A special relationship Thomas Mann and Italy

Thomas Mann returned to Italy, the wellspring of his creativity, throughout his life. Yet despite Italy being a source of inspiration, his writings present a surprisingly sombre portrait of the country.

On 10 July 1895, the 20-year-old Thomas Mann wrote to his school friend Otto Grautoff: “In Italy, the cool shade of peaceful groves will nurture my creativity. If I fail to conceive at least a dozen novellas there, then I do not wish to be an artist.” These were the words of a directionless young man who had outgrown his home town of Lübeck but had yet to establish himself in Munich. Just two days after writing the letter, Mann embarked on his journey south, following in the footsteps of his older brother Heinrich. His months-long journey took him to Rome and the nearby town of Palestrina, which Mann would later immortalise in his novel Doctor Faustus.

Visit to Italy – the foundation for global fame

Just a year later, Mann returned to Italy – this time staying for nearly two years. He lived in Rome with Heinrich at “Via Torre Argentina trentaquattro, three flights up”. Here, just a short distance from the Pantheon, he penned short stories such as Tobias Mindernickel and The Clown. It was also here, far from his North German home, that the future Nobel laureate started working on his magnus opus, Buddenbrooks. Heinrich Mann would later remark that it was in Rome that talent “overcame” him; the same could likely be said of his younger brother. Yet, although the foundation for his global fame was laid in Italy, Thomas Mann’s works paint a strikingly sombre portrait of the country.

Italy plays a significant role in many of Mann’s works. In The Magic Mountain, one of the patients at the sanatorium is the Italian intellectual Lodovico Settembrini; in Tonio Kröger, the titular protagonist strays onto the wrong path in Italy; and in Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn encounters the devil in Palestrina. The two most striking Italian-themed works, however, are Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician. Each portrays, in very different ways, a sickening society, both end in tragedy and both draw directly from Thomas Mann’s personal experiences in Italy.

Decline and disaster

In the 1911 novella Death in Venice, the aristocratic writer Gustav von Aschenbach is drawn to distant lands. He embarks on a journey to Venice, where, concealed by the authorities, a cholera epidemic is ravaging the city. As the plague spreads, Aschenbach experiences his own personal decline, falling in love with 14-year-old Tadzio, who he sees as the incarnation of absolute beauty. In stark contrast to the ethereal Polish boy, Gustav von Achenbach encounters a series of grotesque characters in the course of his stay. From the shady paymaster on the ferry and the unlicensed gondolier with his coffin-black boat to the degenerate street musician on the hotel terrace – Italy’s presence in Death in Venice is one of foreboding and doom. Indeed, by the end of his stay in Venice and at the end of the novella Thomas Mann described as “the tragedy of a degradation”, Aschenbach has been reduced to nothing more than a caricature of himself.

Warning against fascism

The Nobel laureate’s second most renowned Italian-themed work, Mario and the Magician, was published in 1930, four years after Mann had travelled with his wife Katia and their two youngest children to the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi on the Ligurian coast. There, the family experienced firsthand the rising influence of fascism and a palpable hostility towards everything foreign. This deeply autobiographical novella, subtitled A Tragic Vacation Experience, was not only a literary reworking of that very holiday, it was also a stark warning to German readers about fascism, embodied in the sinister figure of magician Cipolla. The narrator’s family attends Cipolla’s show, which quickly devolves into a spectacle of degradation, in which Cipolla uses hypnosis to strip his audience of their free will and subject them to his control.

In Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann portrays Italy as a land of moral decay and foreboding. There are no signs of the idealised visions presented by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his Italian Journey a century earlier, which helped shape Italy’s image as a “country of longing”. Yet, despite this bleak portrayal, Mann returned to Italy time and again throughout his life. Even in the year before his death, approaching 80, he wrote in his diary of his “sympathy for Rome with its obelisks and fountains”, expressing a longing to live there once more. As conflicted as this relationship with Italy may appear, one thing is certain: had it not been for his two-year stay in the country at the end of the century, Thomas Mann might not have become the literary giant he is today, 150 years after his birth.