Death in Venice by Thomas Mann: A Summary of the Novella and Its Themes
What it is about
Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella by the German writer Thomas Mann, published in a limited edition by Hyperion-Verlag in 1912, serialised in Die neue Rundschau over October and November of that year, and issued as a trade edition by Fischer in 1913. Mann drew in part on his own stay in Venice during the cholera epidemic of 1911.
The story follows Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated author in his early fifties, recently ennobled for his achievements, which is how he came by the aristocratic "von". He is disciplined to the point of severity, ascetic, widowed young, and entirely given over to his work. The novella opens with him walking outside a cemetery, where he catches sight of a coarse, red-haired foreigner who stares back at him belligerently. Aschenbach walks on, embarrassed but oddly stirred, and has a sudden vision of a primordial swamp, fertile and exotic and full of hidden danger. Shortly after, he decides to take a holiday.
After a false start in Pula on the Austro-Hungarian coast, he concludes that Venice was always the intended destination and takes a suite at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido. At dinner he notices an aristocratic Polish family, and among them an adolescent boy of about fourteen in a sailor suit. Aschenbach is startled to realise the boy is supremely beautiful, like a Greek sculpture. The boy's sisters, dressed so severely they resemble nuns, make the contrast sharper. Later, at the beach, Aschenbach overhears the boy's name, Tadzio, a nickname for Tadeusz.
What Aschenbach first reads as a detached, artistic admiration becomes something else. The weather turns hot and humid, his health suffers, and he resolves to leave. On the morning of his departure, the sight of Tadzio fills him with regret. When his trunk goes astray at the railway station, he feigns annoyance and is secretly overjoyed. He returns to the hotel and stops thinking about leaving.
The main characters
Aschenbach is the whole centre of the book. Everything is filtered through his consciousness, including the parts he will not admit to. His rigour is not calm but strained, and the holiday loosens something he has spent a career holding down. Mann marks his descent with a series of strange figures, all red-haired and disreputable: the man by the cemetery, an unlicensed gondolier with a skull-like face who ignores his instruction and repeats "I can row you well", and later a street singer who performs at the hotel. On the boat to the Lido, Aschenbach turns away in disgust from an elderly man surrounded by high-spirited youths, got up in a wig, false teeth and make-up to fake his own youth. The reader is meant to remember him.
Tadzio barely speaks. He is observed rather than known, a figure of beauty rather than a character with inner life, which is precisely Mann's point. He was likely based on a boy named Władzio whom Mann watched during his 1911 visit. One evening Tadzio turns a charming smile on Aschenbach, who thinks of Narcissus smiling at his own reflection. Aschenbach rushes into the empty garden and whispers aloud, "I love you!"
The themes
Mann sets artistic discipline against appetite and lets the second win. Aschenbach has built a life on form, restraint and control. In Venice he listens with pleasure to songs he would once have despised. A dream full of orgiastic Dionysian imagery finally shows him the sexual nature of his feelings, and after it he watches the boy so openly, and follows him so persistently, that Tadzio's guardians begin warning the boy away from the strange solitary man. Yet the feelings, however intense, are never spoken aloud to anyone.
Disease runs alongside desire. Discreet notices from the Health Department warn of an unspecified contagion and advise avoiding shellfish. A strong smell hangs over the city, which Aschenbach eventually recognises as disinfectant. The authorities deny anything serious, and the tourists wander on. Aschenbach ignores the danger at first because he enjoys the idea that the city's hidden corruption matches his own. When he finally presses a British travel agent, the man reluctantly confirms a serious cholera epidemic. Aschenbach considers warning Tadzio's mother and decides against it, because a warning would take the boy away from him. Mann is blunt about the moral position: the knowledge that he is complicit, that he too is guilty, intoxicates him.
Why it still matters
It is short, and it is exact. Mann takes a respected man and dismantles him in a hundred pages or so, without ever letting him do anything dramatic. Nothing is confessed, nothing is acted on, and the collapse is total all the same. The novella also catches a city in denial about an epidemic while visitors stroll on, which reads differently now than it once did. Its central questions, about whether the worship of beauty can stay clean, and about what the artistic temperament is really serving, have kept it in print and in argument since 1912.
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