair. Before the end, however, in his attempt to secure the attention of the young Tadzio, he has submitted to the same cosmetic treatment. Furthermore, Tadzio's family, noticing the inordinate attention their son is receiving, take steps to put distance between themselves and the novelist.

There is one other creative work out of Germany in the years since Mann’s novella that echoed its predicament of a middle-aged man, long leading the life of the mind, who becomes undone by an unexpected obsession with an inappropriate object of desire. Yes, I mean the 1930 film that put Marlene Dietrich on the map, The Blue Angel—which was based on a 1905 novel, Professor Unrat, written by none other than Heinrich Mann.

Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents would not be published until nearly two decades after Death in Venice, but Mann had already anticipated, in fictional form, the theories of the founder of psychoanalysis on the enormous restraints placed by civilization upon the primitive instincts for sex and death at the heart of individuals. Mann, who wrote about artists and intellectuals throughout his career in such works as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, saw these instincts particularly at work in creators such as himself.