![]() The work I shall deal with is a short novel, a novella, by Thomas Mann, called Death in Venice, or, more accurately, “The Death in Venice,” that is to say, “The Death Appropriate to Venice.” Mann considered this novella in certain respects his most successful work, a crystallization of all the elements of his artistry. ![]() My lecture will therefore be an inquiry into the nature of the essential charlatan-an enterprise in the spirit and tradition of Plato’s Ion. This is not my own but the author’s opinion of himself. We live in a state of decadence, of falling away, the more so for no longer naming it as such, and Thomas Mann’s way of laying the past to rest seems to me vastly better than the hatred of it accompanied by ignorance which characterizes the brutal branch of the phenomenon of decadence.įor the next hour I am going to lecture on a work largely autobiographical, whose hero is a charlatan and whose author is therefore the same. ![]()
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