Liebestod: Death in Venice

Abstract

The figure of the artist in the early short stories and novella of Thomas Mann proved a perfect vehicle for his exploration into the nature of attenuated sensibility and its problematic relationship with the social world. It was on the basis of this incisive and highly personal engagement with the problem of artistic sensibility that Mann came to be known as one of the great psychological writers of the age.75 In spite of the sympathy with which the characters in these early stories are depicted, they are, however, subject to a certain ironic perspective which allows us to see the comic as well as the potentially tragic nature of their predicament. This is true even in Tonio Kroger, which is by far the most thorough exploration of the gap between artist and society in the works of Mann’s early period. Thomas Mann called that story his ‘Werther’, because, like Goethe’s novel, Tonio Kroger is essentially a study of the pain that accompanies a youthful longing for acceptance and recognition by the loved one and by society. Tonio’s suffering, in the end, is as much a consequence of his young years as it is of his status as an artist.