Klappentext

Gustav von Aschenbach has built an entire life, and a considerable reputation, on discipline. A distinguished writer, ennobled by his government, widowed young, he has organized every hour of every day around the conviction that great art is achieved through rigorous self-mastery, never through surrender to mere feeling.

Exhausted and restless, he travels to Venice for what he tells himself will be simple rest. There, among the guests of his grand hotel, he sees a Polish family - and among them, a boy of extraordinary, almost unbearable beauty. Aschenbach tells himself this fascination is philosophical: the contemplation of ideal form, the kind of aesthetic experience Plato once described. He tells himself many things. One by one, over the course of a summer, they stop being true.

As a cholera epidemic spreads quietly through the city - concealed by officials and merchants unwilling to frighten away the tourist trade - Aschenbach makes a choice that the entire novella has been preparing the reader to expect. His private collapse and the city's public corruption become, by the novella's end, impossible to separate.

First published in 1912, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous and most enduring work - a novella of exacting, formal perfection about the catastrophic vulnerability of the disciplined mind to the beauty it believed it could master. It inspired Luchino Visconti's celebrated 1971 film and Benjamin Britten's final opera, and remains, more than a century later, one of the most powerful and unsettling studies of desire, art, and self-deception ever written.

By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929.