Thomas Mann

One of the most important figures of late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature, Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, Germany, to a distinguished merchant family with a literary lineage.  Mann's older brother also became a famous novelist and playwright.  Famous both for his fiction and for his critical essays, Mann was a well-learned intellectual who studied the works of German philosophers such as Nietzsche.  Nietzsche was famous for his theories in decadence and heavily influenced Mann’s writing.  Mann held the notion that true art was only produced in despite of corrupting passions.  He presents this conflict between art and life in his novella, A Death in Venice, published in 1912.  The protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, is an aging German writer and very closely resembles Mann himself.  Aschenbach shares the belief that art must be separated from the corrupting passions of life.  However, all of that changes when he decides to travel to Venice to try and gain artistic inspiration from a change in scenery.  This trip is the first indulgence he has allowed himself in years, and it is through this self-indulgence where Aschenbach achieves self-realization, and also the beginning of his decline.  At his hotel he notices an extremely beautiful fourteen-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio, who is visiting Venice with his family. At first, Aschenbach tells himself that his interest in the boy is purely aesthetic, quite similarly to Michel. However, he soon falls obsessively in love with the boy, although the two never have direct contact.  It is purposeful that Mann doesn’t have Aschenbach come in contact with the boy.  He is expressing, through his art, his own homosexual tendencies and his desire to keep it a secret. Cholera infects the city of Venice but Aschenbach cannot bear to leave Tadzio and stays. He experiences a moral decline and is driven to a form of passionate madness by this boy until he finally dies of the cholera, stripped of his dignity, a slave to his passion.  Aschenbach ends up the moral opposite of how he started out the story.  While about the topic of homosexuality, since Aschenbach and Tadzio never come in contact, the homosexuality is only expressed in his mind and never actually acted upon in a physical sense; this story is more about the struggle the character goes through in finding his authentic self.

Homoerotic, often unrequited, love was a significant feature in much of his writing. In Death in Venice, an older man’s hopeless affection for a young boy leads to tragedy. Mann’s personal experience contributed to that story, as in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido of Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by what is described as “the angelic figure” of Władysław Moes, an adolescent Polish boy.  In fact, it has been revealed, twenty years after his death, that Mann had been exclusively homosexual through his late twenties, and that Mann remained intensely attracted to men throughout his life. His diaries told of his struggle with his sexual orientation, as when he described his feelings for the young violinist/painter Paul Ehrenberg as “the central experience” of his heart.  Eventually, by the failure of this homosexual relationship, Mann fled into marriage, further repressing his homosexual yearnings, which already had to be kept secret.  Nevertheless, at the age of 53 Mann fell in love with a 17-year-old boy named Klaus Heuser. 

Still able to keep his homosexuality under wraps, by the time Hitler came to power in 1933 Thomas Mann, at 59, was in possession not only of his daring secret life, but also of the Nobel Prize, which he had received in 1929.  Thanks to the Nobel Prize and the tremendous earnings of his books, Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, Mann lived in a large and beautiful house in Munich with his family, and they lived an aristocratic lifestyle.  They took trips, they ate and drank well, and two large cars stood in the garage: an open American car and a German limousine. Mann had a reputation as the most serious-minded and respectable Germans alive, and made use of such status to make a foray into politics.  While Nazi policy on sex and sexuality actually encouraged intercourse, they only encouraged it when it was between a male and a female for the purpose of procreation.  There was a definite stressed importance on the heredity of the next generation, and the ideology was that a citizen has responsibility to the next generation, “having children, for these women, was not exercising the right of self determination but fulfilling their responsibility to the next generation…their task was the preservation, furthering, and increase of their kind.”  Feeling defeated after the first World War, the idea is that Germany has to get back to a homogenous “pure” population in order to maintain/achieve their ideal “Aryan master race” and in order to rise above the rest. There was no room for homosexuals and any other sexual identification beyond heteronormative sex, and Nazi policies enforced severe punishment for homosexuals.  Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and freedom.  Mann was exiled, and upon his departure, in a letter, he wrote, “I am too good a German, too closely involved with the cultural traditions and language of my country for the prospect of a year-long or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard, ominous meaning for me.”

Homosexuality was clearly not a widely accepted practice in early twentieth century Europe, and Mann neither attacks it nor praises it. He represents it as a symptom of the unhealthily obsessive nature of an artist.  Like The Immoralist, A Death in Venice, is an expression of the artist’s own mind, through literary art.