TWO

Beauty

1

Early in Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community, the schoolmaster Rorlund borrows a famous New Testament phrase to characterize the large towns of the modern era: they present a beautiful exterior, but it only serves to conceal the rottenness within—they and their most respectable citizens are “whited sepulchres” full of “uncleanness.”¹ Even if the suggestions of the previous chapter might permit the judgment that Aschenbach’s art lends worth to his life, important questions about his social persona are left unanswered. For Aschenbach is not only the celebrant and defender of bourgeois values but one who has claimed to embody those values in his conduct. His obsessive passion for Tadzio reveals him to be a sham, an unworthy descendant of those severe ancestors whom he has attempted to emulate—as with Ibsen’s protagonist, Karsten Bernick (and many other Ibsen characters), the pleasing appearance masks the “uncleanness”: Aschenbach is distinguished from Bernick only by the fact that his mumbled and self-serving “confession” at the fountain is far less honest and courageous than Bernick’s forthright final acknowledgment of what he has done and been.

A less moralistic narrator, one who did not repudiate the maxim that “to understand all is to forgive all,”² might appraise the mismatch between the writer’s desires and his conduct differently, not diagnosing any “foulness within” but seeing instead the deformation wreaked upon a sensitive but potentially healthy individual by a rigid and uncomprehending society. Aschenbach would emerge as a victim, a man forced to conform to prejudices about the limits of acceptable human nature and permissible conduct. His own acquiescence in the prejudices, the identification with the ancestors and the narrow values they defended, would be seen as emphasizing the intensity of the forces working to confine and distort him and the depth of their penetration.

Yet wherever the fault is taken to lie, in proclivities so “unnatural” they must be concealed or in social judgments so uninformed by understanding of human psychology and so inflexible in their application that they twist the lives of those unlucky enough to be at odds with them, the envisaged unity between artist and citizen, at least in this case, has broken down. Aschenbach fails to advance beyond Tonio Kröger’s predicament—he does not achieve that deeper identification in which the writer not only endorses and defends the bourgeois values but successfully lives them as well.

Mann’s two writer-protagonists reject Nietzsche’s condemnation of the “decent citizens,” the Bürger, as inevitably limited and crippled, part of a herd whose lives are worthless. To the figure of Zarathustra dancing on the mountains, Tonio counterposes the images of Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm dancing in a Danish resort. Even to have written The World as Will and Representation or to have composed nine symphonies (presumably Beethoven’s) would pale, Tonio Kröger thinks, beside the achievement of their living.³ These joyful bourgeois figures, Hans and Inge, are oblivious to the higher beauties art claims to discern or to create (Hans, rightly, reads books about horses rather than Schiller’s Don Carlos), but they embody beauty.⁴ Observing them, Tonio Kröger is moved to his Credo: although he, the artist, has seen the confusion of human life, its tragedy and absurdity, his deepest love is for those who are unconscious of these realities, for the “lightly living ones” whose philosophically innocent lives are beautiful. For Aschenbach, too, the elegant lives he observes on the lido and in the strange, ambiguous city appear as parts of an elysian landscape to which he has been magically translated, where a wonderful lightness of living is given to humanity—and where beauty is embodied in Tadzio.⁵

Death in Venice apparently follows Tonio Kröger in presenting the split between artist and citizen, a split reminiscent of Plato’s famous story of the division of humankind related in the Symposium.⁶ The artist is sensitive to the sources of value in human life, able to contemplate life’s beauties and to create beautiful representations of them. The citizens who live well embody those beauties in their lives—lightly, thoughtlessly, carelessly. No individual can manage both—even those who live well, live incompletely. Hence any attempt to go beyond what Tonio, the self-conscious outsider, already achieves must involve pretense, must be a confidence trick—a visit behind the scenes to the actor’s dressing room would reveal the repulsive spots under the costume. Aschenbach cannot be the good citizen he seems.

Important to the success of the novella was Mann’s skill in allowing his readers to observe the split from either side. His sardonic reassurance to Philipp Witkop that his story was “very respectable” expresses itself in a narrative voice, that of the moralistic “second narrator,” who issues the orthodox judgments and permits readers to think that Mann, like Aschenbach, buttresses the Approved Moral Point of View.⁷ Yet the novella can be read—probably always has been read by those with a less intolerant view of Aschenbach’s latent predilections—as a depiction of the deformation of a once-vulnerable youth who has been compelled, throughout his life, to confine and deny central elements in his character. Those who combine this latter interpretation with a reading of Mann’s surviving diaries will understand how closely Aschenbach’s sense of self-distortion resembles that felt by his creator. They will recognize Mann’s fidelity to the demand that the writer who is to be of service must place himself on trial.⁸

Connected though it surely is with his earlier fiction, Death in Venice should not, however, be regarded as a simple reprise of themes Mann had presented before: it is no more a recapitulation of Tonio Kröger (the Artist, even one who admires the Bourgeois World, is inevitably an Outsider) any more than it is a repeat of “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” (Discipline undone by Passion—again). If the later novella goes further, it is (as the last chapter proposed) because there are significant differences between Aschenbach’s years of discipline and their fruits and the tepid serenity Friedemann attains—and because Death in Venice probes a relation Tonio Kröger takes as given. From the first tense moments in which Tonio fears that Hans Hansen will not join him for the walk home from school, Tonio is presented as an outsider: it is no surprise when his letter to Lisaweta confesses that he stands between two worlds.⁹ Aschenbach successfully masquerades as a bourgeois—he “passes” well enough that the unctuous manager of the Hotel des Bains ascends with him to show him his room. On the face of it, however, the writer’s failure to ft into conventional society, for all his apparent success, has nothing to do with his role as artist: the incompatibility between artist and citizen, presupposed by Tonio Kröger (and by Tonio Kröger), is irrelevant to the issue. The elements of Aschenbach’s life do not ft together; his literary work and its aims are concordant with the persona he presents but not with the person he is—but the clash stems from his repressed homosexuality. Mann apparently decided on a change of theme, turning his attention to the plight of the closeted homosexual (or bisexual) male in prewar Wilhelmine Germany.

Or did he? In turning from the disciplined artist to the socially embedded man, I have already slightly amended the philosophical perspective that dominated the previous chapter: there the focus was on potential sources of value in human lives; here the issues have been posed in terms of values in general and of a specific value—beauty. Echoing the most famous sentence of Nietzsche’s first work—“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world finally justifed”¹⁰—I have suggested the quasi-Platonic split: the artist perceives value and its beauty and renders what is valuable beautifully visible; the “blond and blue-eyed ones” live beautifully. Death in Venice explores the tension between artist and citizen, a tension taken for granted in Tonio Kröger, in terms of this perspective on the central philosophical question, a perspective that understands worthwhile lives as possessing beauty, as being themselves works of art. Citizens and artists whose lives appear to go well stand in different—complementary—relationships to beauty, but the relations necessarily exclude one another. To reveal the inevitability of exclusion, Death in Venice presents an apparent possibility of transcending the split between artist and citizen, a possibility heavily dependent on ideas in Plato and his successors,¹¹ one that must ultimately fail. Although failure can be dramatically exhibited in an older man who is drawn to the beauty of a boy—a case of Knabenliebe—the homoerotic resonances only heighten the drama. The plot Mann discarded, the story of the seventy-four-year-old Goethe’s infatuation for the teenage Ulrike von Levetzov, would have sounded, if less strongly, the same tones.

The attempt at transcendence rests on transforming the roles of artist and of citizen. Instead of thinking about the attitudes of actual citizens, cramped as they may be by widespread prejudices, we can envisage an ideal citizen, one whose evaluations and whose conduct conforms to the civic virtues, those virtues that allow human beings to lead worthwhile lives in harmony with one another. These ideal citizens may live as lightly as Hans and Inge, responding to the pull of what is just and good and beautiful without deep understanding of how their actions should be directed; thanks to their natural dispositions and the circumstances in which they are placed, particularly because they have been given a wisely crafted education, they grow into people who will naturally behave gracefully and well. Their accomplishments would be subverted were they to try to probe the psychological complexities of human behavior: that is why Hans should not read Don Carlos and why Aschenbach rightly turns away from “knowledge.” Actual citizens, although they may approximate the ideal of unselfconscious virtue, may sometimes be led astray by the faulty ideas about virtue current in their societies—in this respect their education fails them, and they deviate from the civic ideal. Consequently, real-life counterparts of Hans and Inge, who have unfortunately absorbed the prejudices of prewar Wilhelmine German bourgeois society, may misunderstand and scorn some of the passions of the Tonios and the Aschenbachs, may even be moved to talk of “whited sepulchres” or to applaud the judgment of the moralizing narrator who comments on the writer’s fall.

One philosophical tradition that descends from Plato—and opposes its founder in making peace with the arts—takes the problem of understanding “wisely crafted education” as central.¹² Dewey writes, provocatively, that “if we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education,”¹³ and he claims that attempts to work out a wise approach to education properly draw on the arts as well as the sciences (broadly construed).¹⁴ Similar ideas are present in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—although they are far less explicit and directed very differently (to say the least).

Nietzsche’s early essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” (“Schopenhauer als Erzieher”) was a work Mann read with considerable care and interest.¹⁵ In it, Nietzsche begins by formulating the ancient philosophical question: we are, he claims, conscious of our finitude and recognize that we only have a brief span in which “to show why and to what purpose we have come to be.”¹⁶ Unlike the philosophers who have emphasized participation in and contribution to society as an educational goal, Nietzsche focuses on the individual, on “the law of your individual self”:¹⁷ “Your true teachers and educators reveal to you the true original sense and fundamental substance of your being, something ineducable and unformable, but, in any event, difficult of access, imprisoned, paralyzed: your educators can be nothing else than your liberators. And that is the secret of all real education …”¹⁸ To contribute to the real goals of civilization, this liberation should bring forth exceptional individuals (“geniuses”), not docile servants of the state. Scorning contemporaries who replace the serious problem of how to live with issues about the reform of political arrangements, Nietzsche rails against “the doctrine, preached from the rooftops nowadays, that the state is the highest goal of humanity, and that there can be no higher human duty than to serve the state: in which I recognize, not a return to paganism, but a return to stupidity.”¹⁹ Schopenhauer, unlike most of the learned occupants of professorial posts, including Kant,²⁰ is a genuine philosopher, someone who can serve as educator for exceptional people, someone who can enable those people to find themselves.

In transforming the role of the artist, Mann borrowed from Nietzsche the idea of the educator in the fullest sense, the Erzieher, the discoverer and communicator of insights that free people to live in their own worthwhile individual fashions, attributing to the artist the power to take on this invaluable work. At the same time, he ignored the Nietzschean suggestions that the work can only be for the few, that it must produce individuals whose projects override the interests of their communities, that if it gives rise to good citizens it must ipso facto have failed. Mixing features of Plato’s philosopher-guardians with characteristics of Nietzsche’s ideal educators, he envisaged artists identifying enduring values and making those values apparent to all, thus contributing not only to the success of individual lives but also to the publicly pervasive assessments made within the ambient society. This is the goal he assigns to Aschenbach, who sees his own writerly service as following in the tradition of his ancestors.²¹

There was one significant further borrowing from Nietzsche’s conception of the educator. Schopenhauer was distinguished among others bearing the title “philosopher,” suited to be a “teacher and disciplinarian,”²² because his thoughts permeated his life. Nietzsche explains how Schopenhauer could be his teacher: “I recognize a philosopher to the extent that he is able to provide an example…. But the example must be given through his outward life and not merely through his books, and thus in the way that the ancient philosophers taught, through demeanor, behavior, clothing, food, and customs more than through what they say or even what they write.”²³ So the role of the ideal artist-educator—Mann’s counterpart for the Nietzschean philosopher—is properly discharged if the insights discerned and communicated are reflected in the life of the Erzieher, as, according to the “obituary,” they do seem to be in Aschenbach’s case: for, unusually for an intellectual, he lives in “honorable upper-class bourgeois status.”²⁴

Mann’s sympathy for this view of the artist’s role is apparent from the notebooks he kept at the time of his early writings. During the tempestuous period in which his notebooks reflect on his friendship with Paul Ehrenberg, the object of intense homoerotic yearnings, he writes that the truly eminent writer (Dichter) must build “beautiful bridges” to the world of his contemporaries and that his life, too, must be seen, in its entirety, as a work of art.²⁵ Goethe figured as an exemplar here, a poet who served as advisor—even cultural czar—for the Weimar of his day: Mann paid careful attention to Nietzsche’s attempt to transform Goethe into a purely contemplative “inactive” presence.²⁶ The conception of the artist-educator was also exploited in Königliche Hoheit, the immediate predecessor of Death in Venice, where the pinched and limited life of the “poet,” Axel Martini, is used to cast doubt on his suitability for the role for which he is publicly honored.²⁷

This chapter began with two simple approaches to Aschenbach the decent man and honorable citizen. Readers inclined to say “Hm. Hm” on hearing the theme of the story but then reassured by its “respectability” approve the unmasking of Aschenbach as a sham, the opening of the “whited sepulchre” to disclose the foulness it contains. Others, less prejudiced, find the story poignant in its revelations of the deformations societies inflict. The novella, I suggest, allows a different and more complex reading. There are transformations of the roles of citizen and artist allowing for the apparent possibility of joint embodiment. An ideal artist may live after a fashion that prompts the disapproval of actual citizens—but that is because the deprecating judges do not recognize the virtues to which the artist responds, the virtues present in his life and conduct: like the moralistic narrator they are possessed by prejudices, indoctrinated by an inadequate education, one devised, perhaps, by a “bureaucrat-philosopher,” a truncated Kant lacking all traces of genius. Ideal citizens, Hans and Inge if they are wisely educated, will appreciate the virtue the artist perceives and embodies, just as he responds to theirs. Artist and citizen will be at one in the understanding of virtue—and beauty.

2

Aschenbach, von Aschenbach, is introduced to us as one who has dedicated his art to moral education, although we do not know the extent to which he has refined the norms current in his society. His life, too, insofar as it is lived in public, moves gracefully through the bourgeois world. We might worry a little about the circumstances under which the finely chiseled prose is generated—and not just that final page and a half on the beach—the hours of dedicated and often painful struggle. Perhaps the contrast between the grace of the surface and the austere discipline behind it is itself a kind of confidence trick. The major question to Aschenbach’s successful reconciliation of the roles of ideal artist and ideal citizen is, however, posed by the embodiment of beauty in Tadzio not, in the first place, because of the direction of the longings evoked but because of the moral obfuscation to which it leads. One moved by beauty to perceive the good would not connive at the venal deceptions of the Venetian authorities.

