The final theme is also of a camera with the black sheet kind of flapping, which emphasizes this perspective. The reader is both manipulative, you like, but ends up being more critical than Ashenba himself and that's really important. I do think there is this kind of implicit affinity between Tatsu and Ashenba that Tatsu can't realize yet - not least because he has bat teeth. So there are all of these kind of hints that Tatsu might be somehow similar to Ashenba as well as being horribly objectified by him. Do you want to come in?
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