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Death in Venice Paperback – May 31, 2005

by Thomas Mann (Author), Michael Henry Heim (Translator), Michael Cunningham (Introduction)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,057 ratings
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The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann―here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. “It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom,” Mann wrote. “But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist’s dignity.”

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    160 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Ecco
  4. Publication date
    May 31, 2005
  5. Dimensions
    5.31 x 0.36 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0060576170
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0060576172
  8. Lexile measure
    1410L
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom, Mann wrote. But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity.

From the Back Cover

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ecco; Reprint edition (May 31, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060576170
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060576172
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1410L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.36 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,057 ratings

About the author

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Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

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Paul Thomas Mann (German: [paʊ̯l toːmas man]; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, returning to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, literature written in German by those who opposed or fled the Hitler regime.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
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I liked it :)
4 Stars
I liked it :)
Not gonna comment on the story cuz that's subjective but the book itself is in good condition and arrived ontime 👍
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Top reviews from the United States

Linda Linguvic
5.0 out of 5 stars Deep with meaning and symbolism, this work has stood the test of time
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2011
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It seems like a simple story. But yet it is heavily symbolic and its many translations from the original German have been analyzed by literature buffs since it was first published in 1912. The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, an esteemed writer in his fifties with his own particular world view. The book is deep with meaning and symbolism. And every sentence which is written in beautiful prose has been analyzed and reanalyzed by scholars for almost a century.

Gustav von Ashenbach takes a trip to Venice. Here, he is attracted to a young boy. Most of this short book consists of his thoughts about this boy. He never speaks to this boy but he follows him whenever he can and lusts for him, seeing him as an innocent thing of beauty. His passion takes over and he becomes quite ridiculous as he tries to make himself look younger. In the meantime, Venice is undergoing some sort of plague which the authorities try to hide from the people although rumors are flying. Gustav has a chance to warn the other guests in the hotel, including the boy's family, but his own inner thoughts seem to prevent him from speaking to them at all.

The writing is beautiful and layered with the meaning of this one man's pursuit of beauty at the end of his life. It is all played out in elaborate early 19th century language and the author sure does know how to use his words. The reader gets to see his dreams, his hesitancy and his complicated thought process and I felt pure pleasure just letting my eyes move across the page and soak up the atmosphere the author created. Clearly, this is a work of art and has stood the test of time.
18 people found this helpful
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Larry P
4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, But Lousy Scanning
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2023
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I do not recommend this Kindle version. The scanning software turned every apostrophe into an "f" and every quotation mark into either a "g" or an "h." I became accustomed to it, but it was still quite annoying.
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S H l T - Hole - W04
3.0 out of 5 stars Episodic text
Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2024
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I had been thinking to myself I need to brush up on some nineteenth century British literature to fill a hole in my own reading history.

I reached out to a friend and asked what the best Dickens was to him, and he said Bleak House.
So, I bought the book, and it is a big brick of a book, almost a thousand pages.

I learned some things. Like I have joked in the past that Dickens got paid by the word and you can tell. I do not think that it is really a joke. I just think the expectations about what a book looks like are different. I still remember in high school keeping a reading journal for myself reading a Tale of Two Cities because there was so much going on. I think that instead of thinking of something like Bleak House as a novel it’s more like a TV show now, where it is episodic and driven by that kind of arc even if now we talk about them as novels. Like the Soprano’s or something.

I also joked that the thing was very character driven, but not in a good way. The writer of the afterward notes that there is 48 characters, and you feel it. The first half of the book is basically a character introduction and twenty pages of focus on them and then a new character. There is not a lot of narrative momentum, and if I were editing this for adaptation to film, there’s dozens of characters who could go out the door.

Because there is really nothing that happens. People die and get married and have disfiguring illness, but it is not until page 483 that something of note really happen. And then it feels incidental to the plot. The whole overarching thing holding the book together kinds of resolves weirdly and unsatisfactorily.

The weird thing is that overall, it i
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MJ Walters
5.0 out of 5 stars I love this novella, but the audiobook didn't work for me.
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2017
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This is a story I've read any number of times since I first encountered in college, and I decided to try an audiobook this time around.  Big mistake.  I don't know what the problem was, but it felt like a wholly different book to me, and not one that I particularly enjoyed.  Possibly it was the narrator, a number of people have expressed negative opinions on his work in their reviews.  Possibly it's a different translation, but I see no indication of who the translator was, and I really don't have the energy to compare the audio and hard copy versions side-by-side.  Bottom line: this didn't work for me.

On the off chance that you don't know the story, writer Gustav von Aschenbach feels restless and takes himself off to Venice where he finds the weather oppressive, but the proximity of a young Polish boy enough to keep him in the city in spite of his health concerns. Much is made of Aschenbach's work ethic, his moral stance, his belief that will power will carry one through all troubles. And yet in a moment, all of his professional nobility is shattered by the appearance of a luminous boy, a perfect amalgam of Eros, Hyacinth, and whatever other gorgeous, mythic youth Aschenbach's besotted brain tosses up to explain away the experience of being utterly gobsmacked by desire.

The irony here is so think you need waders.

