The first time I read the novella it seemed to be a story of unrequited love about a middle-aged successful author, Gustave von Aschenbach, who encounters beauty incarnate in the form of a young man named Tadzio; indeed, there are a number of references specifically to platonic love. As the story goes on, Aschenbach’s passion for the adolescent boy grows, culminating in lust and obsession. In my own earlier adolescence, I focused solely on the outburst of passion and loved how Mann romanticizes the obsession by presenting it as a sophisticated prose decorated with classical allusions. Nabokov would be furious, but back then I even found some resemblance of the obsession in his work, Lolita. But apart from Freudian influence, homoeroticism, and heavy classical allusions, the main concern of Death in Venice is the Nietzschean struggle with art and life for an artist.

For Thomas Mann, being an artist was not easy: it was a noble calling, a moral obligation, and a will to art that required an artist to sacrifice himself physically and emotionally for the sake of perfectionism. But passion can lead to confusion and the temptation of beauty can turn to obsession. His artistic struggle is laid bare in Death in Venice, as Aschenbach’s passion for Tadzio is a metaphor for an artist’s tragic pursuit of perfection and the opposing forces of Apollonian and Dionysian artistic creation. At the beginning of the novella, Aschenbach is portrayed as having an Apollonian psyche when it comes to artistic creation. He is highly systematic and disciplined with his work. After he becomes obsessed with the ideal beauty of Tadzio, his approach to artistic creation transforms into a chaotic, irrational, and Dionysian pursuit of an ideal beauty that eventually leads to his decadent downfall.