On May 18 of 1911, Mann read the obituary for composer Gustav Mahler, who had died at the age of fifty Mann based Aschenbach’s facial features on Mahler’s. Mann had been on an island near Venice in 1905 during a cholera outbreak, and he later traveled to the city in May 1911, because, like his character Gustav von Aschenbach, he was exhausted by a difficult stage in his writing and felt the need for escape. Largely inspired by actual events in the life of its author. Literature of the era also focused to a large extent on issues of homoeroticism: like Death in Venice, Dorian Gray uses a fictional character to serve as a mask for its own homosexual author Andre Gide’s novel The Immoralist (1902) represents the extreme identity crisis experienced by many European homosexual artists of the time. At the turn of the century, many European writers expressed a biting awareness of cultural and personal decadence, and social and moral decline This book reflects many of the most vital ideas discussed in literature during the time of its composition. In the film, Visconti loses the philosophical content of the Thomas Mann work. Some found it depressing, its style tiresome – why can’t it get to the point without all this long-winded Greek stuff? Or is the Greek stuff a justification for the lust?
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