Pandemic as a Core Theme of the Text
Abstract
Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice“ tells about the love passion of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author, widowed and in his early 50s, against the background of the 1911 cholera epidemic in Venice. His strange love passion for Tadzio, a Polish boy from an aristocratic family, leads him to total spiritual and physical destruction. Intertextually rich, complex and polymorphous, the novella can be read as a skillfully woven web of allusions from antiquity forward. The protagonist is portrayed as Thomas Mann‘s alter ego; in this sense, the novella can be also read as a portrait of the artist in “the infected city“.