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Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book
Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book
Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book
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Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book

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Written in 1912, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's best-known novella — a haunting, elegiac masterpiece in which the main character, Gustav Aschenbach, is a successful and much-revered author. While vacationing in Venice, this highly disciplined writer, who always has maintained extraordinary control of his literary creations, finds himself suddenly overwhelmed by an all-consuming love for a beautiful young boy. A deadly epidemic sweeps through the city, but Aschenbach's attraction to the youth compels him to remain, thus sealing his fate.
The second work in this volume, "A Man and His Dog," concerns Bauschan, a friendly mongrel pointer acquired by the Mann family in 1916. A constant companion during the author's morning walks, the loyal creature also deposited himself regularly under Mann's desk while the author worked — a gesture not always appreciated by the writer. More of a genial essay or memoir than a "story," this charming piece, including "one of the most beautiful descriptions of landscape in German literature," is reprinted here with its original preface, which is translated (most likely for the first time) into English.
For both works, Stanley Appelbaum has provided an introduction and informative notes, along with excellent new English translations on the pages facing the original German.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 20, 2012
ISBN9780486143262
Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book
Author

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, and essayist. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

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    Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog - Thomas Mann

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    INTRODUCTION

    The Author

    Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in the old Hanseatic League city of Lübeck, near the Baltic. His father was a wholesale grain merchant and a member of the municipal government. His mother, who instilled a lasting love for music and literature in the boy, had been born in Brazil, and was of mixed German and Portuguese descent. Mann, much given to mythologizing his life, stated that his own earnest, businesslike, sober, bourgeois traits were a genetic inheritance from his father, while his artistic leanings—which he sometimes characterized as irresponsible, bohemian, and akin to charlatanry—came from his mother. In some works, including Death in Venice, he even went so far as to associate artistic endeavor with illness, mental and physical. At any rate, he himself began writing poems and stories while still in his early teens.

    In 1891, Mann’s father died and the family business folded. The year after that, his mother and his three younger siblings moved to the Bavarian capital, Munich, a city of intense artistic activity. Mann joined them in 1894, after his schooling was finished. Munich was to be his home for nearly forty years, just about half of his life, and aspects of the city figure largely in some of his works, including the two included here.¹ In the next few years, he worked in clerical positions, audited university courses with a career in journalism in mind, made contact with writers, continued to write himself (he made his first sale of a story in 1894), and initiated his long acquaintance with, and love for, Italy (particularly Venice) on a few trips.

    In 1896, he wrote his breakthrough story, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (Little Herr Friedemann), which was published in 1897 in the magazine Neue Deutsche Rundschau (New German Review), a house organ of the prestigious Berlin publishing house of S. (Samuel) Fischer. The publishers requested a volume of stories and a novel. Mann began working on his first novel, Buddenbrooks. In 1898 his first volume of stories was published by S. Fischer, who remained Mann’s primary publisher until the disruptions of the Hitler era. From late 1898 to 1900, he was an editor at the avant-garde Munich literary magazine Simplicissimus. In 1900 he completed Buddenbrooks, a fictional treatment of Lübeck and his family, with one character already infected by artistic strivings; this novel, published in 1901, was to remain his most popular work, his perennial best-seller; when he received the Nobel prize in 1929—having already written Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, to name only two of his subsequent works—it was Buddenbrooks that the Nobel committee specifically cited in its award presentation!

    The first decade of the 20th Century was one of intense activity and rising fame for Mann. The bulk of his shorter stories were written and published then, as well as the major longer stories, or novellas, Tonio Kröger and Tristan (both published in 1903); his one and only play, Fiorenza (first staged in 1907); and his second novel, Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness; published 1909). During the same years, he was also establishing a household. In 1905 he married Katja Pringsheim, who came of a well-to-do, intellectual, art-loving Jewish family (her father was a mathematics professor at Munich University). Their first child, Erika—later to be an actress and writer, and wife of both the actor Gustaf Gründgens and the poet W. H. Auden—was born before 1905 had come to a close (she died in 1969). His first son, Klaus—also to be an actor and a significant novelist and autobiographer (he died a suicide in 1949)—was born in 1906. His second son, Golo, who became a historian, v/as born in 1909 (died 1994). There were to be three more children. In 1908 Mann built a country house in Bad Tölz, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, south of Munich; it was there that the family spent their summers until 1917, and it was there that the eponymous canine of A Man and His Dog was acquired.

