Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Overview

Death in Venice is a one-sided romance between an older German author on vacation in Venice and a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, age fourteen. The novel apparently mirrors Mann's own experience of vacationing in Venice in 1911 and becoming attracted to the point of obsession to a fourteen-year-old Polish youth.

Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wixsite.com/watersgreenhouse

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798881102142
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	01/08/2024
Pages:	132
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize, German author Thomas Mann is considered one of the world’s greatest writers. Besides being either bisexual or homosexual himself, three of his six children were homosexual as well. His oldest son Klaus lived an openly gay lifestyle that caused conflict with his father, who had conflicted opinions about his own sexual desires and always insisted on discretion. While scholars tried to deny Mann’s love of males for many years, the publication of his diaries left no doubt. In them Mann mentions his sexual attraction to members of his own gender including a frank admission that he one day realized he was in love with his son Klaus, who was then fourteen (and whose nickname was Eissi): “Am enraptured with Eissi, terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son . . . It seems I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.” Later in the same year, 1920, Thomas came upon Klaus completely nude and wrote that he was “deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming.”

With the realization that not only was Klaus Mann gay but Thomas felt same-sex attraction as well, critics began re-evaluating much of his work in light of the information from the diaries, finding homosexuality encoded throughout his fiction. Of course, in many cases, the homosexuality was always obvious even if scholars chose to make excuses for it. Death in Venice is a one-sided romance between an older German author on vacation in Venice and a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, age fourteen. The novel apparently mirrors Mann’s own experience of vacationing in Venice in 1911 and becoming attracted to the point of obsession to a fourteen-year-old Polish youth. In Tonio Kröger, Mann divides the title character’s love interest between his friend Hans Hansen and a girl who appears midway through the story. We are told that Tonio loves both. The bisexual path, whether desired solution or regrettable compromise, appears again in the work many consider to be Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain.


(from Ode to Boy, Vol. 2: An Anthology of Same-Sex Attraction in Literature from the 19th Century through the First World War by Keith Hale)