Lesley Chamberlain at the Dublin Review of Books:
In May 1911, a few months before Gustav von Aschenbach first became a figment of his pen, Thomas Mann was staying with his wife and brother Heinrich on the wooded island of Brioni on the Istrian peninsula, holiday haunt of the Habsburg monarchy. Moving the holiday across to the other side of the Adriatic was not yet in prospect, but a disrespectful countess was disturbing dinner with her late arrivals and early departures. The irritable Manns had to stand up to defer to her grandeur and when enough was enough they took the ferry to Venice instead.
Mann insisted that Death in Venice was rooted in many real coincidences. Accordingly, starting in Munich, it takes a detour to Pula, the nearest port to Brioni, before establishing Aschenbach on the Venetian Lido. Still, Mann’s admission seems deliberately to lead the reader off the real, symbolic track of the story. Aschenbach in Pola, then an Austro-Hungarian military port writing its name in Italian, was suffering from a lifetime of excessive self-discipline. He disliked his fellow guests but it mattered more that Pola did not give him ‘the right relationship to the sea’. In fact the beaches near Pula are blissful small coves, with turquoise water lapping at low rocks. But for Mann their paradisical aspect was less suited to fevered imaginings than the flat, faintly mysterious expanses of the Lido.
more here.
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