    In 1911, feeling seedy after a lecture tour (he had been a lecturer since 1905), Mann took the exact vacation trip he ascribes to Gustav Aschenbach in Death in Venice, and began work on that story, which was completed and published the following year.² In 1912, Katja spent six months in Davos, Switzerland, undergoing treatment for tuberculosis, and Mann lived with her there for three weeks, getting the idea for what he planned as a brief, easily written story of sanatorium life. He began the story the following summer, and when it was completed and published—in 1924!—it had become his major novel, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), a conspectus of the European mentality, vastly enriched by the experience of the First World War.

    That war itself led to a long-lasting estrangement between Thomas and his elder brother Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), also an important novelist and essayist. Heinrich was a pacifist and an extreme liberal, whereas at this period Thomas was still practically a reactionary, to the extent that he thought about politics at all. Thomas, exempt from military service because of gastric and nervous problems, spent a large portion of the war years writing the extremely long essay Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man; completed and published 1918), in which he defended the war and Germany’s part in it, and espoused views that have even been interpreted as being proto-Nazi. To relax, he then composed the quiet domestic nature piece Herr und Hund (A Man and His Dog; published 1919).³

    In 1925 Mann was lavishly honored on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday; S. Fischer commissioned a novella, for which Mann once more turned to his own family, this time to its internal antagonisms. The result, the extremely sensitive Unordnung und frühes Leid (Disorder and Early Sorrow; published 1926), palliated the real situation: Erika and Klaus, brilliant and conspiratorial, had become problem children to the essentially stodgy, aging author. As already stated, Mann was the Nobel laureate for literature in 1929; no German had won the prize since Gerhart Hauptmann (one of the models for Gustav Aschenbach) in 1912. The late 1920s and early 1930s were a period of intensive lecture tours and essay writing. Mann’s principal fiction project for some twenty years, 1923 to 1943, was the massive four-volume retelling of the biblical story of Joseph; the first three volumes of Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and His Brothers) were published in 1933, 1934, and 1936, respectively. Events were to retard work on the fourth volume.

    During these same early years of the 1930s, the nonpolitical man was forced to open his eyes little by little to the threat of the Nazi movement. He had begun to speak out against it publicly in 1930 (a disturbance was arranged at that event); and his story Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician; published 1930) satirized Fascism in Italy. In 1933, after Hitler became chancellor, Heinrich Mann fled to Paris and was stripped of his German citizenship, and Thomas, after resigning from the Prussian Academy, was declared persona non grata while he was out of Germany on a trip. Warned secretly not to return, he began his years of exile, at first in France and Switzerland.

    In 1934, at the invitation of his American publisher, Alfred Knopf, Mann spent a month in the United States, and returned there briefly in 1935 and 1937. In 1936 he lost his German citizenship and was awarded Czech citizenship. In 1938, while he was on an American lecture tour, Hitler occupied Austria, and Mann decided to stay where he was. He formally emigrated, via Canada, and accepted a lecturership in the humanities at Princeton. In 1939 he lectured in the United States and a few places in Europe; then all Europe was closed to him by the outbreak of the Second World War. In the same year he completed and published the novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns). In 1940 he wrote and published the story Die vertauschten Köpfe (The Transposed Heads), finally started work on the fourth Joseph volume, and initiated a series of 25 anti-Hitler broadcasts to Germany via the BBC.

    In 1941 Mann gave up his Princeton address and moved to Pacific Palisades, a Community in Santa Monica, California (Los Angeles County), that was home to numerous German émigrés who had Hollywood contracts or contacts. In 1943 he completed and published the final part of Joseph, wrote the story Das Gesetz (The Law; a retelling of Moses’ life; published 1944), and began the most important work of his last years, the gripping novel Doktor Faustus (completed and published in 1947). In 1947 he made his first postwar trip to Europe, but still avoided Germany, which he didn’t visit until 1949. This trip caused trouble for Mann back in the United States, which was already fighting the Cold War: it was the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth, and Mann felt it incumbent on him to visit the city most closely associated with his great predecessor, Weimar—in East Germany!

