Cholera in Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’

The Asiatic cholera in Death in Venice, like tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain , symbolises the decadence of the upper class in Europe before its destruction in World War I, and the Venetian Hotel des Bains corresponds to the luxurious Swiss sanatorium in the later novel.  Gustav von Aschenbach’s forbidden and pathological love for the young Tadzio, the physical embodiment of the aesthetic ideal in his writing, runs parallel to the contagion of the cholera, prevents him from leaving Venice and leads to his death.  Ideal beauty may be perceived but not possessed, and the threat of death makes it even more precious. 1

In Disease (2013), Mary Dobson describes the Asiatic origin and hideous effects of the contagion: “In the 19th century, pandemics of cholera, an extremely unpleasant and potentially fatal disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholera , spread out from the Ganges Delta in the Indian subcontinent when food or water became contaminated with fecal matter.  The victims were convulsed with pain, and suffered violent vomiting and uncontrollable watery diarrhoea.  If severe dehydration was not treated, many victims turned blue and died within a short time.  Its sudden onslaught and the haste with which death followed was matched by its foul symptoms and humiliating stench.”  For aesthetic reasons, Mann had to sanitise the disgusting effects of the disease and could not show the refined Aschenbach infected and covered in excrement. 

Aschenbach notices but ignores the disastrous signs of cholera that gradually emerge throughout the novella.  While still in Munich he has a terrifying vision, like an hallucination or seizure—of banyan trees, long-legged birds and savage beasts ready to spring—which suggests the tropical source of the disease.  Mann’s overripe prose evokes the noxious scene and the silence imposed by the oppressive jungle canopy:

He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank—a kind of primeval wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels.  Hairy palm-trunks rose near and far out of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom.  There were trees, mis-shapen as a dream, that dropped their naked roots straight through the air into the ground or into water that was stagnant and shadowy and glassy-green, where mammoth milk-white blossoms floated, and strange high-shouldered birds with curious bills stood gazing sidewise without sound or stir.  Among the knotted joints of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger gleamed—and he felt his heart throb with terror, yet with a longing inexplicable.

Instead of frightening and discouraging Aschenbach, the reeking monstrous vision intensifies his perverse and self-destructive urge to travel.

Aschenbach’s disturbing vision, with the same bamboo thickets and crouching tiger, recurs in Venice.  Mann accurately portrays the specific origin and spread of the cholera from India and along the Mediterranean coast from Syria to southern Italy, France and Spain.  Instead of bringing prosperous trade along the old caravan routes, it brings pestilence:

For the past several years Asiatic cholera had shown a strong tendency to spread.  Its source was the hot, moist swamps of the delta of the Ganges, where it bred in the mephitic air of that primitive island-jungle, among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches, where life of every sort flourishes in rankest abundance, and only man avoids the spot.  Thence the pestilence had spread throughout Hindustan, raging with great violence; moved eastward to China, westward to Afghanistan and Persia; following the great caravan routes, it brought terror to Astrakhan, terror to Moscow.  Even while Europe trembled lest the spectre be seen striding westward across country, it was carried by sea from Syrian ports and appeared simultaneously at several points on the Mediterranean littoral; raised its head in Toulon and Málaga, Palermo and Naples, and soon got a firm hold in Calabria and Apulia.

(Trying to halt the pestilence, Dr. Adrien Proust, Marcel’s father, championed the cordon sanitaire and wrote a book about it: La défense de l’Europe contre le choléra, 1892.)

Venice, a port city cobwebbed with fetid canals, was especially vulnerable to the disease that soon spread northeast from Naples.  Mann incrementally reveals the fatal signs that begin to contaminate the city.  Achenbach notes the stagnant, rotten, foul smells of the lagoons; the sickly sweetish odor of the carbolic germicide that is a feeble placebo against the advancing contagion.  He’s finally forced to face the ugly truth when, on water and land, “the horrible vibrions were found on the same day in two bodies: the emaciated, blackened corpses of a bargee and a woman who kept a green-grocer’s shop.”  Despite this horrific evidence, “the Venetian authorities published a statement to the effect that the state of the city’s health had never been better.”  An Englishman in a travel bureau warns Aschenbach, “You would do well to leave today instead of tomorrow.  The blockade cannot be more than a few days off.”

The local government continued to keep its evil secret.  Thomas Rütten’s exhaustively researched and valuable article on the historical cholera epidemic in Venice ( Gesnerus , 66:2, 2009) explains that “it was in the authorities’ interest to leave visitors labouring under the illusion that Venice continued to be hermetically sealed off from the outside threat of infection.”  The Italian government, sending orders from Rome, preferred to have both residents and visitors die rather than wreck the tourist industry in Venice, and continued to encourage travellers to enjoy the healthy atmosphere of their infected city.  The sanitary inspector, who greets Aschenbach’s ship when it arrives from Pola across the Adriatic, merely provides false reassurance that everything is safe and under control.  The unlicensed gondolier who rows the newly-arrived Aschenbach to the wrong destination and refuses his fee, says “the signore will pay” and warns that he will pay with his life.