In the end, we're the only witnesses to Aschenbach's fall from grace, from the pedestal which he worked so hard to climb. We don't really know why he was so smitten, whether there was something in his past which made him susceptible to a beautiful boy. We see him tart his desire up as casual interest, fascination, as a desire to touch perfection, and as love, but by the end, he's become something he formerly scorned -- an old man trying to be a young one -- in order to be more attractive to Tadzio. It's difficult to watch, and yet impossible to look away from the trainwreck of Aschenbach's end.

Though my favorite Mann story is The Blood of the Walsungs, Death in Venice will always hold a special place in my heart. I'm sorry the audiobook didn't stand up to the task.
3 people found this helpful
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J. Murry Middleton
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the classics of world literature
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2017
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I recently reread this for the first time in 40 years . . . . not all books I've revisit shout out that I had great taste in literature as an undergrad. Death in Venice is just so brilliant, I was left wondering what I could have understood so many years ago. Mann's language (at least as translated here) is among the best of any writer. The narrative is not what the novel is really about; rather like a great poet, Mann leads the reader through the back alleys that we've visited looking for what we imagined we need. Brilliant work.
11 people found this helpful
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Jan de Jong
1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly produced
Reviewed in the Netherlands on October 27, 2022
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The edition looks like a printout from a website. No copyright mentions for the translator - Kenneth Burke - not even sure if he is aware of it. The indication ‘premium annotated edition’ is insulting.
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DNF
5.0 out of 5 stars Recomendado!
Reviewed in Mexico on September 9, 2020
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Aumentando mi colección, es un libro delgado, con letras un poco pequeñas, pero muy practico para llevarlo en un viaje, y practicar mi inglés.
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DNF
5.0 out of 5 stars Recomendado!
Reviewed in Mexico on September 9, 2020
Aumentando mi colección, es un libro delgado, con letras un poco pequeñas, pero muy practico para llevarlo en un viaje, y practicar mi inglés.
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One person found this helpful
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peter peters
5.0 out of 5 stars EXCELLENT BOOK
Reviewed in Canada on August 2, 2017
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EXCELLENT BOOK
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Londonjerez
3.0 out of 5 stars Bad edition of the novel
Reviewed in Spain on October 5, 2015
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Despite the fame of this work, I fould it really quite boring: the first 25 pages were devoted solely to the thoughts of the protagonist before he had even decided to go to Venice.
Also this edition had many - and I mean many - spelling mistakes, which adds to the disapppointment of the book.
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Wras
5.0 out of 5 stars Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2015
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“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

This book is a warning to the reader and to artists, of the price paid for artistic success, and the hidden in the beauty of art, that is the center of culture but also the rejection of culture by the individual that is exploring new possibilities outside the shared reality of a society. this tension of a shared common view and the exploration of possibilities outside the norm tear the peace of one's soul or for dose of us who have no soul our minds. The displacement does not have to be great , it only takes one step to be standing at the edge of the abyss, for it to look back at you with all its fury, and enchantment. For art is the breaking of taboos, and the establishment of new ones, it is reimagining what we are as a group, bubble, culture.

“Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to over fastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

Gustav von Aschenbach the main character of the book is a famous writer, in his fifties; while walking past a cemetery, while observing the edifices and religious motifs, he reads “THEY ENTER THE HOUSE OF GOD” “THE ETERNAL LIGHT MAY SHINE UPON THEM” (the caps is the way the writer wrote the passages) he observes a wild looking foreigner with read hair this makes him fantasize of a wild kind of eden described in detail. there are three more encounters on his travels they all infer his dislocation from society his fear of the otherness within him, some like this one are obviously religious, others are more of societal and sexual in nature. Thomas Mann eloquently warns us of his intentions in a description of the writer.

“What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

And so he takes as by the hand into secret passion, the depravity of Gustav von Aschenbach. His very open fascination with a fourteen year old boy, that is staying in his hotel.
He regards him, absorbs him with every look, escalating into obsession or as he sees it love.

“For passion, like crime, is antithetical to the smooth operation and prosperity of day-to-day existence, and can only welcome every loosening of the fabric of society, every upheaval and disaster in the world, since it can vaguely hope to profit thereby. And so Aschenbach felt a morose satisfaction at the officially concealed goings-on in the dirty alleyways of Venice, that nasty secret which had merged with his own innermost secret and which he, too, was so intent on keeping “
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Little by little this passion consumes him, and physically transforms him into one of his most disdained visions and makes him risk it all, as he falls deeper into visions of the other God.

“But the dreamer was now with them, within them: he belonged to the stranger god. Yes, they were now his own self as they hurled themselves upon the animals, lacerating them, slaughtering them, devouring gobbets of steaming flesh, as they dropped to the trampled mossy ground for unbridled coupling, an offering to the god. And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.“
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

This a book laden with allusions to antiquity and rich in allegory and symbolism, no word is wasted, not a sentence is there fluf or just adorn, it is a masterpiece delivered powerfully and succinctly.
This book was published in 1911 the world is silently spinning into an abyss of death and destruction unbenounced to all its contemporaries, but here you can feel, almost a premonition a warning, of a malaise a stink in the middle of the best of civilization.
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