As in all of Mann’s works-as in Mann’s own life-this tension between the stolid North/West and the fervid South/East will structure the tale.Īschenbach, long a widower, exhausted from his literary labors, takes a stroll through Munich one day.
The aristocratic “von” was a gift of the state he is of bourgeois origin, the son of a German civil servant and a Bohemian woman whose own father was a music conductor. Gustav von Aschenbach is a middle-aged German author of great renown, one who renounced his youthful Romanticism to become an artist of Classical restraint and moral greatness, one taught in schoolbooks and granted an honorary title. Yet here we are, rereading perhaps the 20th century’s greatest novella, Thomas Mann’s masterpiece of 1912. The real fantasy, then, does not even have the romanticizing sanction of classical pederasty, but was the daydream of what the average person might imagine to have been a common pedophile, a prowler at the periphery of playgrounds, the type of person one speaks of putting not in but under the jail rather than awarding the Nobel Prize.
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