Mann claimed that he hadn't read Freud by the time he wrote Death and Benestall the Magic Mountain. He later in the 1920s, the late 1920s said, maybe I'd read a little bit of this and that but given his propensity for boasting about who he was in contact with, it's unlikely he had. So irony also has its limits in the novella. Is it a permissible question to me to ask, why do you think he wanted Ashenba to die? One interpretation, but I think that the kind of the death of Vinkleman, who's initiated classism in Germany, who died aged 50 in early June, who used descriptions of statues
Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous – and infamous - novella.
Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession.
It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach's stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected.
With
Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford
Erica Wickerson, a Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge
Sean Williams, Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield
Sean Williams' series of Radio 3's The Essay, Death in Trieste, can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lzd4