SOURCE: Schmidgall, Gary. “Death in Venice, Life in Zurich: Mann's Late ‘Something for the Heart’.” Southwest Review 82 (summer 1997): 293-324.

In the following essay, Schmidgall asserts that Death in Venice was inspired by Mann's homoerotic attachments to younger men, which continued until the end of his life.

I

In May 1932, twenty years after writing one of the most widely admired short novels of the century, Thomas Mann was 56, about the same age as his protagonist in Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach, who travels south from Munich under a heavy weight of weltschmerz, falls in love, and a few weeks later succumbs—so the world thinks—to cholera. Venice was again on Mann's mind, for his daughter Erika and son Klaus were paying a visit to the dubious city.

Perhaps because it was exactly the season of his own poignant vacation experiences of 1911 that had produced Death in Venice...