The perception of the boy convinces—or perhaps reminds—Aschenbach that there is a kind of beauty—call it “higher beauty”—to which his prose has hitherto been inadequate. Even in the presence of that higher beauty, Aschenbach fails to capture it—and recognizes his own failure. On the evening when he waits anxiously for the Poles to return, the evening that will extort from him the self-confession of his love for the boy, that awareness is painful. “He [Tadzio] was more beautiful than it is possible to say, and Aschenbach felt, with pain as on many previous occasions, that words can only praise the beauty conveyed through the senses [die sinnliche Schönheit] but cannot fully reproduce it.”²⁸ The struggles of the past decades have been so hard precisely because Aschenbach has striven to find the closest verbal approximation to higher beauty, persevering even though his efforts always disappoint (“Durchhalten!”). Tadzio’s presence is an opportunity to pursue this task, perhaps an impossible one, yet further, and the newly felt pain is not merely the result of a lover’s fears (Has the beloved left Venice?) but the realization that his words cannot match what is directly before him.

A very specific conception of the artist-educator, the Erzieher, is at work here. Art, at its greatest, is not simply the free creation of beauty but the creative response to a prior perception of higher beauty, a response that itself makes beauty accessible to those who have not had such perceptions. To play the role fully, a writer must reproduce higher beauty completely. Even though gestures and approximations may convey something, more is always demanded.²⁹

The “obituary” chapter provides enough clues to attribute this self-conception to Aschenbach during the decades in which he crafted the works that have brought him renown. After his encounter with Tadzio, however, the conception is focused with ideas from Plato he may never previously have made explicit. Greek references begin to appear in his private characterizations of the boy, as Aschenbach sits at breakfast the morning after he first observed Tadzio: the rest of the family is assembled, but the “little Phaeacian” is late.³⁰ When he does appear, the writer studies the “godlike beauty” of the youth, whose head is that of Eros. Later, Aschenbach observes the comradeship of Tadzio and Jaschu as they stroll along the beach with their arms around each other (each other’s shoulders?), and Jaschu bestows a kiss. The observer rehearses a playful warning, quoting the words Xenophon attributes to Socrates when Critobulus supposedly stole a kiss from a beautiful young man—an occasion for the philosopher-educator to remind his interlocutors of the importance of self-discipline and restraint in the presence of beauty.³¹ Aschenbach’s thoughts move from a generalized characterization of the youth in terms of Greek mythology to the perspective of Socrates, first as rendered by Xenophon and then by the influential teacher’s more prominent disciple—Plato.

After the return from his abortive attempt to fee Venice, Aschenbach plunges into his Greek idyll, and, seated on the beach, he muses on the role of the senses and of the beauties they disclose in the most intellectual endeavors. He looks toward Tadzio, and he seems to be looking on Beauty itself. The Platonic allusions food in. Thoughts that the sun diverts the attention from the intellectual to the physically embodied give way to the judgment that observation of physical things is necessary for the spiritual quest:

Only through the help of the body is the soul able to lift itself up to higher reflections. Surely the love-god does as the mathematicians do, when they show untalented children pictures of the pure Forms: so too the god deploys the figure and color of human youth to make the spiritual visible to us, using form and coloration as tools in prodding our memory, by decorating them with all the sheen of Beauty itself, so that the sight of them will consume us with pain and hope.³²

Plato’s vision of the world of Pure Forms, observed before birth and recalled to us as we are cleverly prodded to remember what we once saw—as, in the Meno, Socrates leads the slave boy to geometrical knowledge—is already in Aschenbach’s mind, and it becomes explicit almost immediately. The sound of the sea and the glitter of the sunlight transport him in thought to a Greek landscape, scene of the only Platonic dialogue set al fresco. Using fragments of the Symposium as well as of the Phaedrus, he reflects on love and virtue and beauty.

According to the Phaedrus, higher beauty is associated with the most fundamental values, with wisdom, justice, and goodness, so that the perception of higher beauty is simultaneously our way of having access to these values: beauty, unlike wisdom or goodness, can be perceived with the senses. Hence, in apprehending and communicating beauty, the artist would fulfill his function as educator—he would build those “beautiful bridges” of which Mann wrote in his Notizbuch ruminations. The ideal artist would seek out the objects in which higher beauty is most manifest, for reproducing their beauty is the optimal way to carry out the artist-educator’s appointed task. As he sits on the beach, calling up the Platonic tradition offers Aschenbach a reassuring identification of those privileged objects.

Higher beauty is most accessible in the human form, indeed in boys and young men. For, on the Platonic account, sensible manifestations of higher beauty should kindle love, love not simply directed at the object perceived but at the qualities it embodies.³³ Erotic yearnings are bound up with the recognition of higher beauty, but the erotic response must be of a special sort, one that is not debased or corrupted. Supposing that the perception of higher beauty generates love facilitates Aschenbach’s conclusion that other human beings are especially suitable as tools for prodding our recollection of Beauty, and it is not hard to understand the specific focus on the young. Less easy to understand is the step that takes us to the young (postpubescent) male as the ideal vehicle for the perception of higher beauty.

In the Symposium and Phaedrus, the dialogues most concerned with the exploration of love, the dialogues Mann studied as he was writing Death in Venice, the priority of homosexual love is simply taken for granted.³⁴ The Phaedrus discussion is, however, as we have already seen (in section 4 of chapter 1) much concerned with distinguishing between properly disciplined love and the undisciplined love that consumes those who are profane, loose, and corrupt: this is the point of the simile of the team of horses that runs through Socrates’ second long speech.³⁵ If there is an argument for giving precedence to homosexual love in the apprehension of higher beauty—rather than simply the expression of a fashionable aristocratic Athenian prejudice—it lies, I suggest, in the thought that, while the perception of higher beauty must kindle love, the love so inspired must be controlled and disciplined.

Two strands in ancient thought elevate the love of men for youths by emphasizing the incompleteness of heterosexual love. Women are taken to lack the qualities of intellect and character essential to the full erotic relationship. Thus, in Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love, one of Mann’s important sources, Protogenes, the spokesman for the superiority of homosexual relationships, characterizes desires for women in unflattering terms: “even if they turn out well, one may enjoy only physical pleasure and the satisfaction of a ripe body.”³⁶ Intercourse with women is viewed as a tiresome necessity, something that cannot be avoided if humanity is to continue but, because of the intellectual and moral inequalities between the partners, can be nothing more than a physically satisfying act. Diotima’s speech in the Symposium obliquely makes that point when she emphasizes the superiority of that form of reproduction in which the “souls” of “descendants” are shaped by the ideas and example of a great teacher.³⁷ Thus homosexual love is superior because it is not reducible to mere physical release and also because it cannot be aimed at the inferior sort of “immortality,” that obtained through begetting children.

These background ideas impose demands on the character and expression of homosexual love, demands that Aschenbach appears to accept. If the superiority is to be taken seriously, the homosexual relationship must be one in which the lover educates the beloved, “urging him on the path to excellence.”³⁸ Physical contact, should there be any, is only justifiable if it is bound up in this educational mission. Hence, the emphasis on disciplined restraint, an ideal condition made vivid in Alcibiades’ description of his night with Socrates. Plato makes it clear that there is no doubt of Socrates’ delight in the youth’s beauty or of his love for Alcibiades. Despite Alcibiades’ open invitation to sexual relations, his lover remains aloof, and Alcibiades concludes his account of their night together by remarking that he might as well have slept with his brother or his father.³⁹

Aschenbach wants to practice this severe discipline. His failure to normalize his relations with Tadzio, to place a hand on head or shoulder and to begin conversation with him, indicates his failure to achieve the Socratic condition. Instead, as he apparently discovers, his perception of the boy’s beauty entangles him in erotic yearnings of the classically despised kind, yearnings that overwhelm him and ultimately challenge his self-conception as moral educator. After the physical collapse at the fountain, he returns to Socratic language, this time in parody, arguing the anti-Socratic conclusion that perception of higher beauty inevitably involves submission to erotic mastery and thus moral corruption. At the end, Schopenhauer’s suspicions about the power of the sexual impulse triumph over Plato’s vision of a form of love that will guide the artist-educator to the perception and communication of beauty.

So it seems. Aschenbach was deceived into thinking he could combine disciplined restraint with the perception of Tadzio’s beauty. Well and good, but surely too blunt. For we must ask: Is this because of some flaw in Aschenbach? Or is it, as the Socratic parody supposes, because perception of higher beauty engenders irresistible erotic yearnings that corrupt their possessor? More fundamentally, is there really some notion of higher beauty? Is what makes it higher some connection with the most basic values? If it exists is it embodied only, or most completely, in human beings, particularly in young men?

Or, more fundamentally, isn’t all the philosophizing evasive, stemming from strategies to cover up what is held, under repressive social conditions, to be disreputable and disgusting? The Platonic ideas are too implausible to survive in a world that has overcome the prejudices confining Aschenbach and his creator. So my attempt to explore a reading that will “transcend” the split recognized in the first section of this chapter may seem entirely too hifalutin’ and elaborate, an unnecessary way of avoiding what we, if not Mann’s contemporaries, can see as the simpler—sexual—reading. Immediate post-Wildeans may have needed the disguises in which Mann swathed his homoerotic leanings, the classical references and the philosophical superstructure; we do not.

Mann himself shed those disguises posthumously, allowing the few Tagebücher he decided not to destroy to be edited and published, after a safe interval.⁴⁰ Even the volumes that passed his censorship made his complicated sexuality apparent. Besides the references to specific episodes in which one or other “pretty young man” attracted his attention, the overall tone of the language reveals his preferences. The adjective hübsch (pretty) is overwhelmingly likely to be attached to young men, although there are occasional periods, particularly in Mann’s later years, in which a few women have the privilege of its application.⁴¹ Chance visions of young men, sometimes interestingly enough, at the beach, are registered with appreciation and even delight—to the extent of inspiring the thought that Mann’s liking for the sea stemmed from the opportunities offered for observing the male body relatively unclad: he was disappointed, it seems, with a stay at the seaside in Holland, because the young men he saw were insufficiently attractive.⁴² His explicit references to the “real passions of his life” betray a lifelong fascination with actual counterparts of Tadzio.⁴³

So why not recognize that something more elementary than “Greek Love” is at stake? Why not elaborate a “sexual” reading of Death in Venice? Aschenbach is fascinated with Tadzio’s beauty, because he is a closeted homosexual. The writer’s marriage and family life is long in the past, and it was probably always an attempt to conform his sexuality to approved standards. The challenge of the stranger at the cemetery, with his direct stare, can be read as a sexual invitation; the imagery of the vision of the south in Aschenbach’s reverie is explicitly sexual (the overgrown ferns are described as geil, voluptuous perhaps, but more literally lewd) and primarily phallic (thrusting roots and hairy palm trunks are only the start); the elderly fop disturbs Aschenbach because of the serious possibility that this is a version of himself (as eventually it will be). Even the fop’s parting words of “compliments to your little darling” use the suspiciously neutral word Liebchen. Before he arrives at the lido, the attentive reader can see through Aschenbach’s disguise.

His repression, we might assume, has affected his art, turning it toward formalism because only careful choices allow him simultaneously to conform to the bourgeois conventions and engage passionately with his subject matter: perhaps it is no accident that the great prose epic centers on Frederick the Great.⁴⁴ On the lido, however, his powers of repression are broken, simply overwhelmed by Tadzio’s beauty, and, because the feelings have been held in check so long, they erupt with a force that makes artistic shaping of them impossible. All Aschenbach’s defenses are destroyed, and his passion leads him to violate the conventional standards that have held him in thrall.

So the challenge: Death in Venice may come in elaborate trappings, echoes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, allusions to Greek mythology and play with Socratic dialogues, but it is tempting to suppose that these are disguises Mann considered necessary to mask a more basic story about the social distortion of sexuality and its costs. Freed from the conventional prejudices Mann accurately ascribed to his contemporaries, readers today can recognize the novella for what it is.

The next two sections will attempt a pair of complementary responses to this challenge.

3

From his youth on, Mann had cherished the melancholy poems of August von Platen, recognizing with sympathy Platen’s yearning for love, love typically doomed to remain unexpressed and, when timidly ventured, brusquely rebuffed. Born into the threadbare aristocracy, Platen was sent to the boarding school for cadets in Munich shortly before his tenth birthday. During the next few years, he became aware of his sexual orientation: “I grew accustomed to devote my hopes and dreams to members of my own sex, and sought to achieve in friendship with them the very same goal that lovers seek in marriage.”⁴⁵ During the years he spent in military training, with an interval of service as a page at court, his feelings were directed at a number of young men—typically his con-temporaries—whom he admired from a distance: sometimes the passion fared before he had exchanged a word with the object of his desires, or at a time when he was only rewarded with monosyllabic responses, but it was important for him to gaze on the beloved, to have the opportunity of being in the other’s presence.⁴⁶ In his early twenties, Platen fell in love with a young man to whom he was able to declare himself—he guessed, apparently correctly, that his beloved was also primarily attracted toward men—but the relationship was stormy, with only occasional moments of reassurance and relatively chaste fulfillment. The episode ended when the beloved, Edward, returned Platen’s correspondence and the poems he had written, with “a horrible letter” (“une lettre horrible”); the conclusion gives the tone: “Never dare to write even a single line to me again, or, if I should be in your presence, to speak a single word to me. For my own part, I shall avoid you as a pestilential sickness. Otherwise you could place yourself in danger of being treated just as someone deserves, who has completely abandoned human worth.”⁴⁷ Later, after he had left the army and devoted himself to a nomadic life in Italy and Sicily, Platen appears to have had fleeting sexual liaisons. Reciprocated love seems always to have eluded him.

How many of the details of Platen’s life did Mann know? In the absence of the diaries he kept in his early years (and destroyed in the 1940s), we cannot discover just which parts of Platen’s own copious journals Mann read. A note from 1898 or 1899 records his intention to read Platen’s Tagebücher, which were transcribed and published between 1896 and 1900.⁴⁸ Assuming he followed through on his intention, virtually any sampling of the 1,900 printed pages would have confirmed the portrait he had already constructed from reading the poetry—and from knowing Heine’s famous gibe about Platen’s “effeminacy.” In the essay on Platen (“Platen-Tristan-Don Quichotte”) Mann wrote in 1930, he refers to Platen’s love “that saturates every poem”—“an unending and unquenchable love, one that flows into death, which is death, because it finds no satisfaction on Earth.”⁴⁹ Reflecting on that essay almost four years later, Mann exclaims at how Platen’s “spiritualized and overerotic passion fired my blood” when he himself was in love.⁵⁰

Mann’s admiration and his sense of kinship with the unhappy poet, who had preceded him by three-quarters of a century, would invite a comparison between Aschenbach and Platen, whether or not Mann had carried out his plan of reading the diaries. Perhaps Mann knew already that Platen’s own visit to Venice had liberated him, that he had overstayed his leave, had suffered (mild) punishment for doing so, and that the experience inspired him to quit his military career and take up life in the south. Platen’s most famous poem—“Tristan”—quoted in full in the 1930 essay, points toward Aschenbach’s collapse at the fountain: the one who has “gazed on beauty,” the third stanza tells us,

would like to dry up like a spring,

to suck poison from every breath of the air,

to smell death in every flower.⁵¹

Mann might well also have known that Platen’s last years were spent in restless, unfulfilled, wanderings around Italy—Aschenbach’s obsessive pursuits of Tadzio, on a far larger scale—and also, maybe, that these peregrinations ended when, fearing cholera (which had broken out in Sicily), Platen misdiagnosed himself, took the wrong medicines, and died of a violent intestinal infection.⁵² Most important for present purposes, however, is a connection made clear by Mann’s reference to “spiritualized and overerotic passion”: Platen’s recapitulation of the Platonic tradition.

