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Death in Venice is Thomas Mann\\u2019s most famous \\u2013 and infamous - novella.\\nPublished in 1912, it\\u2019s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy\\u2019s beauty becomes sexual obsession.\\nIt explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach\\u2019s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach's stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected.

With

Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford

Erica Wickerson, a Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge

Sean Williams, Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield

Sean Williams' series of Radio 3's The Essay, Death in Trieste, can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lzd4