In a lot of man's work, there's a very strong autobiographical aspect. How strong is that in death in Venice? Well, a short answer would be it's very strong. It's possibly as most, arguably as most exposing personal work I'd say. Man was aware of the dangers of writing basically a homosexual story. He actually said that he only made Ashenbach homosexual to make this fool from the abyss seen as deep as possible. But writing an explicitly homosexual story was risky in all sorts of ways.
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