Thomas Mann, a German short-story writer and novelist, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. When his diaries were opened in 1975, they spoke of his struggles with his sexuality and that was reflected in his many works. His Death in Venice (1912) is a novella in which perverted love, decadence, and death are the result of a break from traditional morality by a celebrated middle-aged writer Aschenbach from Munich.
A dedicated artist with strong moral attitudes, Aschenbach goes on vacation to Venice. At the hotel he finds himself observing a fourteen-year-old boy from a Polish family whose impeccable beauty and profile recall a piece of classical Greek sculpture. From there, after the initial aesthetic response, Aschenbach is lost. Sensuality that he has subjected all his life. But now, the conflict between sensuality and intellect keeps worrying him all the time. Looking at the child, Tadzio, fills him with the anguish of love, expressed in front of the child’s bedroom door. One night, a dream filled with Dionysian orgiastic imagery reveals to him the sexual nature of his feelings for Tadzio. And he leads to follow the child, to contemplate, to dream, covering the whole range of restlessness, ecstasy and fear.
Aschenbach’s judgment becomes sick and perverted. Thus, Achenbach’s encounter with a silent stranger standing alone in a Munich morgue with a bellicose gaze directly into his eyes makes his heart pound with horror and enigmatic desire. The stranger’s long white lips, exposed gums, red lashes over pale eyes, two vertical horn-like grooves on his forehead, give him the mask of death and the marks of the devil. The foreigner symbolizes the demonic atmosphere that pervades Aschenbach’s progressive decline. He too, meanwhile, suffered the bonhomie of a lascivious young man, old, rude and drunk; all of these previous incidents are indicative of his innate moral decadence, and what he will become as he follows the boy Tadzio through the ‘smell of the sick city’, Venice.
He (Aschenbach) becomes, with the help of a cosmetician’s rouge and hair dye, the old and young fop, and is constantly drawn to the sight of the boy, who seems to be aware of his attentions and, in return, it also seems to encourage and tempt him.
On a nearly deserted beach, Aschenbach watches Tadzio one last time, driven to agony by seeing the boy unsupervised for once, fighting with an older boy where Tadzio is quickly outmatched. Angry, Tadzio leaves his companion and wades to the Aschenbach part of the beach, where he stands for a moment looking out to sea; he then turns around to look at his “lover of his”. For Aschenbach, it is as if the child is calling him. Irrevocably caught up in the fatal fascination of the boy’s corrupting beauty, he tries to get up and follow him, only to collapse back into his flesh, and soon after dies of rage in the silence of his homosexual love.
When news of his death becomes public, the world decorously mourns the passing of a great artist, and his artistic reputation remains unscathed. But the secret of his moral degeneracy also dies with Aschenbach’s death.
Aschenbach had been the ‘Apollonian’ artist (Apollo, the god of reason and intellect) who cultivated the classical virtues of moderation, restraint, and harmony. But after seeing the beautiful boy, his repressed emotional and sexual impulses found release in ‘Dionysian’ anarchy (Dionysus, god of unreason and passion), where the developing neurosis led to his unnatural obsession, infatuation, collapse. morale, broken health and inglorious death. . Achenbach is portrayed as the unheroic hero of the story.
Aschenbach embodies the conflict between art and life, between creativity and illness in real life.
Mann, though sarcastically attacked by his enemies for having made pederasty (child love) acceptable to the educated middle classes, has been instrumental in introducing same-sex discourse into mainstream culture; Mann probably intended to emphasize the need for a balanced existence.