ON TADZIO, THE ADORABLE TEENAGER, AND T. MANN'S WORKS

Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912) is so often presented as the perfect novel and a rich source of examples for aesthetic studies worldwide, with the adorable Tadzio serving as an archetype of classic beauty, having the eternal Mademoiselle of the seas as an ideal scenery... But the kind of approach that most academics usually do to it worries me much, since we all know it was an autobiographic novel. In fact, well, it's no secret that the real Tadzio (Wladyslaw Moes) was just 11 years old and Mann met him in Venice, hotel De Baignes, while staying there in 1911 with his wife and brother.

To tell the truth, that city of Venice, its disease, can be interpreted as a metaphor of the empire's decadence, the old Germany of those times, rotten and socially hill. Mann tries to use the beauty of Tadzio, the "pure" Arian, to save him from that, but he is not well succeeded because that adoration is part of what is rotten. In my perspective, Mann's sexuality (a preference much for young men, it seems, more than a mere attraction to men) explains much about his defense of nazism. His compassion by Hitler and his defense of nationalism, romanticism and the bourgeois ideal are a defense from facing and revealing himself at the same time. Inclusively his racism has its origin in the belief that his homosexuality was genetic, as Mann's mother had "exotic" ascendance: brazilian, portuguese and native american, and that miscegenation was associated by the hypocrites of those times with an exacerbated and dangerous sensuality. I'm planning to write a more extensive article on Helsinki's Gallery Magazine about how Mann may have taken advantage of his young love "objects'" achievements and abilities to develop his own work, the lasting hypocrisy and silence of academics on this issue, the reasons for his troubled relationship with his brother Heinrich, Goethe's works and their influence on Mann, and Death in Venice's symbolism and rationalizations (in terms of the book's content).