    In 1951 Mann resumed work on his novel Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man), which he had left as a fragment since 1910 (it was published in 1954 with the subtitle Der Memoiren erster Teil, Part One of the Memoirs). In the same year he published the novel Der Erwählte (literally, The Chosen One; but known in English as The Holy Sinner). Meanwhile, the witch-hunt atmosphere in the United States was more than Mann could bear, and he returned definitively to Europe in 1952, with domiciles on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland. In 1953 he published the story Die Betrogene (literally, The Deceived Woman, but known in English as The Black Swan). Mann died of phlebitis in Zurich in 1955, and was buried near his home.

    His literary style is extremely careful and self-conscious, to the point of being mannered; he delights in very long, complex sentences, and his vocabulary is immense, including poetic, archaic, rare, and regional words. His personal feelings of ambivalence between the traits inherited from his father and those from his mother manifest themselves as a pervasive irony, directed both at his subjects and at himself. The nonliterary art that most influenced him was music, and his own art of composition is especially indebted to Wagner’s musical use of leitmotivs, recurring ideas, phrases, and tags that unify an entire work, adding new dimensions of meaning as they are reprised and recombined. To cite an example from this volume, the last couple of pages of A Man and His Dog, particularly the Man(n)’s final diatribe, is as dazzling in its memory parade of motifs as Siegfried’s Rhine Journey or Siegfried’s Funeral Music in Die Götterdämmerung.

    About Death in Venice

    At the beginning of 1911, Mann’s health was poor and his career development sluggish. Nothing he had published since Buddenbrooks had been received with such universal acclaim. He had planned but abandoned several long works, and had published chiefly short stories. Convinced that he needed to make a mark with a new piece that would appeal to current tastes, he poured all his mastery into Death in Venice, and circumstances obligingly came to the aid of genius.

    Mann had already been considering a story about an elderly writer’s undignified love affair, intending to use as his subject the real-life infatuation of the septuagenarian Goethe for a teenage girl, but his own vivid experiences while vacationing on Brioni and the Lido in May and June redirected his thoughts. These experiences included his learning of the death in Vienna of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, whom he had met in Munich the year before, when Mahler came there to conduct the world premiere of his Eighth Symphony (Mann had been greatly taken with Mahler as a person), and Mann’s own infatuation with a Polish boy, the Tadzio of the story.⁴ (Mann had had occasional crushes on boys and young men; one idolized school chum was the model for Hans Hansen in the extremely autobiographical Tonio Kröger.) Now he combined the traditional German love-death theme complex (Novalis, Wagner) with his own preoccupations about the Status of creative artists.

    The story was written between July 1911 and July 1912 (writing was interrupted when Mann stayed with his sick wife at Davos). Mann had intended it for S. Fischer’s magazine, by that time merely called Die Neue Rundschau, but was uncharacteristically hesitant about submitting it once it was done—it was too innovative and personal. His wife convinced him to send it in. It was first published in the October and November 1912 issues. In the same year, by special arrangement with S. Fischer, it was published by Hans von Weber in a limited luxury edition in his Hyperionverlag in Munich. Its first trade publication in book form was by S. Fischer, Berlin, in 1913 (8,000 copies, plus 60 signed copies).

    Aschenbach’s first name and physical characteristics were borrowed from Mahler; but Aschenbach has nothing else to do with Mahler in particular or composers in general, except that his maternal grandfather was a Bohemian conductor, like Mahler. There are a few traits of the German playwright and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann in Aschenbach’s makeup. Hauptmann was about the same age at the time, and was widely considered the dean of living German writers. He was of Silesian birth, and in the years just preceding 1911 he had turned away from his early Naturalism and championing of the Proletariat toward a Greek-tinged mythological vitalism. And yet, without the shadow of a doubt, Aschenbach is mostly Mann.