Whether or not Platen had studied the Symposium or the Phaedrus or Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love,⁵³ his efforts to come to terms with his own emotions work through the same conceptions and construct the same defenses. The early confessions to his diary surround his passions with allusions to religious devotion, some of them explicitly Christian (“So I was able to gaze on him, uninterruptedly, fixedly, as the pious do when they pray to the picture of the Savior, before which they lie in the dust”), some steeped in classical allusions (“O come back, happy days, I beseech you; let me at least taste your Olympian nectar once again!”).⁵⁴ He rehearses the ancient view that women cannot be objects of the highest forms of love, because of their intellectual (or spiritual?) limitations (“I believed that the cramped spirit [beschränkte Geist] of a woman would not be capable of captivating me long, and that the vast majority of the fair sex are spoiled through affectation”).⁵⁵ He echoes Diotima’s account of the priority of intellectual/spiritual reproduction (“nobody was so besotted with his children as a poet”).⁵⁶ He confesses that his homosexual passions developed during a period when he was unaware that any “criminal relationship could exist between two men” and that he only later paid attention to writings on same-sex love, noting that, in his own earlier readings of Plutarch, he had entirely overlooked this theme.⁵⁷ The most important recapitulation, however, is the struggle to identify homosexual love as the highest form of friendship. In March 1816, when he was nineteen, Platen characterized friendship in a way of which the ancients would have approved:

I feel that this inclination [toward his current love, “William”] is something noble and forms itself in a noble fashion in me. Its endeavor is to make its object as worthy as possible, and, where possible, to ennoble and improve the errors and weaknesses of that object. It would be my highest triumph to make my William the best of men. It is no blind, no irrational, inclination, for it is grounded on the deepest and best human feelings.⁵⁸

Later in the same year, a reading of Brandes’s On Women prompted an extended identification with the Greek perspective:

The author defends the practice of homosexual love among the Greeks. He believes (as I have always believed) that such love among the Greek aristocrats never degenerated into vice, even if outer appearances aroused it or contributed to it. He shows what great deeds proceeded from this love, how two men could be everything to one another, and how they alone were able to exchange thoughts and feelings. These considerations did not leave me indifferent. I have come to feel stronger in my sense of the probity of my inclinations, which I have always felt as noble and directed towards goodness. I cannot take it as a reproach to have sought the human ideal always among my own sex, and I consider this inclination all the more pure, the more I recognize how different the love of men for women is and how it eventually degenerates into mere sensual satisfaction. The conflict between love and friendship within my breast is resolved. I feel that they [love and friendship] can be united, even if I shall never find a man to whom I can give both.⁵⁹

The resolution, however, was only temporary: about a year later, Platen lamented a fall back into the folly of love. “I am of an age that demands love, and cannot be satisfied with mere friendship…. I can dull my feelings by means of serious occupations, but I cannot silence them.”⁶⁰ Opposing his earlier thought that women are too limited to serve as objects of the deepest love, he envies those whom he has previously loved who have been “saved” by marriage—and hopes wistfully for a future marriage for himself (“Respect and friendship would draw me to my wife, and these would, perhaps, give birth to love”).⁶¹

The turn away from the Greek ideals and defenses is accompanied by an increasing awareness of the slide from sense to sensuality, of the power of the sexual drive, and of a sense of human suffering that echoes Schopenhauer. Platen asks if “the best existence is not a constant suffering” and sees the ideal of love as lying in devotion to another, fulfilled in ameliorating the beloved’s fate.⁶² Pessimism pervades his thinking in the passage, in which he distinguishes between love and friendship. That entry concludes:

There can be no love without a sensual component. But never, in any fashion, did Federigo awake in me a merely sensual impulse. But suppose it should come to that for me in other cases! Then the abyss would swallow me up. I should be lost. I would wretchedly gnaw at myself, I would never achieve my purpose and would even shudder to attain it. I know already how easily a noble love can lead to the edge of corruption and desperation; but I have not yet experienced how dreadfully sensual ardor can destroy the whole person; I have, however, a grim premonition of it. There is so much in the world that makes me wish I had never been born.⁶³

The Greek ideal that section 2 attributed to Aschenbach was present for long periods in Platen’s own efforts to come to terms with himself—and, as with Aschenbach at the fountain, there are moments at which it cannot be sustained, moments at which the abyss threatens.⁶⁴

Mann’s immersion in his predecessor’s melancholy lyrics enabled him to divine this pattern in Platen’s thoughts and feelings. Poetry in which the author figures as a rejected friend (or possibly rejected as something more than a friend), in which the friend/beloved steals off to a girl while the poet broods over a pile of books,⁶⁵ hardly conceals the circumstances in which Platen sometimes found himself:

Friend, it was an empty, mad longing

that our spirits would find one another,

that our glances would spark understanding,

that our tears would mingle …⁶⁶

Particularly important, however, is “Tristan,” from which I quoted above, a three-stanza poem Mann made central to his essay on Platen. Literally (and clumsily) translated, it runs:

Whoever gazes on beauty with his eyes

is already at home with death,

and will be suited to no earthly service,

and yet will tremble before death,

whoever gazes on beauty with his eyes.

 

For him the pain of love endures forever,

for only a fool can hope on this earth

to satisfy any such impulse:

Whoever has been struck by the arrow of beauty

for him the pain of love endures forever.

 

Ah, he would like to dry up like a spring,

to suck poison from every breath of the air,

to smell death in every flower:

Whoever gazes on beauty with his eyes,

Ah, he would like to dry up like a spring!⁶⁷

Mann had already cited this poem in an earlier essay (on “Marriage in Transition”), where he suggested that beauty and form were connected not with life but with a critical attitude toward life, an attitude “most profoundly bound up with death and infertility”: Platen’s poem was viewed as encapsulating the essence of “aestheticism”, and the homo-erotic impulse the core of “erotic aestheticism.”⁶⁸

There is an important last aspect of Platen’s attempt to construct a sexual identity with which he could rest, to wit the prominence of vision in his yearnings. As I have already noted, his feelings could easily be kindled from a distance: without words, without knowledge of the young men who attracted him, he could blaze into passion, torturing himself with plans for seeing more of the beloved, reproaching himself for wasting chances to come closer to them.⁶⁹ During his original stay in Venice and throughout the restless wanderings of his final years, sight is paramount: in Venice he scurries from church to church, entranced by the wealth of paintings, but the sounds, tastes, and smells of the city (of Venice!) leave little impression. Later, in Naples, he finds bathing in the sea particularly agreeable, since it brings him into the company of the local youth.⁷⁰ The apparently clumsy repetition of references to the eyes in the opening line of “Tristan” reflects his openness to visual beauty, and here again Platen recapitulates the ideas of the ancients. In the crucial section of the Phaedrus in which Socrates describes the earthly apprehension of beauty, he is explicit about which sense is involved: “Beauty, as I said, was radiant among the other objects; and now that we have come down here we grasp it sparkling through the clearest of our senses. Vision, of course, is the sharpest of our bodily senses.”⁷¹ Platen, I suggest, accepted this Socratic idea so deeply that he made it central to his understanding of homoerotic expression.

The pessimism of 1817 reaches its nadir in the fear that his erotic yearnings will drive him into the “abyss.” Just over a year later, in the grip of the passion for the young man he identifies as “Adrast”—later revealed as Edward—he reassures himself: “His beauty enchants me, but sexual craving has never sullied me.”⁷² As he comes to know Edward, he suggests that he would be the “happiest of men” if “heaven” would give him “an unchangeable purity of soul,” and he rejoices that “their esteem for each other” increases every day.⁷³ It was not long before their arms found each other’s shoulders and waists, and Platen reports that their “cheeks often touched.”⁷⁴ Yet, in accord with his wish for purity, he hopes that God will help them to emerge from “this abyss” (“cet abyme”).⁷⁵ Even after Edward’s declaration of his own feelings, Platen can reassure himself:

We were no more than a single soul, and our bodies were like two trees whose branches are tightly interlaced, intertwined forever. Nonetheless, I can swear without deception that my longing has been enhanced, and that it has also gained in purity what it has gained in ardor, since when true love, reciprocal love, lifts itself up to a high degree, sensuality is diminished.⁷⁶

In retrospect, after recurrent storms and difficulties—probably caused by Platen’s yearning for a combination of profound spiritual union and restrained physical expression—he looks back on this particular day (June 24, 1819)—“the day that remains in my memory as the most beautiful and the most tender.”⁷⁷ The height of their sexual contact seems to have been attained on the day when they separated: “As he started to leave, he embraced me again tenderly and our lips touched in a long kiss. I accompanied him through the streets and before we separated we embraced each other one more time. I no longer feel my ardent love, I only feel the purest and most lasting friendship [amitié].”⁷⁸ For Platen, apparently, gazing at the beloved was primary and could permissibly lead to ardent conversational exchanges, embraces, and, as apogee, a kiss. Love was to be separated from the lower part of the body.⁷⁹

At least in the early part of his life, Platen sought to adapt his homo-erotic feelings to conventional ideas about sexual expression, by limiting the forms of contact allowed to those that might “pass” as exuberant expressions of deep but “pure” friendship. There are even hints that, at this stage of his life, he foresees a role for himself as educator, as Erzieher, someone whose writings will assist sensitive young men who come after him, youths who discover that they are attracted to men and not to women. He considers the possibility of composing an extensive discussion of “Friendship between men”⁸⁰ and, more prophetically, imagines his diaries as helping sensitive youths—“of my own leanings”—who might learn to avoid his own mistakes.⁸¹ The poetry, if not the diaries, surely comforted one such youth, the author who attributed Platen’s acute, conflicted, Platonic homoerotic identity to Aschenbach.

A “sexual” reading of Death in Venice is too simple because it ignores a primary way of coming to terms with the “love that dare not speak its name,” one elaborated in the poetry and in the life of a writer who spoke intimately to Thomas Mann.

4

Yet Platen’s example—as well as Mann’s own—should prompt a deeper response to the charge that “elevated” philosophical references are solely cover for more elemental impulses. In supposing that the complex of ideas about beauty and the role of the artist are parts of Aschenbach’s attempt to hide his own sexuality from himself, and equally parts of Mann’s concealment of his central theme from censorious readers, an over-simple picture of human psychology is taken for granted. We are invited to think of a drive that is in place, fully formed quite independently of the ambient social environment, a drive that cannot be faced directly and is masked by complex cultural constructions. Nietzsche falls victim to this picture when he supposes that the task of the educator is to liberate the “real self,” the “true original sense and fundamental substance of your being,”⁸² as if there were something completely formed before any educator had gone to work. Platen is less sure, even about the direction of his longings: he wonders if he might have been attracted toward women if his early environment had been different, had he not been sent to military school and grown into adolescence in an all-male society.⁸³ Reasonable skepticism about that particular hypothesis is compatible with appreciating a more general point: cultural complexes of ideas—the cluster of themes about “higher beauty,” for example—might play a double role, giving direction to a more elementary, previously unformed impulse and, at the same time, providing a guise in which that impulse could be accepted. Aschenbach deceives himself when he supposes his fascination with Tadzio stems merely from his apprehension of higher beauty, embodied in the boy—but that does not mean that his homoerotic yearnings are not shaped by a conception of higher beauty and of some ideal relation to it.

What exactly does Aschenbach want from Tadzio? If we assume that he wants, though he dare not admit it, full homosexual relations with the boy, then the self-deception of the Greek idyll is complete. Classical allusions and Socratic paraphrases are just cover for something more carnal. There is, however, an alternative. We may consider whether the same disciplined restraint of his sensibility to beauty, the restraint that underlies his two decades of success as a mature artist, is also felt in the shaping of his erotic yearnings. In the novella, Aschenbach makes increasingly strenuous efforts toward two goals, to observe Tadzio and to elicit from him glances and smiles of recognition. Those goals might be viewed as intermediate aims, first steps toward some more intense intimacy. Or they might not. We can think of Aschenbach as someone whose desire is simply for the sight of Tadzio and for the pleasure, the intoxicating pleasure, he receives when the boy smiles at him. Like (the young) Platen, he may want no more than to be able to gaze on the beloved, to exchange confidences and tears, to give and receive the occasional embrace, to “touch lips” on parting.

Death in Venice records Aschenbach’s daily routine but does not show it. We know that the writer’s life was mostly solitary, but it involved a daily walk, and we can presume that he sometimes encountered youths whose beauty attracted him—hübsche Jungen, as his creator would have called them. Should we suppose the pleasure those visions gave him went unnoted or, at least, was left unanalyzed? Not necessarily. We can imagine him attributing to himself an ambiguous desire, the wish to place a hand on head or shoulder, say, to stop for casual conversation—just the intentions formed when he thinks of “normalizing” relations with Tadzio. Perhaps, on the lido, the attraction is more intense, engendering a sudden recognition of what the ambiguous gesture would mean for him—a recognition brought about in part by Tadzio’s exceptional beauty, in part from the loosening of Aschenbach’s severe discipline.

Aschenbach’s literary development is only sketched, and his psychosexual development must be a matter of complete conjecture. One hypothesis, however, merits exploration. Imagine the young Aschenbach, delicate and intellectually precocious, educated at home, growing into adolescence without many opportunities to play with other children.⁸⁴ His incipient sexual feelings are directed toward other boys, whom he sees from a distance but with whom he can have little contact, and the desires he forms are pervaded by the pious discipline of his family and the classical education he receives. He forms a synthesis of ideas, combining elements from bourgeois orthodoxy and the Platonic tradition, and the synthesis defines the human relations he wants: a respectable and respectful marriage, without passion; love in the contemplation of beauty—or, at most, in modest contact with it. Aschenbach is a homosexual—we can apply that label if we choose—but his homosexuality takes a specific form, one dominated by the wish to ft his unformed yearnings into orthodox culture, to transcend the split between artist and citizen. That form is as central to his “true original sense” as the first springs of attraction toward those distant boys.

Why should we take that particular hypothesis seriously? For a variety of reasons, some of them resting on clues in Mann’s fiction, some stemming from the form of sexuality revealed in the surviving diaries. Let’s begin with two examples from the fiction.

