Death in Venice

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.

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Guests

• Karolina Watroba No other episodes
  Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford
• Erica Wickerson No other episodes
  Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge
• Sean Williams No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield

Reading list

• "Der Tod in Venedig" and the Triadic Structure
  Alan Bance (Forum for Modern Language Studies, 1972) Google Books →
• Approaches to Teaching Mann's Death in Venice and Other Short Fiction
  Jeffrey B. Berlin (ed.) (Modern Language Association, 1992) Google Books →
• Global Intimations: Cultural Geography in Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kroger, and Der Tod in Venedig
  Elizabeth Boa (Oxford German Studies, 2006)
• Fear of Form: Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig
  Edward S. Brinkley (Monatshefte, 1999) Google Books →
• Critical Essays on Thomas Mann
  Inta Ezergailis (ed.) (G. K. Hall, 1988) Google Books →
• "Myth plus Psychology": a style analysis of Death in Venice
  Andre von Gronicka (Germanic Review, 1956) Google Books →
• Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature
  Anthony Heilbut (Papermac, 1997) Google Books →
• Taboos in German Literature
  David Jackson (ed.) (Berghahn, 1996) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann
  Todd Kontje (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Death in Venice and Other Stories
  Thomas Mann (trans. David Luke) (Vintage Publishing, 2001) Google Books →
• Der Tod in Venedig
  Thomas Mann (ed. T. J. Reed) (Bloomsbury, 1998) Google Books →
• Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master
  T. J. Reed (Twayne, 1994) Google Books →
• Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition
  T. J. Reed (Oxford University Press, 1996) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann
  Ritchie Robertson (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Google Books →
• The Psychological Reality of Myth in Der Tod in Venedig
  Heidi M. Rockwood and Robert J. R. Rockwood (Germanic Review, 1984) Google Books →
• Tonio Kroger and Der Tod in Venedig: From Bourgeois Realism to Visionary Modernism
  Richard Sheppard (Oxford German Studies, 1989-90) Google Books →
• Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: A Novella and Its Critics
  Ellis Shookman (Camden House, 2003) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m001mt6l

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mt6l

Auto-category: 800 (Literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous novella.