Surm Veneetsias

The protagonist of one of Mann's most famous works, Death in Venice (1912), is the respected but aging Professor von Achenbach. The German professor is on his way to Venice for a vacation, when he is attracted to a guest at a comfortable hotel. Tadzio, a handsome young man of Polish origin, becomes the old Achenbach's obsession for the entire vacation. Although he is heterosexual and married, the professor is deeply moved by the boy's unusual beauty, and as a result, he begins to look more and more into his past to find an explanation for such an unusual and passionate feeling. Death in Venice is a moving story about the struggle between human passions and rational norms of behavior. Mann presents the reader with a number of symbolic doubts and then offers his own destructive final solution.

German-born writer Paul Thomas Mann (1875–1955) is best known for his symbolic, epic, and often ironic works. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Like the book's protagonist, Professor Achenbach, Thomas Mann himself struggled with his own sexual identity. He was married and had six children.