This document provides a summary and analysis of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice. It discusses how the novella explores the conflict between form (rationality and discipline) versus emotion through the story of Gustav von Aschenbach. Von Aschenbach is a repressed writer who becomes obsessed with a young Polish boy named Tadzio while vacationing in Venice. His obsession leads to his dissolution and death, representing the dangers of giving in to one's passions. The document also analyzes how Venice represents sensuality and decline, and how the story uses mythology and Freudian concepts to examine this theme of rationality versus emotion.

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Philippine Normal University
College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature
Department of Languages, Bilingual Education and Literature
Subject: Litt 508 E (20th Century European Literature)
Novel: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Discussant: Manuel, Jesullyna C.
M. A. ed Literature
April 26, 2010
THE ART OF FORM VERSUS THE ART OF EMOTION IN THOMAS MANN’S
DEATH IN VENICE
I. Introduction
Form as a dimension of meaning has little to do with morality; and yet as the prize of
discipline it is invested with the ethical character. This is the central paradox of Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice. This paper will attempt to discuss the elements of form and dissolution in the novel, the
discrepancies between the meaning and manner, between the profits of the plague and the price of
perfection.
Paul Thomas Mann was born in Lubeck, Germany on June 6, 1875. He was a son of a senator
and a grain merchant and a Brazilian woman who immigrated in Germany when she was just seven years
old. He belonged to a bourgeois family. He studied at the University of Munich in preparation for his
journalism career. He also studied art history, economics, history and literature. Although there are
implications of his homosexuality, Thomas Mann got married and had six children. His children have
prominent figures in arts and literature as well. Mann was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1929, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic
Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), and his numerous other stories.
II. The Novel and Its Background
A number of events occurred in 1911 inspiring Mann to begin work on Death in Venice. One of these
was the death of Czech-Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, a brooding modernist who made his living as a
conductor on May 18, 1911. Mahler's fierce and uncompromising dedication to his art, and demand for
perfection from his musicians, appealed to Mann, who had met him a few years before his death. Mann not
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only gives von Aschenbach Mahler's first name, but he also models his hero's physical description on the
composer. Mann was no stranger to Venice either. In fact, he was vacationing there when Mahler died, and
followed reports of the composer's last days in the local papers. In addition to the shock of Mahler's death,
Mann was also influenced by the deterioration of the political situation in Europe at this time. The political
deterioration of Europe during this time was matched by an increasing cultural decadence and moral
decline, a theme Mann explores, and one that was popular in literature during the turn of the century
(Dierks: 1972).
Thomas Mann’s wife Katia, recalls that the actual idea for the story came during an actual
holiday in Venice, which she and Thomas took in the spring of 1911:
“All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on
the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed
rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open
collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my
husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice — that
he didn't do — but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … I still remember that my uncle, Privy
Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: "What a story! And a married man with
a family!"- (Katia Mann- Unwritten Memories).
The boy who inspired "Tadzio" was Baron Wladysław Moes, whose first name was usually
shortened as Władzio or just Adzio. This story was uncovered by Thomas Mann's translator Andrzej
Dołęgowski around 1964, and was published in the German press in 1965. Some sources report that Moes
himself did not learn of the connection until he saw the 1971 film version of the novel. Moes was born in
1900, and was aged 11 when he was in Venice, significantly younger than Tadzio in the novel. Moes died in
1986 and is interred at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. Moes was the subject of a biography The Real
Tadzio (Short Books, 2001) by Gilbert Adair (www.wikipedia.com).
III. Summary of the Novel
Death in Venice is a novel which tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a dignified and
respected writer who went to Venice for a much needed break from the exhaustion caused by his work.
While on vacation, he saw a 14-year old Polish boy named Tadzio and he was immediately smitten by his
beauty and perfection. This infatuation which eventually led to obsession caused him his own
disintegration and finally, his death.
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IV. Analysis of the Novel
In Freudian terms, Aschenbach represents a ―repressed‖ man. At the beginning of the
novel, Gustav von Aschenbach while possessing a latent sensuality, have always keep his passions in check,
making sure that it does not interfere with his life as an artist and his art.
“Even as a young man, he had valued fastidiousness as the essence and innermost core of talent, and its demands were the
reason he had reined in and cooled off his emotions, for he knew that emotions tend to be satisfied with happy approximates
and half-realized success.”(p.144)
Freud believes that this state of imbalance could not long remain stable nor produce truly inspired art.