Aschenbach stares discreetly at his beloved Tadzio during every lavish meal at the Hotel des Bains.  But he does not try to make personal contact with the 14-year-old Polish boy, who might spoil his perfect illusion.  When he first sees Tadzio he idealizes him as a naked Classical figure and godlike work of art: “He noticed with astonishment the lad’s perfect beauty.  His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture—pale, with sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.  Yet with all this chaste perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that the observer thought he had never seen, either in nature or art, anything so utterly happy and consummate.”

Though he doesn’t want to talk to Tadzio, he pursues him through the narrow and unclean passages of the city, and is thrilled when Tadzio recognizes him, halts and flirtatiously looks back at him.  Aschenbach’s mad pursuit and futile struggle to escape signals his overwhelming obsession.  Despite his adoration, he relishes Tadzio’s unhealthy teeth, his delicate and sickly appearance.  As Edgar Poe observed, “There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”  Aschenbach  thinks, “He will most likely not live to grow old,” and perversely wants the boy to die at the height of his godlike beauty and classic serenity, before anyone else can fall in love with him and before he is ravaged by old age and decay.

Aschenbach, though married and with a daughter, becomes aware of his love for Tadzio at the same time that he becomes aware of the raging cholera.  Relishing the thought of being trapped in the town with Tadzio and risking death, he chooses to remain in Venice, whose canals seem to resemble the rivers of Hades.  (In Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera , 1985, the contagion also symbolises both disease and passion.)

In Death in Venice, the dream and nightmare visions of ancient Greece represent Tadzio before and after the cholera.  This blend of the real and the surreal foreshadows Hans Castorp’s vision in the “Snow” chapter of The Magic Mountain and Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the Devil in Doctor Faustus .  In the Platonic dialogue Aschenbach idealises himself as the aged Socrates, transcending the physical but giving covert sexual tuition to Phaedrus, his youthful, enthusiastic and naïve pupil.  He discourses “upon the nature of virtue and desire, wooing him with insinuating wit and charming turns of phrase . . . and of the fear and reverence felt by the noble soul when he beholds a godlike face or a form which is a good image of beauty.”  

In Aschenbach’s idyllic dream-vision Tadzio inspires an “extravagant gush of emotional intoxication”, while the lonely, ecstatic author lets the splendour of the god shine on him and, with closed eyes, allows the glorious aura to kiss his lids.  As with Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, except for one night in The Magic Mountain , “there can be no relation more strange, more critical, than that between two beings who know each other only with their eyes . . . yet feel constrained to act as strangers.”  As John Donne wrote in “The Ecstasy,” “Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread / Our eyes upon one double string.”

The dignified Aschenbach is degraded by the disease; Tadzio is degraded by an older bully who pushes his face into the sand on the Lido beach.  As Aschenbach becomes infected by the cholera, his idealised vision of his love for Tadzio turns into a disgusting nightmare, a primitive orgy with horrific sounds and smells, with promiscuous embraces that reveal his crudest instincts and “the bestial degradation of his fall”. In this vertiginous vision, “His senses reeled in the steam of panting bodies, the acrid stench from the goats, the odour as of stagnant waters—and another, too familiar smell—wounds, uncleanness, and disease.  His heart throbbed to the drums, his brain reeled, a blind rage seized him, a whirling lust, he craved with all his soul to join the ring that formed about the obscene symbol of the godhead”—the erect phallus.

Thomas Rütten concludes that in this Liebestod of passion and extinction, Mann had a “preternatural insightfulness into an otherwise murky affair that was marked by rumours, speculations and denials. . . . The novella’s portrayal of cholera is not only plausible and naturalistic throughout, but also absolutely consistent with both medical and historical facts.”  Mann’s description of Aschenbach’s love for Tadzio in the context of cholera is one of his supreme artistic achievements.

1. Gustave Aschenbach’s name may be an ironic reference to Gustavus Adolphus, the heroic 17th-century Swedish soldier and king.  Tadzio’s name, a variant of Thaddeus, may be an ironic reference to the hero of the Polish epic poem Pan Tadeusz,1835.

Jeffrey Meyers has published chapters on Mann in Painting and the Novel (1975) and Disease and the Novel (1985), a book Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014) and 47 articles about him.  Gabriele Hollander at the Mann Archive in Zurich gave valuable help.

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