The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.
Illustrated portrait of Gustav von Aschenbach

A character in Death in Venice

Gustav von Aschenbach

A famous German writer whose strict public identity collapses during a holiday he can no longer control.

What they want

To recover a feeling of beauty and freedom without surrendering his image of himself as a controlled, honorable artist.

The book

Cover of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Death in VeniceThomas Mann, 1912

A disciplined writer goes to Venice for rest and stays while desire and disease strip away his control.

View the book

At a glance

Age
Early fifties
Home
Munich
Profession
Writer
Family status
Widower with an adult daughter

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Gustav von Aschenbach is a widowed German writer in his early fifties. He has earned public honors through serious books and relentless discipline.

He treats self-control as the source of both good art and moral worth. Exhaustion therefore appears to him as a weakness to overcome rather than useful information about his limits.

In Venice, he turns an obsession with a child into a private theory about beauty. The narration stays close enough to his mind for readers to hear the theory and far enough away for them to see the conduct it conceals.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • CelebratedHis books and official honor have made him a public example of disciplined achievement.
  • MethodicalHe works through routine and effort rather than waiting for easy inspiration.
  • ExhaustedThe first urge to travel comes after years of forcing himself onward.
  • Highly educatedClassical art and philosophy supply the language through which he understands experience.
  • Self-deceivingHe gives beautiful names to actions he would judge more plainly in someone else.
  • Increasingly passiveHe recognizes each danger but keeps allowing desire and circumstance to choose for him.
Aschenbach's silence and deathHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

After learning the truth about cholera, Aschenbach does not warn Tadzio's family because he wants them to stay. He later dyes his hair and wears cosmetics to appear younger.

Already ill, he watches Tadzio from a beach chair and dies. His final vision cannot repair the fact that he chose proximity over the family's safety.

If you like Death in Venice

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Thomas Mann

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Albert Camus

    Albert Camus

    French Algerian novelist, essayist, journalist and playwright who used the absurd and revolt to ask how people should live without false consolation.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Simone de Beauvoir

    Simone de Beauvoir

    French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.

    View author
Back to Death in Venice