Thus, having kept his life so tight and controlled for so long, when Aschenbach finally decided to loosen
and let down his guards, these passions have redoubled and took over his life. When Aschenbach finally
succumbs to the calling of sensual beauty, as represented by the ―beautiful boy‖ Tadzio, all of his moral
standards break down and he becomes a slave to beauty, a slave to desire; he becomes debased.
“He collapsed on the steps of the cistern in the middle of this space, resting his head against its stone rim…”
“He sat there. The great master, the artist grown dignified, the author of “A True Wretch,” with the abyss and disdained
dissipation, the climber of such heights, the transcender of personal knowledge who had outgrown irony and accustomed
himself to the amenities and obligations of mass public trust, the celebrity whose fame had been officially sanctioned, whose
name had been ennobled and whose style served as the model by which schoolboys were taught to write—he sat there.”
(p 215).
Von Aschenbach's obsession with the boy causes him to rationalize or ignore behaviors that
previously would have been repugnant to him. He begins wearing jewelry, dyes his hair, and dons
flamboyant clothes in an effort to attract Tadzio's attention. Ironically, everything that disgusted him in the
beginning of the story, he embraced in the end. Hence, Aschenbach undergoes a displacement from one
extreme art to the other, from the cerebral to the physical, from pure form to pure emotion. Thomas
Mann’s novels warn the danger, the deathly danger imposed by these two extremes.
From its opening sentences, Death in Venice establishes an ominous tone. The descriptions of the
dire political situation, the storm, and the menacing-looking stranger foretell the impending dangers.
Specifically, the gravestones and mortuary introduce thoughts of death.
“Nothing stirred behind the fences of those stonemasons’ yards where the crosses, headstones and other monuments on display
make up a second, unoccupied graveyard. Across the way, the funeral chapel with its Byzantine architecture stood silently in
the reflected light of the dying sun…” (p. 140).
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The Byzantine architecture with its Greek lettering introduces the motif of the classical world, which
pervade the novel. It is important to remember that Thomas Mann is an economical writer. He writes long
sentences but he remains to be as precise as possible. He does not waste a word; every detail he includes in
his sentences is significant (Chase). Also note Mann’s parallel presentation of his main character and the
current political circumstances establishes what will become a symbolic link between the two in the end: the
declining Aschenbach will come to stand for a civilization blinded to its inner decay and on the brink of
inevitable war.
The first chapter additionally introduces the polarity around the novel is conceptually structured: the
opposition of the Northern European self-restraint and the southern sensuality. Mann, following Plato,
believed this conflict between conscious will and uncontrolled passion, between rational morality and
passionate art, to be the crucial struggle in human existence. While Aschenbach is characterized as the
prototypical upstanding, stiff, and dignified Prussian intellectual, his vision of the tropical scene and his
desire to travel south hints his underlying passion and desire that subsequently at the end of the novel led
him to his death and degradation.
The story’s location in Venice is highly significant: Italy represents the sensuous south, in contrast to
Aschenbach’s austere native Germany; Von Aschenbach, a German, epitomizes the austere, hardworking,
methodical, and rational Teutonic character, priding himself on his intellect, focus, and self-restraint.
Aschenbach’s physical journey from one culture to another and from one climate to the other parallels his
internal descent from cool control to fiery passion. In particular, the city of Venice can be seen as a symbol
for Aschenbach himself: Venice is unique for its daring construction; it is a city built in the middle of a
lagoon, built and maintained by sheer will over the forces of nature (Bergenholtz: 1997). Similarly,
Aschenbach considers true art to be the victory of the will over physical needs and natural impulses and he
considers himself to have accomplished such victories.
“This conflict between the inclinations of the soul and the capabilities of the flesh suddenly seemed profound and
weighty- the prospect of physical defeat so humiliating, so crucial to avoid at all cost…” (p. 178).
Yet, it is also well known that despite the mask of glory, Venice is gradually sinking, literally rotting from
within; again the same might be said of Aschenbach. In the novel, the decline of Venice is portrayed by
Mann through the officials and merchants inside the city. Public officials and merchants are corrupt,
conspiring to hide the news of the cholera sweeping the city from visitors, and almost all Venetians that
appear in the story are disingenuous, desiring only to extract money from von Aschenbach and other
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visitors. The cholera infecting the city represents the decadence into which not only Venice has fallen, but
von Aschenbach himself and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, much of Europe. Mann traveled to
Venice extensively during his life, saying that it reminded him of his hometown, Lubeck. He also set his
1896 story, "Disillusionment," in Venice.