Death in Venice was, as already noted, a replacement for a novella about Goethe’s late infatuation with a teenage girl. Mann was to return to Goethe later, and, when he did, he avoided the depiction of passion in favor of ruminations on the expression of love. For the first two-thirds of Lotte in Weimar, Goethe is the absent presence, dominant in the conversations of the other characters but offstage. Charlotte Kestner (née Buff), the alleged original for “Werther’s Lotte,” now a widow in advanced matronhood, arrives in Weimar to visit one of her sisters, an event that causes a furry of visits to her in the Hotel Elephant—in the manner of Tristram Shandy, the Main Event, the reunion apparently envisaged by everyone, is deferred for six (out of nine) chapters, as the kindly and tolerant Frau Kestner is unable to escape the hotel.⁸⁵ At the very end of her final interview—with the poet’s son—the young man remembers the reason for his visit and issues the invitation with which he has been sent. So, at last, we come to Goethe.

We meet the great man in the early morning, in bed, as he muses to himself, in a long chapter punctuated by conversations with a servant and with his son. The Meister-Erzieher meanders through large thoughts, present aspirations, and past events until the smell of raspberries elicits a connection:

It’s a truly lovely aroma and the berries are charming, swelling with juice under the velvety dryness, warm from the fire of life, like women’s lips. If love is the best thing in life, so too in love the best is the kiss—the poetry of love, the seal of ardor, sensual and platonic at once, the middle of the sacrament between the holy beginning and the carnal end, a sweet act, completely in a higher sphere than that [the consummation in intercourse], and with the pure organs of breath and speech—spiritual because still individual and thoroughly differentiated—between your hands the unique head, tipped backward, under the lashes the smiling serious evanescent look into your eyes, and the kiss says “You I love and adore, you lovely unique creature, expressly in the whole creation, you!”—for copulation is anonymous and animal, fundamentally without choice, and night properly covers it. The kiss is happiness, copulation debauchery, God gave it to the serpent. To be sure, you imitated the serpent [du würmtest] energetically at times, but your proper métier is rather happiness and the kiss—the fleeting touch of self-aware passion on evanescent beauty. It is also the difference between art and life, for the abundance of life, of humanity, the making of children, is not a thing of poetry, of the spiritual kiss on the raspberry lips of the world …⁸⁶

Mann’s Goethe, citizen and artist,⁸⁷ offers a view of restrained fulfillment we might easily ascribe to the character who replaced him in the early novella. Goethe adds to the complex of ideas about higher beauty the thought that the truly spiritual erotic response is individualized, concentrated on this being, here and now, in which beauty is, for the moment, most forcefully realized. Tadzio is almost the only human figure in Aschenbach’s field of vision who receives a name.⁸⁸ Tadzio is the focus of that vision, the object of the gaze, Goethe’s “holy beginning” of the “sacrament.” The writer who gazes might share with the character he displaced the view that the sacrament would be fulfilled in a kiss.

Or consider a much earlier work, the immediate predecessor of Death in Venice. Königliche Hoheit is rightly seen as a fairy tale, one that retells the story of Mann’s courtship of Katia Pringsheim. Mann himself figures as the prince, Klaus Heinrich, born with a withered arm that he tries, with disciplined determination, to conceal; Katia becomes the heiress Imma Spoelmann, the daughter of a wealthy man who has made his home in America but who returns to the declining principality because its mineral waters seem good for his health. The prince woos and wins, convincing Imma to give up her mathematical studies⁸⁹ to join him in discharging his royal duties, and the old gypsy prophecies are fulfilled: that a prince with one hand would “give more to the nation than others could with two” and that, on a day of great jubilation, the old stock of roses will no longer bloom with a scent of mould and decay but will give off “the most natural and the loveliest” fragrance.⁹⁰

If we take Mann seriously in claiming that the elite writer puts himself on trial, it is not hard to recognize aspects of the Manns’ long marriage—its successes as well as limitations—behind the fairy tale. A pivotal moment in the relation between Klaus Heinrich and Imma is his admission to her of his deformity. As he stands in front of her, with his usual oblique stance so that the withered arm and hand can easily be concealed behind his hip, he observes the direction of her gaze:

“Have you had that from birth?” she asked quietly.

He went pale. But with a sound, that seemed a sound of release, he sank down before her, while he embraced the strange [seltsam: singular] figure with both arms.⁹¹

Imma’s “singularity” at this moment is less odd than the phrase Klaus Heinrich utters at a moment of apparent redemption: he calls her “little sister.”

Those words have come to the prince earlier, as a private designation of Imma⁹²—and they will recur, in the conversation when she accepts his courtship—a “strange” agreement to marry: “‘Little sister,’ he said with a serene expression, and held her a little more tightly in the dance, ‘little bride.’”⁹³ Even as she goes to the altar on her wedding day, that description resonates not in the prince’s words but in those of the narrator: “Her strange little child’s face (Kindergesichtchen) was pale as mother-of-pearl.”⁹⁴ Imma is taken as a partner, a wife … but not, it appears, as a fully grown woman.

The sexlessness of this relationship is reinforced by the mode through which Klaus Heinrich wins his bride. His first proposals are resisted, as Imma confesses her sense of the distance that the pomp of royalty—in which the prince has been so carefully coached—conveys to her, the coldness he radiates. In true fairy-tale style, he is set a quest, but, faithful to the character of their situation and of his courtship, it is a prosaic one: he is to learn to immerse himself in the affairs of his people. Full redemption comes to Klaus Heinrich through a course of study, particularly in economics, in which Imma participates. He is to become a different kind of prince, one attuned less to protocol than to the issues and policies that affect his subjects. Romance is even subtracted from the fulfillment of the gypsy prophecies. The prince gives greatly to his people because the dowry paid by Imma’s father frees the country from the economic disorder of the recent past. The roses yield their true scent when they are replanted outside the confining mold-infested walls of the palace courtyard, when they are given light and sun.

This marriage may provide happiness, a “severe” or “demanding” happiness, as the final words of the novel suggest,⁹⁵ but that happiness is founded in respect, in cooperation, in commitment to a wider duty. That is no bad foundation. It might have served a more fortunate—or more venturesome—Platen. It might have been the marriage Aschenbach had, a disciplined partnership unfortunately truncated by his wife’s premature death. It seems to have been a marriage of the sort the Manns lived through their five decades together.

At the core of Klaus Heinrich’s marriage is the moment of revelation, of release, of redemption, when his inborn disability (Hemmung) is disclosed and Imma accepts it. Katia came to terms with the secret her husband took pains to conceal—a secret that plainly tormented him during the period of threatened exposure⁹⁶—the fact of his attraction toward young men. Her memoirs touch lightly on the visit to Venice during which Mann was struck by the “charming, picture-pretty (bildhübsch)” boy: “He had an immediate weakness for this boy, who pleased him beyond measure, and he always observed him on the beach with his playfellows. He didn’t pursue him around Venice, that he didn’t do, but the boy fascinated him and he thought about him often.”⁹⁷

The surviving diaries are even clearer about the extent of Katia’s knowledge and acceptance. On October 17, 1920, Mann recorded his appreciation of his wife’s understanding: “Gratitude towards K., because she is not in the least disconcerted or troubled in her love, when she is finally unable to arouse any desire in me and when lying beside her cannot equip me with desire—that is, complete sexual desire—for her. The peace, love, and equanimity with which she accepts this is truly admirable, and thus I do not have to be unnerved by it.”⁹⁸ That entry was written shortly after Katia had returned after an absence of nearly two weeks—on an evening when Mann had seen his elder son, Klaus, naked, and had been confusedly aroused.⁹⁹

A few weeks earlier, after celebrating his mother-in-law’s birthday, the couple had come home late, and an attempt at intercourse had failed. Mann had apparently visited his wife’s bedroom.

I am not completely clear about my condition in this respect. It can hardly be called real impotence, but more a matter of the usual confusion and unreliability of my “sex life.” No doubt it’s an annoying weakness, brought about by wishes that are directed “to the other side.” How would it have been if a boy “lay before me”? In any event, it would be unreasonable if I let myself be depressed by a failure, whose grounds are not new to me.¹⁰⁰

Several months later, in the spring of 1921, Mann again expresses his appreciation for Katia’s acceptance of him. After an evening out, “… embraces with K. My gratitude for the great kindness in her response to my sexual problems is deep and warm.”¹⁰¹

It is not hard to understand how, at the time of his great distress over the possible publication of the earlier diaries—possibly even more ardent and candid than those of 1918 through 1921—he could be comforted by sitting for hours with Katia, hand in hand, or how through the years for which we have records, his sleeplessness, whether bound up with self-doubt or unwelcome sexual stirrings, could lead him to her room, perhaps to place his head on her shoulder, perhaps to sit by her bed in a chair.¹⁰²

Yet it is worth asking: what if a boy had lain before him? With the exception of the diaries from 1918 to 1921, all those that remain belong to a period after the threat of exposure, and prudence may have made the later records of his longings less vivid.¹⁰³ Nevertheless, the entries do not conceal Mann’s sexual proclivities, although they do give it a particular form. They recapitulate the vision-centered restrained expression of homosexual desire hypothesized for Aschenbach. Here is one extensive explanation of a common type of incident. On his daily walk, Mann was gripped by a vision; he saw with “great joy”

a young lad at work in the garden-shop, a little cap on his head, very pretty [hübsch], naked to the waist. The uplift I felt at this so ordinary, so everyday and natural “beauty,” the chest, the swell of the biceps, led me to think again afterwards about the unreal, illusory, and aesthetic character of this inclination, whose aim, it seems, lies in looking on [“gazing”] and “adoration,” and, although it is erotic, neither reason nor the sense aims at any sort of further consummation. It probably consists in the influence of the sense of actuality on the imagination, which allows delight, while holding it fast to the visual image.¹⁰⁴

Again and again, through the years of the surviving diaries, young men who attend Mann’s lectures, or who come to interview him, or who are children of friends or friends of his children—or who are simply seen on his walks—stir his visual imagination. More than a decade after the observation of the youth at the nursery, he records an unwelcome sexual excitement, partially caused by medicines but partly the result of an “image by the wayside.”¹⁰⁵ That phrase was first used several months earlier, when on a walk he had been “captivated by an image at the way-side”—on subsequent days, he saw the “image at the wayside, dressed” (“Das Bild am Wege, dressed”), the “image, undressed,” and the “image, in bright colors.”¹⁰⁶ The southern California climate was conducive to these welcome opportunities—as was the seaside.

It is impossible to know the character of the sexual expression Mann wanted or allowed himself in his early romantic attachments, but the diaries do contain comparisons among episodes. Early in 1934, he read the records he had kept in 1927, when, on a family holiday to the island of Sylt, he had made the acquaintance of the seventeen-year-old Klaus Heuser. The Heuser and Mann families encountered one another on the beach, and Mann was sufficiently charmed to invite the youth for a visit to Munich. Recalling these events he finds himself “excited, touched, and captivated” by the memory, viewing them as occasions on which he attained what is truly rare in human life, Happiness. Reflecting on his earlier amorous adventures, he understands them as “taken up in the late and astonishing fulfillment,” so that his previous loves are “consummated, expiated, and made good” in this (last) episode.¹⁰⁷ The (apparently positive) effects of his evening reading of passages in his diaries, recording the time Klaus Heuser had spent in the house in Munich, were still felt the next morning.¹⁰⁸

A few months later, he returned to the contrast between his relationship with Klaus Heuser and the more “melancholy” romantic experiences of his youth. Thirty years on, he is able to declare that he has “lived and loved,” that he has attained happiness and been able to “enfold within his arms that which he desired,” and that the later passion was “more mature, more considered, happier” than those of his earlier life.¹⁰⁹ In 1942, he revisited the episode:

I read extensively in the old diaries from the Klaus Heuser time, when I was a fortunate lover. The most beautiful and touching parting in Munich, when I realized my dreams, and laid his temples against my own. Yes, I have lived and loved. Black eyes that shed tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed—it happened, I too had this, and I shall be able to tell myself that when I die.¹¹⁰

As with the young Platen, the fulfillment of sexual desire comes with a kiss.¹¹¹

We return to the sensibility of Goethe’s morning musings, to the conception of a purified and acceptable sexuality grounded in the visual apprehension of beauty. So: what if a young man had taken Katia’s place in bed? If Mann had held true to the thoughts he had formulated and the feelings he had reflectively endorsed—very little. Of course, discipline might have broken down: as we shall see, he was all too preoccupied with that possibility. Throughout his life, he wanted to distinguish his own inclinations from what he saw as the “orgiastic release” of a homosexuality much more developed than his own.¹¹² He distinguished his own novella from his son Klaus’s coming-out novel (Der Fromme Tanz). Klaus’s own diary commented on the difference between his own sexual identity and that of his father: “the theme of seduction is so characteristic of ‘Zauberer’ [magician; the family name for Thomas Mann]—in opposition to me. The seduction motif: Romanticism—music—Wagner—Venice—death—‘sympathy with the abyss’—pederasty…. Different for me.”¹¹³

FIGURE 2.1. Kinderkarneval, Friedrich August Kaulbach, 1888. The five Pringsheim children. Thomas Mann cut this picture out and kept it.

The entangling of his homoerotic desires with aesthetic fulfillment was central to Mann’s conception of his own sexuality. To the end, he longed to separate love from the lower part of the body. That love flowed in two directions—toward young men, through his enraptured gaze, consummated, perhaps, in a few embraces, a kiss at parting—but also to the woman he married. He saw her first in a picture, posed with her four brothers, all in pierrot costumes. Katia records that, in his youth in Lübeck, “he saw the picture in a magazine. It pleased him so, that he cut it out and fastened it with drawing-pins over his desk. Thus he had it always before his eyes.”¹¹⁴

Five children, all attractive with similar features, four of them boys, wearing costumes that elide sexual differences … that is what is shown in the picture Mann chose. Nevertheless, whatever the grounds of the original attraction, whatever the vicissitudes of his sexual difficulties, despite the often-noted lack of interest in the diaries about what “Katja” wore or said or did (in marked contrast to Mann’s preoccupation with minute details of his daily life), there can be little question of the strong bond with his wife.¹¹⁵ Besides the gratitude expressed for the understanding she showed and the comfort she supplied, their marriage embodied their devotion to a common purpose—his purpose—prefigured in the depiction of Imma and Klaus Heinrich. A diary entry from 1933 uses a different figure from his fiction in her praise. Reading the proofs of the first volume of the Joseph tetralogy, Mann

was again moved to tears by Rachel’s death, as in the writing and as inevitably recurs on each rereading. The origin of this character in my relationship to K. plays a role in this. It isn’t for nothing that she loves the story of Jacob and Rachel so much. She recognizes it as the idealized, mythical, representation of our lifelong companionship.¹¹⁶

For all the intensity of his focus on himself, for all the effusions about the beauty of the young male body, it would be wrong to conclude that the creator of Rachel was incapable of at least some form of heterosexual love.

