SOURCE: Rotkin, Charlotte. “Form and Function: The Art and Architecture of Death in Venice.” Midwest Quarterly 29, no. 4 (summer 1988): 497-505.

In the following essay, Rotkin considers a series of polarities in Mann's life and work and maintains that Death in Venice “reveals Mann's abiding concern with the artist's responsibility regarding the form and function that his life and art assume.”

In the voluminous canon of Thomas Mann's work, several autobiographical themes recur. Of primacy is the artist's struggle for control over antagonistic forces that compete for his loyalty. Mann's involvement with polarities began during his formative years in the medieval town of Lubeck. During childhood, Mann was privy to the conflict between two rival forces, the mercantile aspirations of his German father and the bohemian inclinations of his West Indian and Portuguese mother. Tension between the opposing familial factions of the bourgeois and the romantic exerted a profound influence...