    Mann himself lived in Munich, owned a country house in the Bavarian Alps, had a foreign mother who brought creative talent into a bourgeois family, shared Aschenbach’s methodical working habits, and had reached a kind of impasse in his writing. The astute critic’s characterization of Aschenbach’s weakling heroes in the story had been made, word for word, about Mann’s protagonists. All four books cited as the chief works of Aschenbach’s maturity, with the very same titles, had been planned and then abandoned by Mann himself. Mann really wrote an elegant brief article while on the Lido beach, just as Aschenbach does, and many of the incidents related actually occurred, included the near-departure from Venice and the rowdy show at the Hôtel des Bains. Naturally Mann preserved his decorum and his wits vis-à-vis Tadzio, or we would never have had the story. And the cholera outbreak was in Palermo, not Venice. (Nor was Mann ever made a nobleman by a German ruler.)

    Why did Mann choose Greek mythology and philosophy as the allover symbolic frame of reference for the story? None of Aschenbach’s books are about the ancient world, and Venice first attained importance only in Byzantine and medieval times. The probable answer is threefold: (1) Aschenbach is by this time a classic writer (in German literary history, classicism is strongly associated with Greco-Roman influence). He is said to represent the European spirit (in the view of many, ancient Greece is the fountainhead of that spirit). In the story he is made to recollect what he learned about Greece in school. (2) The Italian surroundings reminded Mann of the ancient high civilizations of Europe, which were inseparable from the Mediterranean. (3) Since his story concerned a man’s passion for a boy, Mann’s thoughts were irresistibly drawn to the European culture in which pederasty was an accepted social practice, extensively reflected in literature.

    Although Mann strove to appear as a paragon of erudition, archival evidence indicates that it was only after deciding to use Greek mythology and philosophy that he boned up on it, consulting traceable German-language translations and compendia. At any rate, it is important to note that his classicism is seen through the prism of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche.

    Absolutely essential to one’s understanding of the story is the distinction drawn by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) between what he saw as two polar strands of the Greek religious and creative experience: the Apollonian strand, with the sun god Apollo standing for the bright, dignified side of human nature and endeavor (optimism, rationalism, civic pride, noble forms of worship—reflected in such literary forms as the Homeric epics and Socratic philosophy), and the Dionysian strand, with the wine god Dionysus standing for the dark, rebellious recesses of the soul (intoxication, antisocial dominance of the emotions, savage chthonic religion—reflected in the heady art of music and the Athenian tragic drama, which was originally a musical form). Aschenbach has developed into a thorough, official Apollonian; his natural enemy is Dionysus the dissolver, symbolized in the story by the four grotesque characters who prophetically cross his path (the man in the Munich cemetery, the superannuated dandy on the ship from Pola, the surly gondolier who takes him directly to the Lido, and the leader of the street musicians).

    Explanations of specific classical references are provided in the fifty footnotes to the translation, which also deal with topography in Munich and Venice, and assorted other matter.

    About A Man and His Dog

    The title of the second (1930) translation into English of this work has become so well known that it has been retained here for the sake of recognition, but there are several objections to it. For one thing, it conveys a maudlin message, reminiscent of a boy and his dog. But, more seriously, it fails to convey the multiple connotations of Herr, particularly that of (lord and) master; and much of the work is concerned with a jockeying for mastery between the two principal characters. (In the duck-hunter episode near the end, the connotation dignified gentleman is also important.) Were it not for the dead hand of the past, the work would have been titled Master and Dog, or A Dog and His Master, in this volume.

    In both German- and English-speaking lands, the work is always included in collections of stories—but is it one? The term Erzählung, generally applied in German to Mann’s stories and novellas, basically means narrative, and is loose enough to fit; but to English-speaking readers, story usually implies a piece of fiction, preferably with a plot (which is not the case with A Man and His Dog), and the work would seem to be rather a memoir or a genial essay.

    Mann started to write it in March 1918, only days after completing the massive, and relatively uncongenial, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. He wanted to try something easy and light, and to practice the art of narrative again before returning to work on The Magic Mountain. His labors were interrupted by the necessity to read the proofs of Reflections, but he finished A Man and His Dog in October. In his 1932 recounting of his childhood and adolescence, Kind dieser Zeit (A Child of This Era), Mann’s son Klaus reported: Sometimes we would have portions of the story read aloud to us, and it was oddly flattering and charming to rediscover things that were, after all, part of our everyday life stylized in such literary elegance.