Aschenbach may be confined by the society to which he belongs, but his complex sexuality is also shaped by it. That sexuality, refracted for the reader through the Platonic tradition, through Platen’s poetry and attempts at self-definition, through Goethe’s musings and Klaus Heinrich’s marriage, and, above all, through Mann’s wrestling with his own inclinations, is molded into a form Aschenbach can accept. We should reject the idea of some “core identity” in Mann or in Aschenbach (or in the young Platen), a biologically fixed drive that continues to yearn for complete homosexual intercourse, something that is opposed and eventually repressed by the pressures of the ambient society. Thought about human behavior and the inclinations and capacities that underlie it is all too easily distorted by hypothesizing some fixed nature that socialization may combat or foster or even liberate.¹¹⁷ The specific form of homosexual desire attributed to Aschenbach and to his creator, desire that is satisfied in gazing on the beloved or that culminates in an embrace or a kiss, expresses their real selves—it is no façade erected to mask urges that cannot be confessed. Given the social worlds in which they have grown to adulthood, these are the people they have come to be. When, in a late diary entry, Mann asks rhetorically “How can one sleep with men?” he is completely self-conscious and sincere.¹¹⁸

Nevertheless, without lapsing into the myth of the preformed self, the idea that the social environment has confined a person retains its sense.¹¹⁹ Imagine Thomas Mann growing up a century later, perhaps in Hamburg rather than in Lübeck, able to express his attraction to other men, experiencing joy in full homosexual intercourse. Comparing this imaginary figure (a happier Klaus?) with the real thing, you may be inclined to envisage possibilities of greater fulfillment, even to judge that the actual Thomas Mann’s life was diminished by the prejudices of the society that shaped him—he could, it seems, have had a richer, deeper set of sexual desires and could have satisfied them. Judgments of this kind rightly identify the depth and intensity of full sexual relations—just as Klaus Mann confided to his diary—but they raise questions that are hard to answer. The actual Thomas Mann (and the Aschenbach he created) forgo particular profound pleasures they might have had, but it does not follow that they are—overall—less fulfilled, that—as a whole—their lives are rendered less worthwhile. Global comparisons of the value of lives across different environments are not easy, even though there may be one respect, even an important respect, in which one regime of socialization precludes a central and rewarding form of human satisfaction. We do not need to make a global comparison, however, to ground a judgment that society has confined a person’s life: it is enough to point to a major part of human experience and to features of the social environment that prevent full and fulfilling exploration of that domain.

To claim, as I have done, that a particular form of sexual identity, attributed to Aschenbach or to his creator, goes “all the way down” allows for the possibility that the expression of that identity, in some episode of attraction or infatuation, might involve self-deception or pretense. Aschenbach’s desire to gaze on Tadzio’s beauty, even to yearn for an embrace, expresses entirely and completely his sexual character. When he thinks, however, of laying a “fatherly” hand on the boy’s shoulder, or when he imagines himself playing Socrates to Tadzio’s Phaedrus or Alcibiades, he is indulging a comfortable illusion: what, after all, would they have to say to each other?¹²⁰ In these respects, Aschenbach is as deluded as countless other lovers, fictitious and real.

To understand a sexual identity is not necessarily to endorse it. We may well regard Aschenbach and Mann as curtailed in their sexual development, unable to reach out for the intense pleasures that should have been available to them, as importing fantasies into their self-confessions in affairs of the heart, and we may view the limitations and deceptions as effects of intolerant and prejudiced societies—all this is consistent with reconstructing their longings as I have done. That reconstruction is crucial. For the danger of harboring those very particular yearnings is central to one important aspect of the novella. Mann used Aschenbach to dramatize a possibility he feared: to maintain this form of sexuality requires a stringent discipline, one that may border on the superhuman—for it is vulnerable to the very beauty it celebrates.

5

On the “sexual” reading of Aschenbach, he is thoroughly self-deceived, refusing to acknowledge his sexual inclinations until their violence forces him to do so. I propose, instead, that his self-deception is only partial. What he wants from Tadzio is simply more of what he actually gets, a continuous opportunity to look on, to gaze, to smile and be smiled at—or, perhaps beyond that, conversation, openly exchanged looks of mutual understanding, or a gentle touch, a modest embrace, and a chaste kiss. Society may actually frown on these desires or their fulfillment, but it should not do so. Aschenbach’s conception of the ideal citizen includes the possibility of responding to beauty as he sees himself responding to Tadzio, and his conception of the ideal artist-educator favors the project of making beauty manifest so that narrow prejudices are undone. Thus the supposed tension between artist and citizen is resolved: Aschenbach is clear about his own attractions to boys and young men (Tadzio, and any predecessors who featured along the writer’s walks or who attended his public readings), clear about the proper limits of homosexual expression, and clear about the integration of these inclinations with his (now past) life as husband and father.

On this reading, he would recognize, from the beginning, the erotic character of his delight in Tadzio, seeing the content of his underlying desires as directed at being in Tadzio’s presence, exchanging glances with him, and so forth. Indeed, he would be right about that. His error would lie in believing that such disciplined eroticism is safe, that it could not invade other areas of his psychological life and undermine his moral commitments. Seen in this way, he is not deceived about the content of his sexual desires but only about their scope and power.

When Aschenbach confesses his love for the boy, he is prompted by a smile. He characterizes that smile as that of Narcissus, enchanted by his own reflection in the mirror. The mirror in which Tadzio has seen himself is Aschenbach, surprised and overjoyed by the sudden appearance of the Polish family. To view the writer as the mirror of Narcissus is to understand him as the passive recipient of beauty, whose sole activity consists in creating opportunities for the expression of beauty.¹²¹ We might even say that his erotic love is not directed primarily at Tadzio but toward the feelings and images that the boy impresses upon him. Tadzio becomes an “image at the seaside”—a Bild am Meer rather than a Bild am Wege. In his notebook for the period in which he was writing Death in Venice, Mann copied out Spinoza’s definition of love: an excitation accompanied by the idea of an external thing.¹²² Aschenbach cannot leave Venice and must pursue Tadzio not because he wants physically to possess him but because of his insatiable desire for the excitation produced by an external object, the boy whose life does not really touch his own.¹²³

To be a perfect mirror of Narcissus is to be exquisitely sensitive to beauty, and that sensitivity brings danger. In his parody of Socrates, Aschenbach contends that the perception of beauty leads inexorably to intoxication and desire, to actions that flout moral strictures, and so to corruption and “the abyss” (der Abgrund).¹²⁴ The argument the writer rehearses, to be examined shortly, aims to uncover a deep tension between the roles of citizen and artist, even in the idealized form that aspires to transcend the split. The resolution Aschenbach hoped to have achieved is inadequate not because he has repressed homosexual desires but because the sexual identity he has fashioned and its integration with the quest of the artist-educator, the pursuit of beauty, can only be combined with the conduct of the ideal citizen through a discipline so fierce and severe as to be unsustainable. Aschenbach’s homosexual desires heighten the drama of the undoing of his discipline precisely because that discipline is so central to his life not only as a writer but also in the shaping of his sexual self. Those inclinations have been recognized and channeled toward a proper object—beauty—to be gazed at, captured in words, touched modestly, perhaps at last with a “spiritual kiss on the raspberry lips of the world”: the need for self-control has been thoroughly absorbed. To think that is, however, self-deception. Discipline is undone by the lure of beauty.

Mann was preoccupied by the theme, perhaps because of his sympathy with Schopenhauer’s thesis that the “higher” objectifications of blind will are in intense conflict with those that are more basic: the struggle between spiritual striving and sexuality being particularly acute.¹²⁵ From his early stories on, he explores the ways in which human self-conceptions, even human lives, may be undone by the lure of beauty and the desires it elicits. Those desires do not have to be homosexual or even socially forbidden, merely at odds with the previously chosen self, and the power of the lure of beauty will be most clearly revealed when the subject is already forewarned—a writer, for example, who has reflectively endorsed limits to the expression of desire and who polices those limits with strict discipline.

Little Friedemann falls victim to the lure of beauty. His youthful experiences convince him that fulfilled romantic love is not part of his lot, and he turns to the arts, achieving what appears to be a disciplined serenity. That is disturbed by the arrival of the beautiful Gerda von Rinnlingen, whose charms Friedemann struggles to resist. Resistance finally breaks down at a performance of Lohengrin, where she is his neighbor in the box: she drops her fan, and they both stoop. “Their heads had been quite close together, and, for a moment, he had had to breathe in the warm scent of her breasts. His face was contorted, his whole body shook, and his heart beat so appallingly heavily and violently that his breathing stopped.”¹²⁶ The combination of surging romantic music and enforced proximity to female beauty is too much for Friedemann. His disciplined acceptance of quiet joys—the static pleasures recommended by Epicurus—is acutely felt as insufficient. He must strive, against all his good judgment, hopelessly, ludicrously, for more, and when the inevitable rejection comes, he sees no alternative to death. The effects of the lure of beauty are more pronounced in Friedemann’s case than they are in Aschenbach’s—despite the fact that the desires beauty provokes in him are socially permissible, even if absurdly quixotic: Friedemann’s life is curtailed; Aschenbach’s probably is not.¹²⁷ Both characters deploy the same metaphor to describe the breakdown of their discipline, both refer to the “abyss” (Abgrund).¹²⁸ With a little exaggeration, we could say that Friedemann ends there.

A second example of the preoccupation with the lure of beauty, far more extensive, many sided, and profound, occurs in the Joseph tetralogy. Mann draws the material for an extensive episode (almost two hundred pages) from fourteen verses of Genesis.¹²⁹ The source tells merely that the wife of Potiphar, whom Joseph serves, invites him to lie with her; he fees, leaving his “garment” behind. On the return of her husband, she accuses Joseph of trying to seduce her, and Potiphar sends Joseph to prison.

Mann gives Potiphar’s wife a name and an extensive character. She is Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s “titular wife,”¹³⁰ known for her purity and chastity, the “nun of the moon” (Mondnonne), whose participation in sublime religious rites is much admired. The appointment of Joseph as Potiphar’s steward brings a beautiful young man daily into her presence and disturbs her unfulfilled marriage. Aware of the passion that arises within her, she struggles to resist it. Over a period of three years, she attempts to have Joseph dismissed, even pleading with her husband to send him away. Potiphar refuses. Irresistible desires grow within her, driving her to grotesque and demeaning rituals.¹³¹ Eventually, abandoning both chastity and dignity, she attempts to seduce Joseph. Rejected, she emerges from the palace, bearing his clothing, and calls the Egyptians of the household to hear what the foreign slave has attempted. Joseph is bound and taken away. Mut sits on the ground before the palace and awaits her husband’s justice.

Yet Joseph is partially complicit in these events. He is aware of his own charms, delights in them, and refuses advice to avoid Mut’s presence. His actions amplify the corrupting effects of his beauty. In this, he further develops aspects of Tadzio that Mann presents only fleetingly—for example, the Narcissus smile that wrings from Aschenbach a confession of his love for the boy. The lure of beauty applies to the bearer of beauty himself, and, because of that corruption, the corruption of others proceeds more easily. Tadzio’s future decay—his corruptible mortality—is touched on only fleetingly, when Aschenbach takes note of his pallor and of his teeth.¹³² Joseph’s self-corruption by his own beauty receives extensive treatment: we are introduced to him as he lies, in a state of provocative undress, under the moon—thereby eliciting the rebuke of his father.¹³³ His delight in the coat his father has favored him with leads him to carry out the mad plan of parading his beauty and distinction to the world, which prompts his envious brothers to strip him naked and cast him into a pit.¹³⁴ In the face of Mut’s unbounded passion for him, he decides to carry out his supposed “duty” of inspecting that part of the palace in which she is alone.¹³⁵ Justice requires that Joseph be punished—that he be thrown into the pit a second time.

Potiphar delivers justice. Arriving home, he hears the accusations, listens to the pleas of Joseph’s longstanding foes that the young foreigner be mutilated, observes Joseph’s silence (which he praises), and offers a swift and sure verdict. Joseph is not to be killed or even subjected to bodily damage. Instead, he is to go to a labor camp in the Nile delta. This is Potiphar’s finest hour. A figure previously portrayed as genial but lazy, cultured but inclined to dilettantism, a master of the ceremonies and leisure pursuits of aristocrats, emerges as an impartial and fair judge—even in a case in which jealousy might inspire harsh and partial judgment.

Why is this? The secret of Potiphar’s achievement as a judge is the secret of his earlier failure as a husband, the secret of his imperviousness to Mut’s pleas for Joseph’s dismissal—and the secret of his uncomprehending suggestion to her, in the aftermath of the trial, that, since she has held herself in the house throughout the festival day, they might now enjoy the evening together in celebration (a wonderfully ironic close to the third part of the tetralogy).¹³⁶ In Mann’s version, Potiphar is a eunuch. As Joseph learns, before he even enters Potiphar’s service, the noble boy received a “little snip,” a penance paid by his parents, brother and sister, whose incest created him.¹³⁷

If “Friedemann” can be taken as a simplified miniature of the lure of beauty that overwhelms Aschenbach, the breakdown of Mut’s extraordinary resistance reveals it on an epic scale. Mann wanted his readers to appreciate the possibility that the lure of beauty is irresistible, that the Socratic restraint that so impressed (and perhaps disappointed) Alcibiades is a myth. Only those who have been freed from sexuality entirely, who have come to Potiphar’s condition, can emerge unscathed from the encounter with beauty.¹³⁸ That is one way—the only way?—to separate the lower body from love, or as Mann wrote in a (slightly later) letter to Grauthof, urging his friend to develop discipline with respect to the urges that troubled him, to “fasten the dog in the basement to his chain.”¹³⁹

Aschenbach’s anti-Socratic murmurings at the fountain elaborate this attitude. They oppose the possibility, presented (maybe regretted?) by Alcibiades, of the Socratic discipline that can both apprehend beauty and restrain the associated erotic desires, allowing the lover to become a genuine moral educator and friend in the fullest sense. They also contest the idea of some route to artistic insight independent of the perception of beauty and thus freed of the lure that would corrupt any discipline of which human beings are capable. In explanation of his own fall, Aschenbach presents a Socratic dilemma. There are two potential routes to artistic insight. One—a path the obituary chapter tells us Aschenbach rightly abandoned—involves deep and intimate knowledge of the human condition. Those who follow this path recognize and communicate the detailed circumstances of human actions and thereby bring readers to understand, to sympathize, and to excuse: the moralizing author of the obituary praises Aschenbach for avoiding this “sympathy with the abyss,” for refusing a route that leads to the laxity of thinking that all is to be forgiven.¹⁴⁰ The alternative path focuses on beauty, attunes itself to purity of form. Yet, as Aschenbach’s own example has shown, the development of the capacity to apprehend beauty makes the artist vulnerable to erotic passions of such power that they cannot be resisted. The more fully developed the sensitivities that suit the artist for his ideal role—recognizing beauty and serving as a perfect mirror of Narcissus, reflecting beauty in fullest form—the greater the power of the erotic longings: the dog can no longer be kept on its chain. The lure of beauty leads to intoxication and desire and an equally ineluctable descent into the abyss.

