"The Black Swann" and "Death in Venice": the reconfiguration of disease in Thomas Mann's late style

Abstract

This article seeks to determine the different literary elaborations of disease, an important theme in the work of Thomas Mann, between his young work, Death in Venice (1912), and The Black Swann (Die Betrogene), a “late work”, published in 1953, two years before the writer's death. In these forty years of difference, the main historical events of the first half of the 20th century occurred: the First and Second World Wars, events which, in the case of a writer of realism, must be taken into consideration with regard to the construction of his fictional work. We seek to understand how the writer frames disease as a compass of history: in the 1912 novella, as signalling the decadence of classicist aesthetics, and, in the 1953 novella, as rehabilitating romantic love as a form of opposition to the administered world after Hitler's downfall. Thus, Thomas Mann's late style takes shape through the rehabilitation of the great themes of the German literary tradition after going through its deepest cultural crisis.