The kind of analogy which Visconti draws in [The Damned] between the history of the von Essenbecks and the rise of Nazism is by no means without precedent in literature. As artists, Visconti and Mann [particularly in his novel Buddenbrooks] have more than a little in common. The symbolic structure of Mann's novels in which 'characters and situations take on a representative symbolic character' incorporating a 'general human predicament' goes hand in hand with a minute attention to naturalistic detail. Both Mann and Visconti are stylists without being mere aesthetes. Mann's 'static and reflective' language and the distancing he achieves through his intrusion as a narrator might be said to be paralleled by Visconti's slow-moving camera which dwells on the remarkable textures and grouping he achieves in his work and which sometimes takes on an independent life of its own. In The Damned, for instance, during the scene...