    Although the work was ultimately intended for S. Fischer, Mann’s regular publisher in Berlin, it was first published by Knorr & Hirth in Munich, in April 1919, in a special edition of 120 copies, the proceeds going to the German Writers Support Fund, an organization that aided writers impoverished by the war and the subsequent revolutions that swept away all German monarchs. This edition was illustrated, in the style of scissor-cut silhouettes, by the eminent graphic artist Emil Preetorius (1883–1973), with whom Mann had been familiar since 1910.⁶ The edition also featured a preface that has never been reprinted along with any edition of the story, either in German or in English. It is translated here, most likely for the first time in English, following this Introduction. It has not been placed directly before the story text because, though it provides interesting information about the story—it is the only source that explains the dogs unusual name!—it is really a preface to the very special edition in which it appeared. (Even the huge Fischer collected-works edition of 1960 prints it in an essay volume, not in the story volume.)

    The trade publication, by S. Fischer, which appeared around Christmas of 1919, was called Herr und Hund. Gesang des Kindchens. Zwei Idyllen (A Man and His Dog. Song about the Infant. Two Idylls), because it also included the Gesang, which Mann wrote between the autumn of 1918 and early 1919. This work, also included as an Erzählung in German editions of Mann, is even less of a story, since, in addition to being plotless nonfiction, it is in verse (hexameters)! Prompted by his delirious joy at the birth of his daughter Elisabeth (his fifth child, but the first in eight years),⁷ Mann described his emotions, and the baptism ceremony, in poetry, for which he was suited neither temperamentally nor technically.

    A Man and His Dog is vitally linked to the house in which Mann was then living, and to its surroundings. From 1910 to 1914 he occupied a house on the east edge of Munich, in the neighborhood known as Herzogpark, across the Isar from the municipal park called the Englischer Garten. (He was thus on the right, or eastern, bank of the river.) The Isar, which rises in the Tyrol and eventually empties into the Danube, runs through the eastern end of Munich in a northeasterly direction (thus, downstream is basically to the north). Mann loved the river, whose roaring he called a substitute for the surf of the Baltic, his native sea. In 1912 he examined a new site, not very far away, in the Bogenhausen neighborhood, that was being offered by real-estate developers; in 1913 he bought a lot there and built a commodious new villa, which he moved into in 1914.

    This new house was the last one he occupied in Munich. Number 1 on Poschingerstrasse, it was the house nearest to the river. In the postwar revolutionary turmoil of early 1919, when Munich was governed by councils that emulated Bolshevik soviets, the house was saved from looting by the efforts of the radical playwright Ernst Toller.⁸ It was confiscated by the Nazis in 1933 and gutted during the Second World War. The adjacent woodlands and meadows are now built over and covered with private homes.

    The collie that was Bauschan’s predecessor was named Motz, not Percy or Perceval, as Mann calls him in the story (probably because he had been the model for the dog of that name in his 1909 novel Royal Highness). Motz had been with the Manns for ten years when he died in 1915. The name Bauschan is explained in the preface to the special first edition, and in the new footnote to that preface; it may have already been familiar to the entire Mann family before the dog was bought, because in his above-mentioned memoir Klaus refers to a King Bauschan as an imaginary character in his childhood dramatic performances.⁹ The mongrel pointer was purchased in the summer of 1916 at Bad Tölz, where Mann had a country home. Unfortunately, he died in January 1920, within a month of the first trade publication of the work in which he was immortalized; he was destroyed after contracting distemper and pneumonia. Mann either had jinxed him by boasting of his unassailably robust Constitution, or (possibly) had killed him by degrees by the beatings and the exposure to the frost that he complacently describes.

    Just as Mann had boned up on Greek mythology and philosophy for Death in Venice, he gave himself a crash course in botany for A Man and His Dog. His thoughts had already been turned to nature in 1917, when he first read works by Adalbert Stifter, the great Austrian writer (1805–1868), after whom one of the unfinished streets in the story is named. But in a letter of June 1918 Mann confessed that the only trees he knew by name as yet were the ash and the birch. Again his research paid off, and A Man and His Dog has been called one of the most beautiful descriptions of landscape in German literature.

