Yet, according to the later judgment of the author, the material “really only needed to be introduced and thereby showed in the most surprising fashion its compositional power of interpretive significance.”10 Mann’s murky phrase (“kompositionelle Deutungsfähigkeit”) tells us that he found the sequence of experiences pregnant with literary possibilities, which we surely knew already from his decision, on his return, to suspend the writing of Krull and undertake the novella. An early polemical essay reveals his sense of the importance of experience—transformed experience—to literature. The immediate stimulus for that essay, “Bilse und ich,” was a charge made in a Lübeck courtroom, when the prosecutor assimilated Buddenbrooks to the novel whose libelous status was being tried and took both to be instances of a genre he dubbed “Bilse novels.”11 Mann responded by downplaying the role of imagination, especially in the construction of plot and character: “It is not the gift of invention, but that of animating experience (Beseelung) that makes the serious writer (Dichter).”12 The process of literary creation can be thought of as one of deepening a portrait of reality, and Mann allies himself with what he sees as a school of writers, inspired by Nietzsche, who blur the distinction between literature and discovery, between art and criticism.13 Writers of this school examine their world with a vision both cool and passionate; their probing is painful, even agonizing, for themselves; they place themselves on trial and must expose themselves if they are to be of real service.14 The starting point for the painful struggle is the recognition of something capable of valuable transformation in the writer’s experience, and this recognition, we can assume, is what prompted Mann to refashion the material of his visit to Venice.
Yet why did he choose to transform it in precisely this way—why do we have Death in Venice and not Rebirth of a Writer? Part of the answer may lie in frustration at the critical reaction to Königliche Hoheit. In a sketch of his life, composed in 1930, Mann aired the thought that German readers pay respectful attention only to something “serious and weighty,” so that, for all its apparently questionable material, the “tragedy” of his novella might testify to the “moral rehabilitation of the author of Königliche Hoheit.”15 Happy endings were to be avoided.16 Perhaps he was convinced that his proper topic was decline:17 Buddenbrooks had charted the decline of a family, and, in Der Tod in Venedig, Mann focuses, in shorter compass, on the decline of an individual, the falling apart of an eminent writer. In both instances he can be viewed as experimenting with possibilities for himself. Just as his early experiences in Lübeck had prompted the possibility of the brief, unhappy life of Hanno Buddenbrook, a life that could have been his own, so the fight to the south and the charming vision on the lido inspired him to explore his potential future. Is that how we should understand the power of experience to yield literary significance?
Perhaps—but it is only part of the explanation. As many commentators have recognized, important thematic relationships run through Mann’s early work, from the stories that precede Buddenbrooks to the first novel itself and the subsequent short fiction. In an early essay, written in response to a question posed to German literati, Mann drew on material for the projected work on Geist und Kunst to explore the distinction (for him, a significant but vexed distinction) between the “writer” (Schriftsteller) and the “man of letters” (Dichter). The latter, he proposes, starts with the idea, to which he gives concrete form; the writer—or, at least, the pure (absolute) writer—derives the idea from life, from experience, and converts it into ideas: he “‘transforms everything into light and fame,’ as Nietzsche says.”18 Much of the fictional work that culminates in Der Tod in Venedig can be conceived from a perspective that incorporates and refines the proposal. Rather than thinking of Mann as beginning either from an idea detached from all connection with his experience or from an experience he undergoes in some hypothetical idea-free state, he can be interpreted as working between the two poles toward which he gestures, sometimes as Dichter and at others as Schriftsteller—a transcendence of the dichotomy that would surely satisfy the essayist who, after giving his proposed account of the distinction, asks (rhetorically) whether it marks any difference in value.19 A theme emerges from early experiences to generate a relatively simple idea, one that gives rise to embodiment in first attempts at concrete form and is thereby clarified and articulated so that subsequent experience can refine it further, until, to use the Nietzschean metaphor, the light is brilliant and the fame has burned away all impurities—the process leads from the early stories (“Der Wille zum Glück,” for example) to culminate in Death in Venice.