Death in Venice is written according to a method Thomas Mann called "myth plus psychology." Both
elements play equally important roles in tracing Aschenbach's decline. Tadzio is described in mythical terms
and compared to Greek sculpture, to the god of love, to Hyacinth and Narcissus, to Plato's character
Phaedrus. He describes the sunrise in terms of Greek mythology, and laces his story with references to
figures such as Kleitos, Kephalos, Semele, Zeus, Orion, and others. Episodes such as when von Aschenbach
rides in the coffin-like gondola with an unlicensed gondolier are used to evoke motifs in Greek literature
such as heroes' journey to the Underworld on Charon's boat across the River Styx. Such allusions help to
characterize von Aschenbach as a learned man of refined sensibilities and to link von Aschenbach's fate
with that of mythological characters. By liberally dosing his story with implicit and explicit allusions to
Greek mythology, and by incorporating Platonic dialogues into a realistic story, Mann highlights von
Aschenbach's love of classicism and antiquity. Such references also make the story, for a 1912 readership,
more palatable, as they lessen the impact of Mann's exploration of same sex, inter-generational erotic love.
“More than once, as the sun set behind Venice, he sat on a bench in the hotel park and watched as Tadzio played
happily with a ball on the rolled gravel courtyard in a white outfit fitted with a colorful belt. He could have sworn he
was watching Hyacinth, who was fated to die young because a pair of gods loved him (p. 190-191).”
The Apollonian and Dionysian philosophies are both explored in the story. In the first part of the
novel, Aschenbach embodies the characteristics of the former but as the story progresses towards the end;
his character transformed and embodied that of latter. By dedicating himself to Apollo, the god of reason
and the intellect, Aschenbach has denied the power of Dionysus, the god of unreason and passion- a
voluntary act that Freud would call ―suppression‖. Dionysus seems to have followed Aschenbach to Venice
with the intent of destroying him: the red haired man who keeps crossing von Aschenbach’s path, in the
guise of different characters, could be none other than Silenus, Dionysus's mythological chief disciple.
Silenus' role is disputed, however, since he bears no physical resemblance to the secondary characters in the
book. In the Benjamin Britten opera these characters (The traveler, the gondolier, the leading player and the
voice of Dionysus) are played by the same baritone singer, who also plays the hotel manager, the barber and
the old man on the Vaporetto. The trope of placing classical deities in contemporary settings was popular at
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the time when Mann was writing Death in Venice: in England, at almost the same time, E. M. Forster was at
work on an entire short-story collection based on this premise. The idea of the opposition of the Apollonian
and Dionysian was first proposed by Nietzsche in The The Birth of Tragedy and was also a popular motif of
the time (www.wikipedia.com).
Psychological elements are prominently figured in the novel. In the beginning of the story, we see
Aschenbach as a man who forcibly restrains himself from worldly and libidinal drives but as Freud has
predicted, these repressions only force his drives to emerge by some other means; in Aschenbach’s case, his
dreams: when he daydreamed about the tropical swamp and the Dionysian orgy for the ―strange-god‖.
Notably, the strange appearance and re-appearance of red-haired men in the course of the story would
symbolize demons or devils. Moreover, Aschenbach’s journey to Venice and into his death is attended in
every turn by fateful incidents (the dream in Munich of the jungle, the mention of the eyes of the crouching
tiger prefiguring the description of the cholera, the dandy on the boat and the Aschenbach who leaves the
hotel barber with his hair dyed and his lips painted), and by threatening figures (the tramp in Munich, the
unlicensed gondolier, the street musician whose bared teeth suggest the skull forcing its way through its
flesh).
Another major aspect of Mann’s style is his great love for found materials and his writing often takes
on the character of quoted pastiche. Death in Venice for example contains strategically altered citations from
Plato, Cicero, Homer, Xenophon, Plutarch, and August von Platen, as well as an encyclopedia entry on
Asiatic cholera. This penchant for quotations feeds into two other stylistics idiosyncrasies: an inscrutable
authorial perspective and periodic ruptures of hermetic fictionality. Because Mann’s narrators often speak
through the voice of a quoted source, authorial opinion is placed at double remove, filtered through the
narration that is itself filtered through the material to which it is based. It is thus, very difficult to determine
in any way, what Mann may have thought of his character—readers are left to judge for themselves.
Moreover, Mann’s quotations also direct readers’ attention outside the fictional universe of the actual story
at hand. His stories are set in real places and at real times. They occasionally even modulate into the present
tense, as in the graveyard scene, to emphasize that the fictional events are taking place in actual locations
that readers can, if they choose, go and see for themselves. Both in its intertextuality and its willful rupturing
of fictional illusion, Mann’s work anticipates the postmodern characteristic of contemporary fiction.