    This was also one of the first of Mann ’s pieces to become familiar to the English-speaking world. Tonio Kröger had been published in English in 1914; Royal Highness, in 1916; and Herr und Hund was translated, as Bashan and I, in 1923. When Mann attended a meeting of the PEN Club, an international writers’ association, in London in 1924, the president of the club, the eminent English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, expressed his delight in the story. Anglo-Saxon pet lovers were generally delighted with it. If they had actually read the parts that depicted Mann’s cruelty (sometimes he was the same kind of master as Simon Legree), they were unconcerned.

    1. For details, see the section on A Man and His Dog later in this Introduction, and specific footnotes to the translations.

    2. Numerous details about the genesis and publication history of that most significant of Mann’s novellas and stories are furnished in the next section of this Introduction.

    3. Details are given in the third and final section of this Introduction.

    4. Tadzio is a pet name for Tadeusz. In direct address (as when Tadzio is called to on the beach) the Polish form is Tadziu (hence the uadzio) Moes. His stocky, dark-haired friend (the Jaschu of the story) actually was named Janek.

    5. Prior to the First World War, within the German Empire there were still several semiautonomous rulers of varying rank, chief of whom was the King of Bavaria.

    6. In that year Mann wrote a review of illustrations Preetorius had done for a work published by Hans von Weber, who was later to publish the first book edition of Death in Venice. While Mann was writing A Man and His Dog, Preetorius was busy with illustrations for the hundredth edition of Buddenbrooks. The two men corresponded as long as Mann lived.

    7. Elisabeth was also to be the model for the little girl in Disorder and Early Sorrow (1926).

    8. Only a few discreet references in A Man and His Dog indicate the privations that the Mann family, in common with most Germans, suffered during the war and its protracted aftermath. Food and clothing were scarce, and many ersatz products had to be used. Mann never mentions at all another serious problem he had in 1919, when he prosecuted a former housemaid for pilfering. She was acquitted (by then the revolution had taken place, and the lower classes were temporarily in the ascendant), and the Mann family lived in fear of lynching or of her private revenge. 9. Oddly, in the first two English translations of the story, the dog is called Bashan, as if he were a region of the Holy Land. In a 1999 translation he is called Baushan, as if the c in the German were simply too horrific for an English reader to contemplate.

    MANN’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST BOOK EDITION OF A MAN AND HIS DOG

    In the pages that follow, the subject is exclusively my dog Bauschan; for the sake of honesty, let everyone be notified of this expressly in advance, so that no one will be able to complain later that his expectations were disappointed, and anyone who believes that to occupy himself with such a trivial subject is beneath his intellectual dignity can toss these leaves aside again immediately without losing time he is unable to recover. Let the reader not be deceived by the festive care that has been taken with the physical appearance of the book! Because he will not find any lofty problems of ethics discussed in it, nor any significant characters analyzed in it, let alone any attempts at solving social questions. Nor is it a case of tying and untying the knot of a passionate intrigue for the cathartic oppression and pleasurable release of the reader. The author is concerned merely with impressing forcefully on the reader’s consciousness the figure of that honest, nimble creature and friend, endowed with so much beautiful dignity in spite of his humility, by depicting him both in repose and in action; the illustrator, too, admits to being both willing and obligated to devote all the accuracy and merriment of his talent on this same modest figure, without setting higher goals for his ambition in this instance. And so it comes about that two noted masters join forces for the sole purpose of erecting a costly and enduring monument to a scarcely renowned bit of life, a bit of life endowed with a transitory heartbeat, which doesn’t even belong to the human race, and which—just like life in general, most or all of the time—is far from appreciating, or even suspecting, the enviable gift being made to it. These two masters are set upon dedicating all their seriousness and industry to this task: an agreement that unfortunately will scarcely fail to incur the fault-finders’ label of senselessness and idle foolishness, as if more urgent and significant matters were thereby being cheated of their rights and shamelessly abused. But the conscience of the writer and the illustrator is clear, at least to the extent that they can assure the reader that they reached their agreement with no ulterior motive, but solely for its own sake and the sake of its heartwarming subject, which, as al-ready mentioned, answers to the name of Bauschan, and comes running when he hears it.

    With regard to that name, it’s his real one, honest and truly, the one he bears in life and the sound of which arouses his greatest, most alert, and most active attention: in fact, sets his entire musculature, from his floppy ears to his stumpy tail, into stormy motion. We absolutely refuse to lend him a nom de plume or nom de guerre in this book, and we renounce all authorial coyness. We are sketching a portrait and setting beneath it the plain and simple name of its model, that is, Bauschan.

