Der Tod in Venedig

Thomas Mann, 1875 - 1955, is considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. With his work, the modern German novel established a connection to world literature. Mann's diverse body of work received overwhelmingly positive responses worldwide. In 1933, he went into exile, first in Switzerland and later in the USA. He returned to Europe in 1952, where he died in Zurich in 1955.

"Think of the following poetic character. A man, noble and passionate, but in some way marked and a dark exception among the rules in his mind... noble like acceptance, but noble as a sufferer, lonely, excluded from happiness, from the fleeting existence of happiness, and completely focused on achievement." What Thomas Mann addressed in 1907 in Shakespeare's Othello, he later shaped into the character of Gustav Aschenbach in this "novella daring, if not impossible object," which depicts the sudden "outbreak of passion" in a homoerotically inclined person. The not-so-young writer Gustav Aschenbach – with features reminiscent of Gustav Mahler – discovers the Apollonian beauty of the boy Tadzio on the damp Lido of Venice and is consumed by an unfulfilled love. According to Heinrich Mann, he plays with "what seemed most desirable to him." Without hiding his own intentions, Thomas Mann later explained Gustav Aschenbach's longing for Tadzio: "It is the problem of beauty that the spirit feels life, but life perceives the spirit as beauty," for "the spirit that loves is not fanatical... it courts, and its courting is erotic irony..." He intended his novella to be understood as "a translation of the most beautiful love poem in the world into critical prose, the poem whose last line begins: He who thought most deeply loves most vividly.".