(Lithub.com)

In May 1911, Thomas Mann checked into the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido in Venice with his brother Heinrich and his wife Katia. There, he was famously inspired to write what would become perhaps his most widely read work, the novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), in which a severe writer in his 50s, Gustav von Aschenbach (based in some ways on Gustav Mahler), travels to the same hotel and develops an obsession with a young boy, soon becoming unrecognizable to himself, as the threat of cholera creeps over the city. 

In her memoir Unwritten Memories, Katia Mann remembered their own arrival at the Grand Hotel des Bains: 

“It was very crowded, and in the dining room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them [in the novella]: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband’s attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn’t pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn’t do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often.”

But the trip gave Mann more than just Tadzio to work with. “Nothing in Death in Venice is invented,” Mann himself wrote in A Sketch of My Life. “The traveller by the Northern Cemetery in Munich, the gloomy boat from Pola, the aged fop, the dubious gondolier, Tadzio and his family, the departure prevented by a mix-up over luggage, the cholera, the honest clerk in the travel agency, the malevolent street singer, or whatever else you might care to mention—everything was given.”

“Everything was based on reality, even down to the details,” Katia added, “but no one besides Thomas Mann would have been able to make them into Death in Venice. My husband transferred to Aschenbach the pleasure he actually took in this charming boy, stylizing it into extreme passion.”

Death in Venice was published the next year, in 1912, and first translated into English in 1924.