    It has a humorous, Lower-Saxon sound, and a childhood memory came into play when he was named: there was a farm dog of that name in a charming Low German novel.¹ The etymology is disputed, but probably a folksy corruption of Bastian—that is, Sebastian—is involved. So, according to that assumption regarding origins, the name that adorns our hero would be that of the most graciously courageous among all martyrs and saints; though this certainly wasn’t originally planned premeditatedly, and certainly not with any intention of arousing pathos, nevertheless the author subsequently hasn’t got the slightest objection to it.

    1. Fritz Reuter’s Ut mine Stromtid (From My Farming Days), published 1862–64. This book, a favorite of Mann’s, was read to him by his mother when he was a child.

    Der Tod in Venedig

    Death in Venice

    DER TOD IN VENEDIG

    Erstes Kapitel

    Gustav Aschenbach oder von Aschenbach, wie seit seinem fünfzigsten Geburtstag amtlich sein Name lautete, hatte an einem Frühlingsnachmittag des Jahres 19.., das unserem Kontinent monatelang eine so gefahrdrohende Miene zeigte, von seiner Wohnung in der Prinzregentenstraße zu München aus allein einen weiteren Spaziergang unternommen. Überreizt von der schwierigen und gefährlichen, eben jetzt eine höchste Behutsamkeit, Umsicht, Eindringlichkeit und Genauigkeit des Willens erfordernden Arbeit der Vormittagsstunden, hatte der Schriftsteller dem Fortschwingen des produzierenden Triebwerkes in seinem Innern, jenem »motus animi continuus«, worin nach Cicero das Wesen der Beredsamkeit besteht, auch nach der Mittagsmahlzeit nicht Einhalt zu tun vermocht und den entlastenden Schlummer nicht gefunden, der ihm, bei zunehmender Abnutzbarkeit seiner Kräfte, einmal untertags so nötig war. So hatte er bald nach dem Tee das Freie gesucht, in der Hoffnung, daß Luft und Bewegung ihn wiederherstellen und ihm zu einem ersprießlichen Abend verhelfen würden.

    Es war Anfang Mai und, nach naßkalten Wochen, ein falscher Hochsommer eingefallen. Der Englische Garten, obgleich nur erst zart belaubt, war dumpfig wie im August und in der Nähe der Stadt voller Wagen und Spaziergänger gewesen. Beim Aumeister, wohin stillere und stillere Wege ihn geführt, hatte Aschenbach eine kleine Weile den volkstümlich belebten Wirtsgarten überblickt, an dessen

    DEATH IN VENICE

    First Chapter

    Gustav Aschenbach (or von Aschenbach, as his name read officially since his fiftieth birthday), on a spring afternoon of that year 19—which for months posed such a threat to our continent,¹ had left his apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse² in Munich and had gone for a rather long walk all alone. Overstrained by the difficult and dangerous labor of the morning hours, which precisely at this moment called for extreme circumspection, discretion, forcefulness, and exactitude of the will, even after the noon meal the writer had been unable to restrain the continued operation of the productive machinery within him—that motus animi continuus³ in which, according to Cicero, the nature of eloquence consists—and had not found the relieving slumber that, with the increasing tendency of his strength to wear out, was so necessary to him once in the course of the day And so, soon after tea, he had sought the outdoors, in hopes that the fresh air and activity would restore him and help him have a profitable evening.

    It was the beginning of May and, after weeks of cold and damp, a spurious midsummer had set in. The English Garden,⁴ although its trees still bore only a few leaves, had been as muggy as in August, and in the vicinity of the city it had been full of carriages and strolling people. At the Aumeister,⁵ to which increasingly quiet paths had led him, Aschenbach had for a short while glanced at the crowd in that populur outdoor restaurant, alongside which several fiacres and

    1. The year is 1911; the crisis is the Second Moroccan affair, in which Germany sent a warship to the Mediterranean in response to French occupation of the cities of Fez and Rabat.

    2. An elegant thoroughfare of parks, museums, and embassies running from the royal palace gardens eastward to the river Isar and beyond.

