Death in Venice

Set in 1911 during the cholera epidemic, Death in Venice follows its protagonist, writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who believes his obsessive preoccupation with and admiration of a ten-year-old Polish boy, Tadzio, would cure him of his creative block. Instead, it erodes his sense of rationality, disicipline and artistic restraint, on which he had once built his identity. Functioning as both a confession and a critique, the novella delivers a mediation on the fragility of a cultured self when confronted with desires thatcan neither be openly articulated nor entirely supressed. Katia Mann later corroborated that the novella was modelled almost entirely on the events that took place during Manns’ time at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido, Venice in the summer of 1911. The semi-autobiographical elements even invited extensive speculations, to track down the real-life identity of the boy who inspired Tadzio.