Der Tod in Venidig [Death in Venice].

MANN, Thomas.

$25,000.00

Item Number: 98970

Berlin: S. Fischer, Verlag, 1913.

First trade edition of one of the greatest novellas of the twentieth century. Octavo, original publisher’s quarter vellum over marbled boards. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “An Ernst Bertram in herzlicher Wertschatzung Thomas Mann” (To Ernst Bertram in heartfelt appreciation Thomas Mann). One of the best possible association copies, as Bertram was Mann’s closest friend from the late 1900s through the 1930s, when their politics separated them. Bertram was deeply influential on Mann’s thinking and literary direction during the time when he was somewhat artistically lost and suffered his own writer’s block. It was also in nearly daily conversation with Bertram that the long political confessional, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an Unpolitical Man) was born. Bertram was a constant visitor at the Mann’s, and it is evident that there was some quotient of homoerotic attraction to the relationship. It is well-known that Mann’s early adulthood, prior to his marriage to Katia in 1905, were spent in more or less explicitly gay attractions and relations, but recent scholarship has begun to trace the residues of Mann’s homosexuality in his later life and work, and the relationship with Bertram (who was openly homosexual) somehow epitomizes the special significance that the company of men still bore. In addition to being Mann’s closest confidant, Bertram was an important man of letters in his own right. He was a poet, professor at the University of Colon, and author of many books, including Nietzsche – An Attempt of a Mythology. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Inscribed first editions of Mann’s major works are rare; an association copy to this fellow Nietzschean scholar and close confidant makes this a magnificent piece of history.

"Thomas Mann is one of the greatest and most widely read authors of the 20th century… An innovative stylist and synthesizer of the intellectual trends of his time, Mann exerted much influence on modern fiction not only in Germany but in Europe and in both Americas as well. His perceptiveness as an interpreter of Western cultural heritage and his skill as a cosmopolitan teacher of democratic and humanistic values earned him recognition as a 'mirror of his age' and a 'citizen of the world'… Among Mann's many well-written works of short fiction, "Death in Venice" (1928), a novella based on Mann's impressions during his stay in Venice, is the most famous… Typically for Mann, the novella deals with the problem of the unhappy, sick artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, who envies the healthy and 'normal' people of the bourgeois society" (Pribic, 262-3).