ABSTRACT
Gustav von Aschenbach, searching for ‘a new type of hero’ with ‘an intellectual and virginal manliness’, journeys to ‘the incomparable, the fabulous, the like-nothing-else-in the world’ city of Venice, there to find a ‘half-grown lad, a masterpiece from nature’s own hand…a tender young god, emerging from the depths of sea and sky’. The hero of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, written in 1911, is a distinguished middle-aged German writer, the very model of respectability and achievement. Aschenbach is, however, self-oppressed, ‘too busy with tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul’. The sight of a southerly traveller in a cemetery gives him a ‘longing to travel’, an ‘impulse towards flight’. He decides on Venice, ostensibly to spend a quiet summer on the beach but, in fact, in an attempt to escape the regimen of his work-he admits ‘he got no joy of it’—and to break out of his self-imposed solitary existence: Aschenbach’s longing for companionship and sexual comfort is hardly apparent even to himself. Venice, with its rich history and mysterious charm and the expanse of the Lido beaches, beckons the staid German.