Not a theme, however, but two related complexes of ideas emerge. From early in his career, Mann was preoccupied with the role of the artist and with the relations between artist and citizen (Künstler and Bürger).20 He was equally concerned with the struggles and pains of those who feel themselves outside a society in which others are happy.21 Plainly, these categories overlap—one great achievement of Tonio Kröger is the creation of a central figure whose experiences and reflections enable the exploration of both complexes simultaneously—but there are outsiders who have no pretensions to artistic talent (Tobias Mindernickel, Lobgott Piepsam) as well as figures who fit more or less well into bourgeois society and who are in various degrees attracted to or proficient in the arts (from Paolo Hofmann, Thomas Buddenbrook, and little Friedemann through Christian Buddenbrook, Detlef Spinell, and Hanno Buddenbrook to Schiller in his “heavy hour”).22
The fortunes of the Buddenbrooks lapse for many reasons: unfortunate marriages, religious enthusiasms, distractions of public service, lack of appreciation for technological change, the clear-headed determination of the “new men” (personified by Tony’s bête noire, Hermann Hagenström), and, most evidently, the mixture of excessive caution and occasional rashness that constitutes the policy of the family firm under Tom and his father. Interwoven with these causes, however, is the introduction of the artistic life into the household, first in the seduction of Christian (from his childhood penchant for mimicry to the songs and sketches with which he entertains the “club”), later in the arrival of Gerda, reserved and even uncanny, who replaces the blithe, and probably clumsy, flute playing of the old consul with music that must be taken seriously, music whose demands are urgent enough, in the end, to take the widowed Frau Senator back to Amsterdam to a life of duos with her father. With fascination and a sense of his own exclusion, Tom is initially captured, committed to a marriage in which Gerda addresses him as “lieber Freund” (dear friend), left to listen at the door as his wife and the visiting officer-pianist achieve a (nonphysical) intimacy that will always be denied to him,23 brought to ultimate resignation (and perhaps lassitude) by a reading of Schopenhauer (including, presumably, the passages in book 3 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung that celebrate music as not only the highest art but also the deepest probing of reality of which we are capable).24 Tom’s son, Hanno, after whom there will be no more Buddenbrooks,25 fragile, timid, and sickly, in his father’s estimation unmanly, and certainly unsuited to the commercial world of the late nineteenth century, inherits the love of and aptitude for music—the bacillus brought by Gerda reproduces itself in him. Just as an infection ends the Buddenbrook line, so too this bacillus of high art is part of the decline of the family.
Tonio Kröger adds to the image of the artist’s diseased or deformed state other comparisons that divide the Künstler from the honorable citizens. In his long declaration to the sympathetic Lisaweta Iwanowna (a good listener if ever there were one), Tonio denies that any “rightly formed, healthy, and decent” person ever writes, acts, or composes. Artists, he asserts, share the fate of those “prepared singers for the papal choir”—they have been deprived of normal functioning. Separated from humanity by an “abyss of irony, disbelief, opposition, recognition, and feeling,” they must understand that they are separate, outside, people who do not belong.26 The banker whose fiction is genuinely good turns out to be a criminal—perhaps every serious artist is
a confidence trickster.27 Lisaweta shrewdly taxes Tonio’s declaration by characterizing him as a bourgeois gone astray (ein Bürger auf Irrwegen). Her diagnosis brings him to silence, broken only at the end of the novella in his confession that he stands between two worlds, in neither of which he can be at home, and in his expression of loving admiration for the world of the happy and stupid ones, “the blond and blue-eyed” who live lightly and uncaringly, whose unreflective accomplishments are the material to be celebrated in his art.28
Tonio Kröger might have written a book akin to Buddenbrooks: a nostalgic celebration of the world of the decent, upstanding, commercial men, the patriarchs who brought order to small, prosperous towns until their fortunes were undermined by accidents of history, keener rivals, and the bacillus of high culture.29 Tonio stands for a clear possibility, the writer—even the Dichter—who honors or mourns bourgeois life from the outside. Can there be a deeper identification, of the sort implied in Lisaweta’s characterization of Tonio, a writer who crosses the abyss to incorporate in his life the virtues praised in his prose? Or must any attempt to write (seriously) and simultaneously to live as an insider, a proper member of the bourgeoisie, rest upon a trick, an illusion that will be unmasked if anyone is allowed to go behind the scenes?30 Death in Venice can be understood as developing even further the two thematic complexes—one centered on the relationship between artist and bourgeois society, the other on the plight of outsiders—by leading its readers into the life of a protagonist who promises, to himself as much as to the world, Lisaweta Iwanowna’s deeper identification.
