In 1933, when the Nazis completed their takeover of Germany, Mann went into exile, and during the Second World War, he became a U.S. citizen. He completed what is probably his most complex novel, Doctor Faustus, in 1947. Mann spent the last years of his life in Switzerland, as one of the two great German-language novelists of the century, the other being the Czech Franz Kafka. Throughout his life, Mann was fascinated by the workings of imagination as it transforms experience. His Death in Venice explores the nature of the creative mind and the relationship between the conscious artist and his or her unconscious drives, focusing in particular on a member of the German upper middle class.
Golden age of the upper middle class. The action of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice takes place a few years before World War I broke out in August 1914. At the time, as far as most of Europe was concerned, there had been a century of peace, more or less. No major conflict involving all the European powers had taken place since the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the previous century.
This is a free page. This page contains 193 words. This
article contains 5,147 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Death in Venice Access Pass.
