Aschenbachs Vermächtnis

In his story "Death in Venice", Thomas Mann describes the end of the through-spiritual cultural tradition in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. His scenario - a burnt-out man retreats to a holiday island and becomes entangled in an impossible love - has since been taken up and developed further almost everywhere in the world by fellow poets, from Sylvia Townsend-Warner to Hermann Broch, Charles Jackson and Yukio Mishima to Gil Gilbert.to Hermann Broch, Charles Jackson and Yukio Mishima to Gilbert Adair and Hans Christoph Buch, to name but a few. Luchino Visconti and Benjamin Britten also interpreted the material with the means of film and opera. Close to the literary material, Joachim Bartholomae reconstructs the network of references, allusions and contradictions that passionately evoke a culture far in the past and try out the beginning of something new.