Karolina Ashenbach is a central character, but let's turn to the boy. Ashenbach objectifies him. He is the beauty. Adley: There's no sort of talk of lust. There's an adoration of the beauty in reference to the classical idea of beauty. At the same time, as soon as he sees Thadjo, he also hears him, but as you mentioned before, he can't understand his language at all.
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