Aschenbach is a serious and subtle writer, one whose style is a model for others (and whose style is represented for the reader through Mann’s heightening of his own prose), one who has rejected the “Bohemian stereotype,” even in the relatively tame versions represented by Tonio and Lisaweta. He has striven for, and apparently achieved, respectability and decency not only in his books but in his life as well. Conscious of the tradition and potential judgment of his ancestors—“officers, judges, and government functionaries, men who had led upright lives of austere decency, devoted to the service of king and country”31—he writes to honor and preserve that tradition, to earn the approval of the forefathers. His success in doing so is measured in several ways, perhaps most notably in his recent ennoblement: as the first sentence of the novella informs us, he is now von Aschenbach.32 Death in Venice takes us behind the scenes, to the lido where Aschenbach is unmasked, where he is confronted with what he is, and where he dies. He becomes yet another of Mann’s unfortunate outsiders, cut off from those around him—his connections and conversations with others are restricted entirely to the practical details of his life—and he is finally deprived of what had sustained him in solitude, a life of thought, feeling, and expression he could endorse as virtuous and honorable.33
Yet there is more to Mann’s reworking of his experiences for the novella. As the many commentators recognize, Death in Venice is remarkable for the wealth of philosophical references and allusions that pervade it. At two critical moments, Aschenbach’s ruminations invoke the figure of Socrates, in whose voice he speaks to himself.34 Equally evident are the ways in which the protagonist’s thoughts and the narrator’s attitudes are infected by the two German thinkers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who had most shaped the self-education of intellectuals growing up at the end of the nineteenth century. The influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is not only apparent in the essays Mann devoted to each of them but also explicit in his autobiographical writings.35 A letter written late in his life to his old friend Ferdinand Lion expresses poignantly Mann’s admiration for Schopenhauer:
You are reading Schopenhauer—that has made the most impression [am meisten Eindruck] on me. How I wish I could find time, to read at least the principal work [The World as Will and Representation] through one more time, word by word, with love (“con amore”). In a nutshell, reading him was the most intense reading experience of my youth. And isn’t he also in the first rank of European essayists (leaving aside his metaphysical views!), of equal stature with the best of all outside Germany? I hardly need to return to him, for I have never really left or lost him.36
As might be anticipated, in the long essay on Schopenhauer Mann emphasizes the deep impression made on him by his reading of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. It occupied him for a long time, and what he read during the same period or even shortly thereafter seemed to him “strange, untutored, askew, arbitrary, unconstrained by the truth.”37 The 1930 sketch of his own life recalls his encounter with Schopenhauer (which followed an earlier reading of Nietzsche) as a “spiritual experience of the highest order,” comparable to that attributed to Thomas Buddenbrook, an immersion in which he read day and night (“as one only reads once”), more of a “passionate-mystical” than of a “properly philosophical” type.38 Years earlier, in his contorted wartime defense of “Deutschtum,” Mann had explained how Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner formed for him a trinity of deeply influential figures, and he had provided a vivid description of the occasion of his first reading of Schopenhauer:
There hovers before my eyes the small upper-storey suburban room, in which, sixteen years ago [in the late 1890s], stretched out the entire day on an oddly shaped chaise-longue or sofa, I read The World as Will and Representation. Lonely and impulsive, seeking the world and yet fascinated with death, how my young self devoured the magic potion of this metaphysics, whose deepest essence is eroticism, and in which I recognized the spiritual source of the music of Tristan! One only reads that way once. It does not happen again.39