    3. A constant agitation of the mind. The source of the phrase is apparently not Cicero, but Flaubert.

    4. The Englischer Garten is a large park immediately to the north of the western end of the Prinzregentenstrasse.

    5. A foresters house, with restaurant, within the English Garden.

    Rand einige Droschken und Equipagen hielten, hatte von dort bei sinkender Sonne seinen Heimweg außerhalb des Parks über die offene Flur genommen und erwartete, da er sich müde fühlte und über Föhring Gewitter drohte, am Nördlichen Friedhof die Tram, die ihn in gerader Linie zur Stadt zurückbringen sollte.

    Zufällig fand er den Halteplatz und seine Umgebung von Menschen leer. Weder auf der gepflasterten Ungererstraße, deren Schienengeleise sich einsam gleißend gegen Schwabing erstreckten, noch auf der Föhringer Chaussee war ein Fuhrwerk zu sehen; hinter den Zäunen der Steinmetzereien, wo zu Kauf stehende Kreuze, Gedächtnistafeln und Monumente ein zweites, unbehaustes Gräberfeld bilden, regte sich nichts, und das byzantinische Bauwerk der Aussegnungshalle gegenüber lag schweigend im Abglanz des scheidenden Tages. Ihre Stirnseite, mit griechischen Kreuzen und hieratischen Schildereien in lichten Farben geschmückt, weist überdies symmetrisch angeordnete Inschriften in Goldlettern auf, ausgewählte, das jenseitige Leben betreffende Schriftworte, wie etwa: »Sie gehen ein in die Wohnung Gottes« oder: »Das ewige Licht leuchte ihnen«; und der Wartende hatte während einiger Minuten eine ernste Zerstreuung darin gefunden, die Formeln abzulesen und sein geistiges Auge in ihrer durchscheinenden Mystik sich verlieren zu lassen, als er, aus seinen Träumereien zurückkehrend, im Portikus, oberhalb der beiden apokalyptischen Tiere, welche die Freitreppe bewachen, einen Mann bemerkte, dessen nicht ganz gewöhnliche Erscheinung seinen Gedanken eine völlig andere Richtung gab.

    Ob er nun aus dem Inneren der Halle durch das bronzene Tor hervorgetreten oder von außen unversehens heran und hinauf gelangt war, blieb ungewiß. Aschenbach, ohne sich sonderlich in die Frage zu vertiefen, neigte zur ersteren Annahme. Mäßig hochgewachsen, mager, bartlos und auffallend stumpfnäsig, gehörte der Mann zum rothaarigen Typ und besaß dessen milchige und sommersprossige Haut. Offenbar war er durchaus nicht bajuwarischen Schlages: wie denn wenigstens der breit und gerade gerandete Basthut, der ihm den Kopf bedeckte, seinem Aussehen ein Gepräge des Fremdländischen und Weitherkommenden verlieh. Freilich trug er dazu den landesüblichen Rucksack um die Schultern geschnallt, einen gelblichen Gurtanzug aus Lodenstoff, wie es

    private carriages were stationed; from there, as the sun was setting, he had taken a homeward route outside the park across the open meadow; and now, since he felt tired and a storm was threatening over Föhring,⁶ he was waiting at the Northern Cemetery⁷ for the streetcar that would bring him directly back to the city.

    By chance he found the stop and its surroundings free of people. Neither on the paved Ungererstrasse, whose tracks stretched lonely and gleaming toward Schwabing,⁸ nor on the Föhringer Chaussee, was any conveyance to be seen; behind the fences of the stonecutters’ establishments, where the crosses, memorial tablets, and monuments available for sale constitute a second, unpopulated burial place, nothing was stirring; and the Hall of Last Rites opposite, with its Byzantine-style architecture, lay silent in the reflected glow of the departing day. Its facade, adorned with Greek crosses and hieratic paintings in bright colors, also features symmetrically arranged inscriptions in gold lettering, selected religious phrases concerning the life beyond, such as They are entering into the dwelling place of God or May the eternal light shine for them; and for a few minutes, as he waited there, he had found some serious amusement in reading off these formulas and allowing his minds eye to become absorbed in their diaphanous mysticism—when, Coming out of his

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