“For beauty, good Phaedrus, and beauty alone is both visible to the human eye and worthy of adoration: it is—mark
my word!—the only form of the sublime that our senses can both perceive and endure (p. 186).”
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V. Themes and Symbolism
a. The artist, the art and the society
The idea of the artist as a hero with a noble calling to pursue beauty has a rich tradition in western
literature, especially romantic and modern literature. Mann describes von Aschenbach as an artist who has
sacrificed his emotional life and distanced himself from the sensuous world to create beauty with his stories.
In the second chapter, the narrator says of von Aschenbach:
"Even as a young man … he had considered perfectionism the basis and most intimate essence of his talent, and for its
sake he had cooled his emotions." (p. 151).
As a writer consumed by ideas and a moral obligation to pursue beauty at all costs, even his physical
health, von Aschenbach likens himself to heroic figures such as Socrates and St. Sebastian, an early Christian
martyr, both of whom lived their lives in pursuit of a higher good. A critic in Mann’s novel claims that the
kind of hero von Aschenbach favored in his stories was based on the idea of "an intellectual and youthful
manliness which grits its teeth in proud modesty and calmly endures the swords and spears as they pass
through its body." Von Aschenbach was proud of this description, and felt it accurately portrayed his work.
Mann shows what happens when von Aschenbach loses control over his passions and can no longer
distinguish between art and life.
b. Homosexuality
Death in Venice has become a central text in the canon of gay literature, even though the novel
depicts no sexual acts and never explicitly mentions homosexuality. However, von Aschenbach's love for
Tadzio, which he tells himself is based on the young boy's beauty, is quite obviously sexual as well, and the
passion he feels for the boy is evident in his physical responses to the sight of the boy. Mann develops the
theme of same sex love primarily through his use of Greek mythology, particularly when he makes
comparisons between von Aschenbach's love for Tadzio with Socrates's love for Phaedrus and Apollo's for
Hyacinthus. Ancient Greek culture was well known for its homosexual relationships, especially older Greek
men's love for boys. Death in Venice is not, however, a cautionary tale about the dangers of homosexual love.
Rather, Mann uses the relationship to point out the danger of letting emotions override reason and to
underscore the relationship between desire and death.
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c. Symbolisms
Mann packs his story with symbols to imbue details and characters with deeper meaning and to create a
modern myth out of von Aschenbach's tragic decline. The image of the cemetery at the start of the novel,
for example, fore-shadows von Aschenbach's own death, and the appearance of the foppish drunken man
on the boat to Venice symbolizes the very kind of person von Aschenbach will become after he abandons
his moral and aesthetic ideals. Venice itself, perhaps, is the most significant symbol in the story.
VI. CONCLUSION
As we read the novel Death in Venice, we can easily conclude that it’s a story about homosexuality
and the psychology that goes with it. Although it is greatly considered as such, there is much more to the
novel than these themes. Most importantly, it is a story of the artist and the nature of his art. The
publication of Thomas Mann’s diaries years after his death, declared latently at any rate his inclination to
homosexuality. But this reality, did not advocate the release of ―queer themes‖ in his work, rather, it
suggested that Mann’s sexual nature tell us a good deal about his understanding of covert emotion,
repressed feelings, hidden desires—and above all, how this understanding generated a sublime inward,
imaginative and spiritual activity. His exploration of homosexuality gave him a better understanding on how
it is to be a social outsider. In this story, Mann suggests, with the influence of Freud and Nietzsche, that
there should be a balance between conscious will and passionate drives in order to have a healthy state of
mind as an individual and thus contributing to a healthy and cultured society. He also believes that the
maintenance of this balance will help create a true and inspired art.
REFERENCES
Bergenholtz, Rita A. "Mann's Death in Venice," in Explicator, Vol. 55, Spring, 1997, pp. 145–47.
Dierks, Manfred, "Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and Mann's Death in Venice," in Studies of Myth and Psychology in
Thomas Mann, Vittorio Klostermann, 1972, pp. 18–37.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice and Other Short Stories (Translated and with an Introduction by Jefferson Chase and
with a New Afterword by Martin Swales).New York: New American Library.1999
Picart, Caroline Joan S. Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche Eroticism, Death, Music and Laughter. Atlanta:
Rodopi. 1999
Semansky, Chris, Critical Essay on Death in Venice, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
SparkNotes Editors. (2006). SparkNote on Death in Venice. Retrieved April 18, 2010, from
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/deathinvenice/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death in Venice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas Mann
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The Art of Form Versus The Art of Emotion in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice