The Horror of Contact: Understanding Cholera in Mann’s Death in Venice

Abstract

Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) was published in 1912, and written during a time when cholera as a fatal disease had made its presence felt in Italy in 1911 and caused a series of fatalities. This article focuses on the notion of tropicality, and the diseased body and what it means in terms of imagining the colonized spaces as represented in the novella, through the discourse of nineteenth century imperial medicine. The historical context of the 1911 cholera epidemic in Italy is indeed significant in the contextualization and the production of the text. Yet, as the paper argues, the disease of cholera works in a larger metaphor to enable a colonial discourse that serves as a cautionary reminder of barring contact zones, “the horrors of diversity” as Mann’s text states when first describing the emergence of Asiatic cholera in the text.