Later, in the long essay on Schopenhauer, Mann asks his readers (hearers) to forgive his similar portrait of Thomas Buddenbrook’s reading, inspired as it was by the experience of a “twenty-year-old” who had been intoxicated by a “metaphysical magic potion.”40 Unlike his protagonist, however, the twenty-year-old does not go on to a premature death; instead, imbued with a sympathy with death, he writes with increasing intimacy and precision about it.41
I have dwelt at some length on the deep impression Schopenhauer made on Mann and on his enduring interest in and sympathy for the great pessimist, precisely because the role of Nietzsche in his thinking and writing is so much more heavily emphasized—indeed, as we shall see, many commentators on Death in Venice write as if a connection to Nietzsche’s early work could be taken for granted.42 Nietzsche lurks behind two of the mature masterpieces—Der Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus—and references to his writings pervade Mann’s essays, letters, and diary entries. Interestingly, almost all of those citations are to Nietzsche’s middle and later writings, from Human, All Too Human through Ecce Homo and beyond to the material collected posthumously.43 When Mann recalls the early impact of Nietzsche on him—and he tells us that he read Nietzsche before discovering Schopenhauer—he points first to a stylistic influence, evident in his own earliest prose attempts.44 Moreover, he is quite explicit about how Nietzsche’s ideas influenced him:
The twenty-year-old understood the relativity [context sensitivity?] of the supposed “immorality” of this great moralist: if I saw the drama of his hate of Christianity, I saw also his fraternal love for Pascal and understood the hate as moralistic throughout, never psychological—a distinction also to be maintained in his battle, culturally of the highest importance, carried through to the death against the figure he loved the most, Richard Wagner. In a word, I saw above all in Nietzsche the man who overcomes himself; I did not take anything in him literally, I believed hardly anything he wrote, and just this gave my love for him its passionately double-sided character, and gave it its depth.45
Mann goes on to ask, pointedly, whether we should take Nietzsche seriously when he praises Bizet over Wagner or when he commends the “blond beasts” for their predatory behavior toward the lambs.46 Mann’s apologia for German militarism had earlier offered a similar assessment of Nietzsche’s importance. Nietzsche’s attacks on morality are more those of an artist than of a philosopher—ind
eed, Mann views Nietzsche as an artist manqué, someone who would be fortunate to find his great writer (Dichter), as Schopenhauer found in Wagner his great composer. That writer would draw from his source “a form of highest irony, erotic in the slyest and most subtle fashion, playing between life and intellect.”47 So far, the writer has failed to appear, but it is not hard to guess the identity of Mann’s favorite candidate.
His fascination with philosophy, particularly with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, is, in my view, important for coming to terms with Death in Venice—it is (as almost all commentators recognize) a deeply philosophical novella. Yet it is very easy to make that characterization and not take it with the seriousness it deserves: Mann was no professional philosopher, after all—but neither were Schopenhauer or Nietzsche!—so, although he might have borrowed from philosophers, we should not see him as doing philosophy. Here I demur. It is not enough to think of the evidently philosophical concepts that figure in Mann’s writings as counters to be laid out and moved around in discussions of his work but never to be explained, analyzed, or questioned. Nor is it even sufficient to explore the philosophical sources, probing the texts Mann read with the aim of showing how significant ideas are taken over from them and applied or developed in the novella.48 Mann merits our attention as a contributor to the philosophical discussions in which his sources were engaged.
Even if the corpus of studies of Death in Venice is unsurveyable, even if four or five generations of responses to the novella already exist, there is—I hope—room for something different. In this book I shall try to treat Mann’s original text, together with the Britten opera and Visconti film that it inspired, as philosophical explorations in their own right.
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