It is easy to dismiss this supposed dilemma as sophistry, even to think of it as deliberate sophistry, intended to reveal Aschenbach’s debasement in a bitter but unsuccessful effort to rationalize his predicament. I pointed earlier to the complex of ideas involved in Aschenbach’s original conception of the artist and to the questions they raise, and now, faced with the alleged dilemma, it seems vulnerable to critique on any number of grounds. Why should we endorse the background idea of the artist as perceiving something “higher” and communicating it to society? Why suppose that there are just these two routes to this “higher” insight? Why take them to have the features Aschenbach attributes to them? Why suppose, in particular, that the perception of beauty must always be erotic? Only someone in the grip of a particular version of Platonism would be moved by the reasoning Aschenbach presents.

Just as philosophers continue to find insights in Platonic dialogues, so too I think here. Provided we take one step with Mann, endorsing his basic conception of the artist—or the poet-philosopher—as an educator in the fullest sense, an Erzieher, we can reconstruct an interesting line of reasoning. This educative role is not to be fulfilled by some iconoclastic act, a revaluation of values that will expose and undermine the commitments of bourgeois society and its “light-living” members.¹⁴¹ Rather, the poet-philosopher’s deeper insight into the human condition makes the worth of those commitments clearer, makes them more stable, perhaps refines them. What forms might the communication of insight take? One possibility is the deeply psychologistic novel or drama, in which motives are thoroughly probed and in which readers are led to sympathize with figures who see circumstances from different perspectives. A paradigm would be Schiller’s Don Carlos, the work the young Tonio Kröger wants Hans Hansen to read and one the mature Kröger rejoices that he hasn’t read. The recognition of the psychological complexities promotes sympathy with varied perspectives and thereby weakens the force of bourgeois commitment to simple principles and values. Indeed, it may weaken the commitments of the poet-philosopher, making him unfit for the society whose educator he is supposed to be.

The Joseph tetralogy illustrates the phenomenon. Its elaborate and speculative psychology for the mythical characters of the book of Genesis leads to forms of sympathy for which the simple biblical narrative provides no basis. We come to view Joseph, Mut, and Potiphar from different angles and thereby to suspend unrestricted praise or unrestricted condemnation. As one of the narrative voices explains at some length, we have to rethink the much-lauded chastity of Joseph. So, in one of Mann’s brilliantly sly passages of “religious commentary” (a higher “higher criticism”), seven different motives are given for Joseph’s resistance to Mut’s seductions.¹⁴² The discussion leads to an obvious question:

But why did he dare to go so far? … In a word: why did he not rather avoid the lady completely, but let things go between him and her, as far as it is known to have gone? Yes, that was making eyes at the world and showing a taste for curiosity about what is forbidden; there was also a certain corruption of thought with respect to his posthumous reputation and the divine disposition which he recognized in himself; there was also something of cocksure overconfidence, his reliance on the fact that he could flirt with danger—he could always retreat, if necessary; it was probably also, as the laudable flipside of this, the will to challenge himself, the ambition to put himself to severe test, not to protect himself but to push himself to the uttermost, in order to emerge triumphant from the temptation—to complete a virtuoso performance of virtue and to be more true to the spirit of his father than after a predictably easier trial …¹⁴³

Or possibly, as the chapter concludes, because he foresaw the coming events. In any case, for those who have learned the commentator’s details, Joseph can no longer serve as an uncomplicated paradigm for human conduct—inspiration has given way to opportunities for reflective deliberation. That is a loss for those good citizens who need the right patterns to “live lightly.” Better for bourgeois society, perhaps, to stay with those fourteen verses of Genesis.

So the art that educates through careful and detailed presentation of complexities is dangerous. The alternative, pursued by the mature Aschenbach, is the presentation of what is valuable as beautiful. If writing of this sort is to be effective, however, it requires the development of aesthetic capacities on the part of the poet-philosopher and possibly also among his readers, capacities that are themselves problematic. For the lure of beauty depends on the fact that sensitive attunement to the beautiful requires the capacity for erotic arousal by it, and those with this capacity may transfer the passion from what is enduringly worthwhile to things that are more suspect—as Aschenbach’s passion is turned to Tadzio. The effect of that turning is the reinforcing of a desire, the wish to gaze on beauty, that is not problematic in itself but equipped with such power that it distorts moral judgment: Aschenbach is not Mut, for whom sexual impulses are to be expressed in intercourse, but the intensity of his erotic emotions leads him to moral compromise: he remains silent about the epidemic. The crucial premise for the quasi-Socratic argument maintains that developed sensitivity to beauty must have some such disruptive effect—sex must out in some fashion or other: it is a thesis that greatly interests (and perturbs) Mann but one we may not wish to endorse.¹⁴⁴ Is it a matter of psychological fact that the refinement of sensibility is always accompanied by the flowering of sensuality? Does attuning yourself to beauty inevitably arouse the dog in the basement? Is the only “solution” Potiphar’s—to neutralize the lower body and thus forcibly separate it from love?

Aschenbach’s reasoning can thus be detached from the explicitly Platonic framework in which he develops it. When reformulated, it may not compel assent, but it should engage our interest. To be sure, the conclusion is more limited than the one Aschenbach draws. Slumped at the fountain, he abjectly concludes that the synthesis for which he has striven is impossible: the conception of the artist as Erzieher and good citizen simply falls apart. On the revised account, that conception is endangered. Only with careful, possibly heroic discipline can the poet-philosopher find ways of apprehending and communicating insights that will not lead him or his readers to forms of moral relativism or moral nihilism. His development of his own sensibilities must be carefully controlled, his explorations of the details of human life not so extensive as to disturb a precarious equilibrium. The cultivation of refined perceptions must be accompanied by a studied development of bluntness, a resistance to the lower forms of blind Will, an ever tighter attachment of the dog to its chain. It is a kind of confidence trick after all.

In his despair, Aschenbach takes himself to have failed completely. That is an overreaction: for two decades he has brought off the trick with great virtuosity. If the episode in Venice discloses his failure, readers need not accept his pessimistic verdict—nor, for that matter, the judgment of the moralizing narrator. Even if the complete identification Tonio Kröger envisaged has eluded him, Aschenbach has come close. Perhaps his creator did, too.

6

For a different perspective on the material of the novella and the themes of the previous sections, it is interesting to turn to the last opera of a great twentieth-century composer, a man much more at ease with his own sexuality than Mann had been, even open about his interest in adolescent boys.¹⁴⁵ Perhaps Britten’s Death in Venice should be seen and heard as more resolutely pursuing the sexual interpretation: concentrating on the deformations society exerts on a sensitive artist whose sexual inclinations are not to the public taste. Yet, Robert Tear, one of those who has sung Aschenbach, recognizes the extent to which Britten follows Mann in embedding the protagonist’s yearnings within a philosophical frame, one apparently intended to make them more respectable or at least more tolerable. Tear comments: “Musically, it’s a masterpiece. But there’s a cop-out. It mustn’t be called sexual lust. It’s Beauty, or it’s Greek. And that’s a cop-out.”¹⁴⁶ Two of Tear’s points are absolutely correct: it is a musical masterpiece, and Britten does embed the sexual themes within the aesthetic and philosophical framework of Mann’s novella. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Britten places less emphasis on the aesthetic and philosophical issues than Mann does and that his opera is consequently closer to the sexual interpretation of the original story.

Just as critics have sometimes castigated Visconti for his departures from the novella,⁴⁷ they have rightly praised Britten and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, for their fidelity to Mann.¹⁴⁸ When Britten was exploring the possibility of the project, Golo Mann wrote to him about his father’s admiration for him.¹⁴⁹ Although Mann may have previously heard of Britten—perhaps from conversations with Auden during the period shortly after his eldest daughter, Erika, married the British poet and thereby obtained the right to enter Britain¹⁵⁰—his first introduction to Britten’s music seems to have come when he listened to a recording of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.¹⁵¹ He was sufficiently impressed to listen again, in Erika’s company, and to compare one of Britten’s settings with the music of the central figure (Adrian Leverkühn) in the novel he had recently finished (Doktor Faustus): “Blake’s ‘sick rose’ could well be by Adrian.”¹⁵² Golo Mann’s letter recapitulates the idea of that connection: responding enthusiastically to Britten’s request for permission to set Death in Venice, he relates his father’s view that Britten “would be the composer” to attempt a “musical illustration” of Doktor Faustus.¹⁵³ On the face of it, the connection is inappropriate: Leverkühn’s compositional ideas are modeled on those of Schoenberg (for whose music Mann had little sympathy),¹⁵⁴ and the idea of twelve-tone music is attributed to Mann’s fictional protagonist; Britten’s own musical idiom is far more conservative and free of the rigorous constraints both Leverkühn and Schoenberg emphasize; interestingly, however, the German film version of Doktor Faustus follows Mann’s thought and uses passages from Britten, particularly from the War Requiem, as examples of Leverkühn’s music.¹⁵⁵ The adaptation of Death in Venice was thus an unusual one in that both writer and composer knew the other’s work and admired it.¹⁵⁶

From the opening moments of the opera, it is evident that Britten is attuned to the artistic difficulties Aschenbach faces. The gnawing motif, “My mind beats on,” makes musically vivid the unproductive pulses that continue after the writer has left his desk, capturing the psychological state described in the novella’s opening paragraph. Similarly, the moment of illusory resolution—“The boy Tadzio shall inspire me”—provides a nervous bravado well suited to this stage of Aschenbach’s progress. These are only two of many examples in which Britten’s sensitivity to nuances of the text, beyond the homoerotic themes, is matched by extraordinary skill in what one might have thought was almost impossible—operatically adapting a work whose main arena is the central character’s mind. Despite all these efforts, the opera is, even had to be, a differently oriented work than the novella. The aesthetic-philosophical questions are directed differently in Britten’s treatment, and, despite Tear’s complaints, the homosexual passions are given a more central place than they are in Mann.

Most obvious is the sensuality of the music, the opulent orchestral coloring and the lushness of some important motifs (prominent examples are the “Serenissima” and “View” themes).¹⁵⁷ This musical backdrop creates a context in which Aschenbach’s fascination with Tadzio cannot be heard as anything other than erotic. The possibility of a disciplined artistic perception of beauty is never present: from the moment he encounters Tadzio and we hear the exotic vibraphone motif that accompanies the boy, Aschenbach must be understood to be in the grip of passions he refuses to acknowledge. The sexually ambiguous voice of Apollo, sung by a countertenor, enhances the effect. That voice is first heard in the “games of Apollo,” a ballet scene Britten uses to stand for Aschenbach’s Greek idyll (the period in which he officially contemplates Tadzio as an embodiment of pure beauty), and the quality of the voice invites us to conceive it as a homoerotic festival to which Aschenbach responds with delight.

Because of the evident difficulty of matching the quasi-Socratic passages to convincing music, Piper and Britten effectively eliminate the first of them—the games of Apollo ballet stands in—but the second, the anti-Socratic ruminations at the fountain, could not be omitted. Musically and dramatically, it would have been impossible at this point to introduce a spare and angular setting suited to the bitter argument of the text. The focus would have to be on the logic of Aschenbach’s attempt to diagnose his predicament, and it is hard to envisage how any music could do that—and if the words were simply spoken, they would lack the force appropriate to this moment. Britten solved the problem by changing the quality of the reflections, providing Aschenbach with a hauntingly tender song of farewell, his last extended music in the opera. It is a threnody for a love Aschenbach has had to confront but that he cannot endorse, and it is simultaneously an adieu to Tadzio, easily identified as the “Phaedrus” to whom it is sung. It is impossible to hear in it Aschenbach’s austere and embittered attempt to think through the questions about beauty and art that have preoccupied him. Consequently, the scene is shifted away from his failure to be the type of artist he has aspired to be and toward the expression of his unfulfilled love.

There are other respects in which the unacknowledged intensity of Aschenbach’s passion is given greater prominence. Uncharacteristically, Britten struggled with the score, and, even after the early performances, there were cuts and changes.¹⁵⁸ One problem he confronted was that of shortening the music of the first act to allow a balance with the second.¹⁵⁹ The resolution was to break the opera at the point of Aschenbach’s self-confession and thus to give even more prominence to this moment. Indeed, it is easy to hear it as the climax of the first act, the point to which Aschenbach has been tending from the beginning, his sudden awareness of who he is and what he most profoundly desires.

Practical considerations, this time of staging, led Piper and Britten to make another significant modification. In the novella, Aschenbach’s repudiation of his felt duty to warn the Poles is immediately followed by the terrible dream. The opera replaces the violent Bacchic orgy with the appearance of Dionysius—sung by the bass-baritone who has played earlier menacing and disturbing figures—who engages Apollo in a struggle for Aschenbach’s allegiance.¹⁶⁰ The assignment of the various nameless figures to a single voice makes excellent musical sense, but it invites the thought that Aschenbach is encountering a single force, his repressed desires, ultimately unmasked when the singer shows himself as Dionysius. In the vocal duel—a contest for Aschenbach’s soul?¹⁶¹—Dionysius triumphs, and Apollo leaves, singing “I go, I go now,” words echoed in Aschenbach’s farewell to Phaedrus/Tadzio. Deserted by Apollo, Aschenbach too must leave, and the reappearance of the bass-baritone as the hotel manager makes the nature of this departure clear: the “time of politeness and welcome” is over; “who comes and goes” is the hotel manager’s affair.¹⁶² By giving the manager a prominence not envisaged in the novella, Britten confirms him as the last of the messengers of death, indeed as the powerful Dionysius to whom Aschenbach has given himself and who will now decide his fate.

The final scene of the opera, focused on games that turn into the serious fight between Tadzio and Jaschu, stands in obvious relation to the “games of Apollo” of Aschenbach’s Greek idyll. Apollo has departed, and these can only be the games of Dionysius, passionate, violent, and cruel. In Britten’s setting, the mood established in the threnody to Tadzio/Phaedrus continues through the somber pronouncements of the hotel manager to culminate in the bleakness of the deserted beach, on which the last bare rites of unmasked passion are enacted. The music seems to make inevitable Aschenbach’s agitation and his final collapse, and, at least in my seeing and hearing, the closing measures of the score and the final tableau do no more than remind us of how he has descended to his death. The coda of the novella is thus woven into the previous scenes, understood as the continuation of the tragic decline to death. Tear was wrong to think that Britten avoided the reality of Aschenbach’s sexuality—for the “cop-out” in the invocation of classical ideas is exposed in the cruelty of the Dionysian rites. He would, however, have been right to claim that Britten’s focus on the destructive power of unacknowledged passion was one-sided.

