logo
episode-header-image
Jul 2023
48m 37s

Death in Venice

Bbc Radio 4
About this episode

Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous – and infamous - novella. Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession. It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach's stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected.

With

Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford

Erica Wickerson, a Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge

Sean Williams, Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield

Sean Williams' series of Radio 3's The Essay, Death in Trieste, can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lzd4

Up next
Yesterday
The Evolution of Lungs
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the evolution of lungs and of the first breaths, which can be traced back 400 million years to when animal life spread from rock pools and swamps onto land, as some fish found an evolutionary advantage in getting their oxygen from air rather than w ... Show More
48m 24s
Jul 3
The Vienna Secession
In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession. In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the ... Show More
54m 11s
Jun 26
Hypnosis
Ever since Franz Anton Mesmer induced trance-like states in his Parisian subjects in the late eighteenth century, dressed in long purple robes, hypnosis has been associated with performance, power and the occult. It has exerted a powerful hold over the cultural imagination, featu ... Show More
45m 30s
Recommended Episodes
Jul 2023
Death in Venice
Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous – and infamous - novella. Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession. It explores the link between c ... Show More
48m 37s
Nov 2018
Horace
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Horace (65-8BC), who flourished under the Emperor Augustus. He was one of the greatest poets of his age and is one of the most quoted of any age. Carpe diem, nil desperandum, nunc est bibendum – that’s Horace. He was the son of a freedman from sout ... Show More
48m 57s
Nov 2019
Crime and Punishment
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novel written by Dostoevsky and published in 1866, in which Raskolnikov, a struggling student, justifies his murder of two women, as his future is more valuable than their lives. He thinks himself superior, above the moral laws that apply to ot ... Show More
52m 40s
Jun 2021
Edward Gibbon
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of one of the great historians, best known for his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-89). According to Gibbon (1737-94) , the idea for this work came to him on 15th of October 1764 as he sat musi ... Show More
52m 22s
Feb 2017
Seneca the Younger
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Seneca the Younger, who was one of the first great writers to live his entire life in the world of the new Roman empire, after the fall of the Republic. He was a Stoic philosopher, he wrote blood-soaked tragedies, he was an orator, and he navigated ... Show More
51m 25s
Nov 2023
Caroline Vout on Classical Bodies in Art
I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world-renowned Classics scholar and professor at the University of Cambridge, Caroline Vout! Today we are discussing all sorts of figures in Classics, from Venus to Hermaphroditus. Born in Durham, Vout studied for a B ... Show More
38m 18s
Sep 2022
Dangerous ideas & scandalous lives: Germany’s first Romantics
At the turn of the 19th century, a small university town in Germany became the beating heart of an intellectual revolution. From philosophers and poets to scientists and playwrights, Jena attracted some of Europe’s brightest minds. Andrea Wulf tells Ellie Cawthorne about how the ... Show More
41m 42s
Mar 2021
The Bacchae
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Euripides' great tragedy, which was first performed in Athens in 405 BC when the Athenians were on the point of defeat and humiliation in a long war with Sparta. The action seen or described on stage was brutal: Pentheus, king of Thebes, is torn in ... Show More
52m 11s