I think this is a very important question of empathy and who are we invited to empathize with through the narrative perspective. Sean said that we are also invited to be critical of Ashenba. I didn't feel that. I think I felt throughout that his sort of narcissistic interest and the narrator's sympathy with him really lasted. That's what I found so uncomfortable and the Herren law so thinking of unmanned. This idea of, you know, there being no man, but this is no master there. The film version which we've discussed loses all sense of that.
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