Despite its astonishing evocation of the ambiguity of Venice, Britten’s opera, seen without reference to the original novella, is relatively unambiguous. It is the tragedy of a gifted and sensitive man torn apart by the force of erotic desires he has struggled to avoid or repress. As in so many of Britten’s earlier works, our sympathy with the central figure results from recognizing him as a victim, someone whose predicament is brought about by the failure of others to recognize the value of what he is and wants. Despite Aschenbach’s worldly success, he belongs in the world of Mann’s outsiders, of Christian Buddenbrook and little Friedemann and Tonio Kröger: the envisaged identity that goes beyond Tonio to fuse artist and citizen is shattered. The world we are presented with is also that of Britten’s outsiders. Aschenbach is another version of Peter Grimes, with the difference that Aschenbach does not have the conventions of the Borough thrust upon him but instead absorbs them deeply within himself.

7

If that were all there is to say about Britten’s opera, then it would pay the price of its dedicated fidelity, standing as a vivid translation of a specific way of reading the novella into music of great beauty. Yet, just as some ideas in Mann’s novella can be illuminated by seeing them in light of his other works—we can view the preoccupation with the lure of beauty in the stories of Friedemann and of Mut—so too with Britten. If one comes to the opera Death in Venice after concentrated hearing of Peter Grimes, the effect will be to underscore the interpretation I have sketched. Billy Budd provides a different perspective.¹⁶³

There are two remarkable affinities between the operas. One is the explicit discussion of Beauty in both.¹⁶⁴ In Britten’s version, Billy is referred to as “Beauty” both by his admiring fellow sailors and by his adversary, the master-at-arms Claggart. He is seen as the embodiment of virtue and goodness, the moral attributes connected to the aesthetic ones, just as they are in Aschenbach’s Greek meditations. The second affinity lies in the motifs Britten uses for the confessions of three major characters: Claggart, Captain Vere, and Aschenbach. Each of them makes a declaration in similar words.

 

I, John Claggart, master-at-arms upon the Indomitable, have you in my power, and I will destroy you.

I, Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the Indomitable, lost with all hands on the infinite sea.

I, Aschenbach, famous as master-writer, successful, honored, self-discipline my strength …

FIGURE 2.2. Three declamations (Vere, Claggart, Aschenbach).

Yet it is not just the similarity of the word structures but the musical setting that unites these lines. In each instance, Britten assigns the singers (Vere, like Aschenbach, is a tenor; Claggart a bass) a sequence of repeated notes, high in the singer’s range, with a shared, distinctive, rhythmic pattern.¹⁶⁵ He thus invites us to consider the kinship between Claggart and Vere and, for those who come to Death in Venice with Billy Budd in their ears, the kinship of both to Aschenbach.

How can this be? Claggart is threatened by Billy’s beauty, moved to a desire to destroy it. For the recognition of “beauty, handsomeness, goodness” is a reminder of what he is not, a disturbance of the precarious equilibrium he has fashioned for himself. His attempt to convict Billy of treason and mutiny leads to a confrontation in which the youth, unable to speak because of his stammer, answers with his fist. Claggart falls dead, and it is left to Vere to administer justice, to condemn Billy to death and so to complete that destruction at which Claggart had aimed. Vere makes his declamation at the moment when he has just committed himself to carrying out the sentence of death; Claggart’s comes as he announces his intention to achieve that end. Claggart and Vere, then, are bound together in the destruction of Beauty, the one because of its threat to him, the other with great reluctance and guilt. As Vere sings: “I was lost on the infinite sea.”

In Britten’s Death in Venice, the roles are reversed. Aschenbach does not destroy Beauty but is himself destroyed by his perception of it. If, however, we consider the final scene of the opera, there is a trio of figures: Aschenbach, Jaschu, and Tadzio. In these Dionysian games, Jaschu rises up against Beauty, overthrowing Tadzio, while Aschenbach, like Vere, looks on, helpless. We can even conceive this witnessing of the defeat of Beauty as the immediate cause of Aschenbach’s death—assuming we do not take it for granted that the writer succumbs to cholera.¹⁶⁶

Billy Budd has a flaw, the fatal stammer that prevents him from replying to Claggart’s accusation—and so, too, with Tadzio. In Mann’s version there are physical imperfections: on his first sight of the boy, Aschenbach wonders whether the pallor of his skin connotes sickliness, and his later observation of Tadzio’s teeth reveals them to be jagged and unhealthy. Concluding that the boy will probably not grow old, Aschenbach has feelings of satisfaction—as if he were secretly glad that this embodiment of Beauty will perish prematurely.¹⁶⁷ This is not Claggart’s wish to smash and destroy, but it is an echo of it, one that will be heard further in Aschenbach’s fantasy of a diseased Venice in which he and the boy linger on, perhaps in some hoped-for Liebestod.¹⁶⁸

Britten’s opera omits the physical flaws but highlights Aschenbach’s fantasy of a world in which he and Tadzio are left alone. It also develops further the moral flaws that Aschenbach is pleased to observe in the boy—the proud petulance and the narcissistic joy in the regard of others. (Britten’s Tadzio is more coquettish than Mann’s, although he is an amateur compared with the extraordinary flirt Visconti depicts.) With the earlier opera in mind, we might understand these flaws as background to the final scene, as spurs to Jaschu’s revolt, indications of coming destruction that is prefigured in the wrestling match (the culmination of the Games of Apollo in act 1). Like Vere, Aschenbach must look on at the fragility of Beauty, must recognize its transience, must understand that he is powerless to prevent its passing.

Mann’s novella is framed by announcements of von Aschenbach’s eminence and by the worldwide reverberations of his death. Britten’s Billy Budd is also framed by monologues, an opening in which the older Vere remembers the pivotal events on the vessel he commanded, events that changed his sense of self, and a coda in which he recalls how the Beauty and Goodness he helped destroy proved able to restore him, how he found his way again.

The Vere who opens Billy Budd is an old man, one who “has experienced much.” The good he has seen, he tells us, has never been perfect—there has always been “some stammer in the divine speech.” Although he has tried to work for the good, his efforts have been confused. He has been “lost on the infinite sea,” and he asks: “Who has blessed me? Who saved me?”

The answer, of course, is Billy Budd, the young man whom he sentenced to death. Vere needs to work through—surely not for the first time—the events of 1797: the opera unfolds in the mind of an old man searching for reconciliation with what he has been and done. In the epilogue, the older Vere is on stage again, asking the same questions. Now they have answers.

O what have I done? O what, what have I done? But he has saved me, and blessed me, and the love that passeth understanding has come to me. I was lost on the infinite sea, but I’ve sighted a sail in the storm, the far-shining sail, and I’m content. I’ve seen where she’s bound for. There’s a land where she’ll anchor for ever. I am an old man now, and my mind can go back in peace to that faraway summer of seventeen hundred and ninety-seven, long ago now, years ago, centuries ago, when I, Edward Fairfax Vere, commanded the Indomitable …

Even before Vere sings of “the love that passeth understanding” it is overwhelmingly obvious that Billy is a representative of—or a vehicle for—Christ,¹⁶⁹ that his willingly accepted suffering absolves Vere of guilt, that the depth of the goodness he embodies (even if it is flawed with a stammer) enables his captain to find peace. So, it might seem, the crucial difference between Billy Budd and Death in Venice lies in the character of their theologies. The God of Love presides over the events on the Indomitable—the lido is the scene of struggle between Apollo and Dionysius, a struggle inevitably won by an unforgiving, blindly passionate deity, the epitome of Schopenhauer’s Will. Hence, Vere can find redemption, whereas Aschenbach must discover failure, humiliation, and a bleak death. Once beyond the Christian world, there is no alternative to destruction.

Perhaps not. For the Platonic connection between Beauty and Goodness is central to the figure of Billy. The stammer mars his physical grace, but moral beauty shines through all his actions, even the blow that fells Claggart. Were we to understand Vere as inspired by the apprehension of Beauty, in counterbalance to Claggart’s immediate urge to destroy it, we could humanize the action. Billy is not Christ—he is a mortal young Englishman in whom the capacity for forgiveness attributed to Jesus manifests itself. A flawed captain is confronted with beauty and goodness, expressed in an extraordinary gesture: “Starry Vere, God bless you!” Billy sings at the moment of execution. That confrontation enables Vere to find peace. Could Aschenbach, conscious of his own flaws, of his straying from the Socratic path that leads through Beauty to Goodness, achieve anything similar? Could Tadzio’s walk into the sea, the turn back and the beckoning gestures, lead Aschenbach too to some sense of reconciliation? That is not the operatic ending Britten wrote as he attempted to be faithful to Mann’s story, but, as chapter 3 will explore, he might have concluded with something akin to it.

8

Vere’s anguish and confusion express his sense that he has acted wrongly: he has been complicit in the destruction of goodness. He might be viewed as facing a classic moral dilemma, caught between the duties of his office (that require him to condemn Billy) and his recognition that the murder of Claggart is an act in which evil is eradicated. The deeper self-reproach lies in an awareness that his own conduct has been inadequately sensitive to the sufferings unjustly inflicted upon his men—in his concern to avoid insubordination and possible mutiny, he has allowed the master-at-arms to practice cruelty in the name of discipline. However the etiology of Vere’s judgment of Billy is understood, however the morally suspect moments in it are given greater or lesser weight, one thing is clear: the decisions and actions have grave consequences, and the ultimate outcome is one Vere rightly regards as the sacrifice of an innocent.

Mut’s seduction by the lure of beauty is similarly consequential. Although Joseph, “chaste Joseph,” and even Potiphar may share responsibility for what occurs, she has not only made an assault on Joseph’s virtue but also slandered him, thereby exposing him to possible death or mutilation and to an actual unjust imprisonment. It is possible to imagine an extension of the fourth part of Mann’s tetralogy, or even an opera based on it, in which Mut’s subsequent penitence culminates in a scene in which she receives from Joseph, in his role as Pharaoh’s vizier, explicit forgiveness and redemption.¹⁷⁰ The potential opera might even be framed by the anguish of the elderly Mut, just as Billy Budd is framed by that of the elderly Vere.

The case of Aschenbach, however, is entirely different. His capitulation to the lure of beauty has no actual consequences for anyone’s well-being except, perhaps, his own.¹⁷¹ To be sure, he fails to warn Tadzio’s mother of the cholera that has infected Venice, but it is hard to estimate the difference his moral lapse makes to the chances that any member of the family will fall ill: as already noted, the children are well supervised and thus unlikely to eat contaminated fruit, mother and governess may already have better information than the socially isolated writer, and even an attempt to report the epidemic might fail to convince, because he would be viewed as trafficking in unsubstantiated rumors. Readers rarely blame Aschenbach for not trying to broadcast around Venice the report he hears from the English clerk—a course of conduct he never considers—even though that might be viewed as the behavior of an ideal citizen: tolerance surely rests on thinking that any attempt of the kind would be quixotic.

Aschenbach’s failure is internal to his own life. By the standards of Greek perfectionism, a life succeeds or fails according to its ft with a proper pattern, a pattern that fully develops the person’s nature; a post-Enlightenment modification would abandon the emphasis on individual “natures” in favor of a criterion of autonomous choice—a proper pattern is one that embodies the person’s free selection, provided that the selection respects the equal autonomy of others.¹⁷² Lives that bring grave consequences for others will often be undermined by doing so, but this is not the only way in which things can go awry. Internal failures may arise from the absence of any pattern, or from a pattern that suppresses part of the person’s nature, or from a chosen pattern to which, because of propensities that cannot be restrained or confined, the person cannot conform. On any of the readings we have been considering, if Aschenbach fails, he does so in one of the latter two ways. Were this to be counted as an ethical failure, it would belong in a different range of the ethical spectrum from those lapses that adversely affect others—it is tempting to echo Nietzsche’s early dictum and conclude that Aschenbach’s life is unjustified as an aesthetic phenomenon. For, apparently, he does no harm.

Britten writes eloquently ambiguous music for the Venice in which he sets his central character. The “master-writer” is imposing, like the Venetian palaces—but the pilings beneath are pressed by weight and lapped by foul water. The beauty in Aschenbach’s life masks the strains below, and it is inevitable that the foundations must crumble. When they do, the apparent beauty is nullified: on this, Britten is unambiguous. Mann, I suggest, was more ambivalent. His hero succumbs to the lure of beauty, but we should ask how deeply that affects the worth of his life. If Vere—and perhaps Mut—can find “redemption,” why suppose that Aschenbach’s apparently inconsequential lapse from his self-chosen discipline, the odd but insulated behavior of his final days, is weighty enough to undermine the worth of all he has been and done?

Britten could not have known how eerily his portrait resembles Aschenbach’s creator. Moving elegantly through the world of well-to-do Munich, the young author of the brilliantly successful Buddenbrooks captured the fairy-tale princess Katia Pringsheim. Together they had six children—Erika, Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elizabeth, and Michael—and lived in public as exemplars of bourgeois well-being. After Death in Venice, there were more masterpieces to come, including, at least, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, and Doctor Faustus. Along the way, he won the Nobel Prize for literature—and was, apparently, considered for a repeat award because of the brilliance of his later work.¹⁷³ His prominence in resisting Nazism made him the voice of “healthy” Germany. In the end he became a monument.

The costs are not immediately visible—even today, the majority of Mann’s readers know little of the life behind the writings. Without the surviving diaries and letters, there would only be external clues to the pains, the severe depressions, the repressed desires, the sleeplessness,¹⁷⁴ the sexual difficulties—all the things that could move Mann to declare, on his thirty-third wedding anniversary, that he would not choose to live his life again. His miseries, however, are not the principal concerns about the worth of his apparently so brilliant career. They might even be viewed as part of his triumph, his fidelity to the motto—“Durchhalten!”—he attributes to Aschenbach. Aschenbach’s turmoil, as we have seen, does no damage to others. Mann, by contrast, was sustained by a family, on whom his troubles—and his successes—took a severe toll. Even in the rosiest vision, offered in prospect in Königliche Hoheit, what is predicted is “severe happiness,” a combined effort in which disabilities must be overcome, deformities accepted, and, most importantly, sacrifices made.

Imma Spoelmann’s sacrifices are beyond the horizon of the early novel, to be guessed as readers take leave of her at the dawn of her marriage. Katia Mann’s selfless devotion to the Manngesellschaft—Thomas Mann Enterprises, Inc.—can be glimpsed in her “unwritten memoirs” and gleaned from what her husband’s diaries say and do not say. She is the organizer of the household, often invisible but especially appreciated when she falls ill or when the presence of guests or the absence of servants increases the strain.¹⁷⁵ Her duties include picking her husband up from his walk, taking him to his various medical appointments, writing letters from his dictation, listening to and providing constructive comments on his readings of works in progress—as well as occasional jobs like attending to the needs of an increasingly decrepit brother-in-law (Heinrich).¹⁷⁶ Her memoirs make it clear that she rejoiced in the success of her “Tommy”—mein Mann. His diaries make it equally evident that she made the everyday routine of his life possible, responded to his sexual failures with compassion and comfort, tolerated his attractions to young men, and, perhaps, even helped him keep them within the bounds of his own disciplined homoeroticism. A recorded exchange between them reveals how they were able to discuss those inclinations—how, like Imma Spoelmann, Katia was able to look on her husband’s “deformity” and, perhaps, help him to accept it. In May 1948, after a walk together, they had lunch at a favorite café, where Mann observed the “picture-pretty” (bildhübsch) teenage son of an “unattractive Jewish man.”¹⁷⁷

I said: “Sad that beauty is only for a moment. In a couple of years, he will be so like his father, that it will have quite disappeared.” To which K. responded, to my comfort: “Why? Maybe his mother is a beautiful woman.”¹⁷⁸

Aschenbach, of course, lacks any similar helpful presence.

