Sudworth: The notion of death and the inevitability also brings back the idea of myth, which we haven't talked about so much. It's a very accessible text, even though it's a highly impenetrable text, because it's so scaffolded if you like. You have this kind of meeting place of classical myth, the German literary canon and also those elements that had become popular by that point. Where did COVID come from? Fever, the hunt for COVID's origin from BBC Radio 4. Listen and subscribe on BBC Sounds.
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