Quotes from book
Death in Venice

Death in Venice

Thomas MannOriginal title Der Tod in Venedig (German, 1911)

Death in Venice is a novella written by the German author Thomas Mann and was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. The work presents a great writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth. Though he never speaks to the boy, much less touches him, the writer finds himself drawn deep into ruinous inward passion; meanwhile, Venice, and finally, the writer himself, succumb to a cholera plague.

“But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

The disposition of the main character "Gustav Aschenbach", Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Death in Venice (1912)

“With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

“I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke

“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

“How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

On a short story of the character, "Gustav Aschenbach". Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Death in Venice (1912)

“This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke

“The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke

“Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke

“How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

“The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body … the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

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