Mann’s awareness of that help was fleeting—although sometimes he became conscious of how little notice he had taken of his wife or of their marriage. On February 11, 1945, his diary entry begins: “Cooler weather. K. had to remind me that today is our 40th wedding anniversary. Ended the article for Free World to my satisfaction …”¹⁷⁹ Celebrations of her birthdays often seem centered on his own projects: “K.’s 56th birthday. In the morning on the beach I finished the seventh chapter of Lotte in Weimar on p. 104 with a short dialogue, and on the subsequent walk I turned my attention to the eighth chapter…. In celebration of the day, I read K. the last 20 pages of the seventh chapter.”¹⁸⁰

Yet his frequent moments of depression, self-doubt, and unrest make his debt to her apparent to us—as it was to him. “Sleepless until 3 a.m. and longer. A whole Phanodorm [a sleeping medication Mann commonly used in this period] with only belated effect. Some time in K.’s room in the chair. Walk around the room. Towards morning a few hours of rest.”¹⁸¹ “Tired and sad. Sat on the sofa, my head on K.’s shoulder.”¹⁸²

Occasionally, his gratitude became public, as when, on her seventieth birthday, he declared that “she would live on,” by his side, in any posthumous celebration of his work.¹⁸³ Most of his audience would not have known how much lay behind the conventional praise—maybe not even Katia herself, whose famous remark, “Never in my life have I been able to do what I would have liked to do,” is made as if this is simply a social fact about the condition of daughters, wives, and mothers (at least in her period and milieu).¹⁸⁴

If she signed on to the Manngesellschaft as a willing partner, the sacrifices demanded of the six children were less obviously voluntary. External clues already raise questions about their parents’ success in equipping them to live worthwhile and independent lives of their own. There were two suicides—Klaus, the second child and first son, and Michael, the third son and last of the six.¹⁸⁵ Klaus’s death came after a previous attempt had failed: in July 1948, he had been visiting his parents in California and tried to gas himself. As Mann’s diary records, Katia went immediately to the hospital and gave her husband a report on her return. The next day, Erika visited her brother, and Katia seems to have gone back and forth between hospital and home. The diary entry continues: “Distracted work, interrupted by reports from K. Drove out with her a little to Santa Monica. Handwritten letters to (Lavinia) Mazzuchetti, Adorno, and others. Heinrich to dinner.”¹⁸⁶ The following afternoon, Mann accompanied his wife to visit Klaus in the home of the Bruno Walter family. He was “touched” by his son’s “sensitive” nature—and very, very tired after the visit.¹⁸⁷

The entries for the subsequent days reveal that the work (interrupted or not) went on: he continued to write his account of the composition of Doktor Faustus.¹⁸⁸ A month after the incident, when Klaus was ready to return to Europe, Mann’s primary thought seems to have been that his son might undertake a mission on his behalf. “Evening with Klaus to say goodbye before his departure to Amsterdam. Good wishes. Emphasis on my interest that he should work with Marton and Korda in London on the Magic Mountain project [a proposed film that never materialized].”¹⁸⁹ Was the emphasis on participation in one of his father’s artistic ventures meant as encouragement? Were the “good wishes” accompanied by expressions of how Mann felt about the near-loss of his son? We cannot know, but there is an odd tone to this farewell, the conspicuous absence of any expressed concern that a vulnerable young man might try again—and succeed.¹⁹⁰

When Klaus did just that, his father, mother, and elder sister were on a speaking tour in Scandinavia. After a discussion among them, they decided to continue with a reduced version of the engagements planned—Mann would deliver the promised lectures but would cancel the social events. Katia and Erika were evidently more affected than Mann himself, and he records his “sympathy” with them and his attempts to comfort them.¹⁹¹ Almost three weeks after Klaus’s death, Erika few to Nice and went on to Cannes, the scene of his suicide. The only one of the family who had been there before her was Michael, who was fortuitously in Europe at the time and who played a viola solo at the funeral.

It has sometimes been suggested—although the idea has been sharply challenged—that Klaus suffered from three great burdens: he was a drug addict, he was homosexual, and he was the son of Thomas Mann, and that the greatest of these was the shadow cast by his father.¹⁹² Certainly, Klaus’s own diaries sometimes complain of paternal coldness, and, in a letter to Herman Hesse, Mann acknowledged the “shadow” he felt he had cast on his son.¹⁹³

The relation between father and youngest son was also difficult. Before Michael’s birth, Mann had meditated on the merits of having a sixth child. His diary dispassionately considers the economic and cultural situation of postwar Germany, and the deliberation concludes: “Apart from considerations of K.’s health, I really have nothing against it [allowing the pregnancy to continue to term], except that the experience for ‘Lisa’ [Elizabeth, the fifth child] (she is, in a certain sense, my first child) might be influenced and diminished by it.”¹⁹⁴ After the birth of the new baby—known initially within the family as Beisser (biter) and later as Bibi—Mann confessed his emotional distance: “I continue to feel estrangement, coldness, even dislike towards our youngest, about the arrangements for whose baptism I wrote yesterday to the parson who teaches Erika religion.”¹⁹⁵

Although his early career as a violist was apparently successful, Michael decided, shortly after his father’s death, to obtain a Ph.D. in German literature. In 1975, Mann’s diaries were finally available for others to read, and his youngest son, now a professor at Berkeley, read the passages just quoted, apparently during a visit to Europe where he was participating in celebrations of his father’s centenary.¹⁹⁶ His reading probably confirmed what he had already felt.¹⁹⁷ The suicide came a year later.

Despite Mann’s sense that his fifth child was really his first, that with the birth of Elizabeth he had discovered paternity, his diaries show significant interest in and admiration for his eldest daughter. In the early weeks of the Manns’ exile, Erika showed the organizational skill and helpfulness that would be so thoroughly developed later—and Mann also showed paternal pride in her writing.¹⁹⁸ At that stage, Erika was very much an independent force in the cultural world—her satirical cabaret, Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill) had won considerable acclaim for its witty attacks on Nazism. The independence occasionally led to sharp differences between father and daughter, especially concerning the ways in which the German writers who had emigrated should publish their work. An early dispute in 1933 was much amplified in 1936, when Erika wrote her father a critical letter about his “Protest,” published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.¹⁹⁹ At this stage, she was very much aligned and allied with Klaus, to whom she had always been close. During the next two decades, she was increasingly drawn into orbit around her father, especially after the Second World War, in which she had played an active role as a correspondent. The visits to California became longer, and her intelligence, organizational skill, and command of English proved especially valuable. The diaries reveal her deftness in turning Mann’s German into speeches and lectures for an English-speaking audience and in coaching her father on his delivery.²⁰⁰ Her advice in fashioning and refashioning his writings, articles, lectures, and Doktor Faustus was constant and much appreciated.²⁰¹ Gradually, she took over the role of principal sounding board and managing director of the Manngesellschaft. Three days before Klaus’s suicide, Mann could write of “the priceless help of Erika and K.”²⁰²

As the sibling to whom he had been closest became ever more involved in his father’s work and life, Klaus may have experienced a sense of betrayal. After his suicide, Erika’s principal intellectual endeavors were divided between service to a living father and to a dead brother. The independent voice of her youth became an amplifier—a most valuable amplifier, to be sure—of the work of others.

The youngest of the three daughters, Elizabeth (“Medi”), through whom Mann discovered paternal love and to whom he wrote his hexameters (Gesang vom Kindchen), did achieve independence. She married, suddenly and young, Giuseppe Borghese, a man thirty-six years older than herself. Her father found the wedding day painful and oppressive, nor did his view of the marriage improve.²⁰³ After the death of her husband in 1952, she embarked on a successful career as a political scientist, with special interest in environmental issues, raising two daughters who went on to professional lives of their own.

The diaries record Mann’s continued affection for Medi, although, with the years, her primacy is undermined by his increasing gratitude toward and love for Erika and his enchantment in his grandson Frido.²⁰⁴ They also reveal shifting attitudes toward the two middle children, often overlooked and almost always less prominent. Monika, the fourth child and second daughter, initially appears as one among many, only occasionally distinguished—as on Christmas Eve 1918, when she was particularly pleased with her presents.²⁰⁵ Her birthday (the day after her father’s) in 1920 rates a perfunctory mention but goes unnoted in the following year.²⁰⁶ By the time the extant records resume, “Moni,” now in her twenties, has clearly become a problem, making difficulties for her mother.²⁰⁷ So it continues. There are discussions of Moni’s “oddness,” of the “Problem Moni.” She remains in her room during the Christmas Eve sharing of gifts—yet it is “the happiest Christmas and New Year for years.”²⁰⁸ After 1940, Monika’s difficulties increase: married in 1939 to Jenö Láni, she settles with him in London; during the blitz, the couple resolves to travel to America, but the ship is torpedoed and, while she looks helplessly on, her husband drowns. The parental home provides little sanctuary: her presence is a problem requiring bright ideas from parents and siblings; Mann has to bridle his “bitterness about her existence.”²⁰⁹ Her intellectual efforts are slighted—“Manuscript from Moni, embarrassing”; “Wrote critically to Moni about her little manuscript.”²¹⁰ After her father’s death, however, she does manage to achieve some personal happiness and, contrary to his judgment, even some success as a writer.

Then there is Golo—Angelus Gottfried Thomas, to give him his full name—the only one of the siblings for whom the family nickname became the public appellation. Teased, possibly even tormented and humiliated by his elder brother, he figures early on as a cross between gnome and clown in the family drama, careful, it seems, to avoid too much parental scrutiny or parental discipline.²¹¹ Through the 1930s and 1940s, his father’s diaries show Golo’s stock rising. Unlike Monika, he is a serious partner for serious conversation; although never achieving the intimacy allowed to Erika (or even to Klaus), he earns his father’s respect. After Mann’s death in 1955, his own career as writer, academic, and intellectual begins to flourish, as if he were finally liberated. He becomes a distinguished man of letters in his own right—in my judgment, the only one of the siblings whose works would be widely read if their authorship were entirely unknown.²¹²

His personal life was shrouded from public view. Golo never married, although he adopted a son, and he spent his final year in the home of his widowed daughter-in-law. If as is often supposed, he was homosexual, he was far less open about his preferences than those—Britten among them—with whom he once shared a house in Brooklyn. It seems probable though not certain that he never found fulfilling romantic love. Eventually, he inherited his parents’ last house, in Kilchberg just outside Zürich, and, like them, he is buried in the Kilchberg cemetery. In accordance with his explicit instructions, his grave is placed at the maximum distance from that of Thomas and Katia Mann.

9

There was probably no moment in Mann’s life at which he intentionally did something that caused serious harm to his wife or to one of his children or when he deliberately acted to limit the value of their lives. In that respect, he is quite unlike Mut or Vere. Nevertheless, a review of the lives of his children cannot avoid raising questions about the costs imposed by the disciplined life he led: this is not a matter of ascribing blame—that would be pointless and silly—but of recognizing that the achievement of some kinds of value puts others in jeopardy. The Manngesellschaft produced wonderful things, masterpieces of world literature that continue to illuminate, delight, and even transform those who read them. Yet the conditions of production cannot simply be wished away or ignored.

Whatever the strains he felt in uniting the roles of artist and citizen, Mann succeeded as the Artist-Erzieher he aspired to become. The discipline imposed on himself had costs, but they are trivial in comparison with the triumphs—as Goethe’s imitations of the serpent, his “energetic wormings,” although by no means poetic, do not detract from his life—the discarded novella about his late infatuation ought to have been a comedy.²¹³ The more serious problem comes when other lives are conscripted, joined to a larger enterprise without any reflective choice, when those lives are confined or truncated or blossom only when the period of conscription is over. For all Mann’s commitment to reading Nietzsche ironically, the achievement of the Manngesellschaft recapitulates the Nietzschean thought about the proper relationship between birds of prey and lambs—sacrifices are needed for the full triumph of what is noble and strong.²¹⁴ Whole lives are devoured in bringing about a greater end.²¹⁵

With the enduring quality of Mann’s fiction clearly established, its artistic eminence fully recognized, those whose lives felt the impact of the efforts required in accomplishing it—however the losses are finally identified and the causes finally understood—might well retrospectively acquiesce in the contributions they made or even in the interferences with their own development. Katia and Erika apparently did exactly that. As the events recede into history, the perceived costs to individuals diminish. Looking back, grateful readers do not worry about the conditions of production—or, if they do, they focus on the aesthetic balance in the life of the author: was Mann’s life justified as an aesthetic phenomenon?

From the beginning of this chapter, the central concern has been with parallel questions about Aschenbach. Does he succeed in fitting the disparate elements of his identity together? Is his life invalidated by his capitulation to the lure of beauty? Must the artist inevitably succumb to that lure? For Mann, these were crucial questions, and the creation of Aschenbach was part of his long exploration of them, part of his lifelong endeavor to put himself on trial. Juxtaposing Mann’s Aschenbach with Britten’s, with Mut and with Vere, and with Mann himself may lead us to wonder if these are the right—or the only—questions. Aschenbach, so far as we can tell, does no serious harm. There is nothing to suggest that his marriage curtailed another life or that he cast a long shadow on his daughter. As I suggested earlier, the novella simplifies the philosophical predicament precisely through leaving other human relations unaddressed—on the one hand we have Aschenbach’s austere discipline, resolutely maintained for more than two decades, and the literary accomplishments it has made possible; on the other, the brief final lapse, the entrapment by the lure of beauty, personified in Tadzio. No baneful effect on others complicates the picture. Assuming that the literary triumphs are comparable to Mann’s own, Aschenbach’s life appears easier to vindicate.

The maxim he rejects—“To understand all is to forgive all”—overstates a sound thought, that understanding may lead sometimes to forgiveness. We can “see life foully,” in Joyce’s apt phrase, and reconcile ourselves to it. In the wake of Klaus’s suicide, Mann invoked a similar thought, as his distraught daughter quarreled with an old friend: “Her bitter distortion of things, including what concerns Klaus and his life. Humiliating in its rigor, and even more in its half-truth. But too much character makes one unjust. Of course, tolerance is probably not allowed today.”²¹⁶

I read these words as a half-articulated defense against a charge Erika never made explicitly, one Mann was inchoately conscious of but would not look fully in the face. The perspective is quite contrary to Aschenbach’s official stance—even though considering it would be valuable for him as he sits, slumped and humiliated at the fountain. Equally it is apt for us readers as we think about Aschenbach—and about his creator.