Thomas Mann
(November 2020)
Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) is a novel by the German writer Thomas Mann, published in 1912, during a cholera outbreak in Italy – one of the last outbreaks of this disease in Europe.
The story is a portrait of the reflections of Gustav Von Aschenbach, an old writer on his last trip to Venice. Gustav plans this trip for an air change, as a mechanism to renew his artistic creativity, but he finds his beloved Venice in a despicable state, despite his past good memories of the city. At first, he is disgusted with the sanitary conditions of the city and willing to leave to another destination, but the infatuation for a young Polish lad, Tadzio, who is also being hosted in Gustav’s hostel, persuades him to stay a little longer. While following and admiring the beautiful young man from a distance, Gustav starts to investigate what are the details regarding Venice’s situation, since most residents of the city, as well as the hotel staff, deny that something particularly wrong is happening with the sanitation. Nevertheless, Gustav eventually discovers that the city government demanded the local people to be silent about the cholera outbreak. Sadly, Gustav will be infected by cholera and, at the instant before his death, the writer falls from his chair, trying to stand up and follow a distant Tadzio at the beach.
Certainly, one of the most controversial features of the story (and also the main focus of the movie adaptation by Luchino Visconti) was Gustav’s passion for Tadzio, a fragile and perfect beauty in the writer’s eyes. During his stay at the hotel, Gustav is always aware and hunted by the age gap, so he will even put some effort into his appearance, such as dyeing his hair and putting makeup on, so he will not look so old. As described by the psychoanalyst Tavares, the closing scene represents the extinction of life itself and the depletion of its possibilities of reaching pleasure (2017). His death is not only dramatic but symbolic.
Leaving the protagonist’s conflicts aside, the book presents an interesting portrait of the cholera epidemic scenario, as well as how the government (inadequately) handled the situation, by hiding the critical situation from outside visitors to avoid impact on the tourism, but increasing the exposure of people to the disease.
Before discussing how the cholera epidemic was presented in the book, it is important to point a few remarks about the disease in question. Cholera is a mainly waterborne disease, an acute diarrhoeal disease caused by the ingestion of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Therefore, the disease spreads in environments with poor wastewater treatment, inadequate sanitation, and inappropriate waste management. Frequently, these conditions are found in overcrowded areas with lacking sanitation structure, in which the risk of becoming epidemic and/or endemic is higher and faster. According to WHO (2019), peri-urban slums with precarious basic infrastructures, as well as refugee camps, rural areas, or places with no minimum requirements of clean water and sanitation, are vulnerable to the spreading of the disease.
Nowadays, up to 80% of cases can be successfully treated with oral rehydration solution, but severe cases require rapid treatment with intravenous fluids and antibiotics. However, even if we know the cure at the present, cholera is still an important health issue for many countries. According to the WHO’s cholera fact sheet (2019), it is estimated that there are 1.3 million to 4.0 million cases of cholera, and 21 000 to 143 000 deaths worldwide due to cholera. Thus, even if 1912 seems far from the current days, the unfortunate truth is that cholera still affects populations all over the world. Many people are still in need of proper treatment of water and wastewater; improved sanitation and waste disposal and treatment system; and healthier urban planning.
Environmental issues can relate to numerous topics and demands. We need to debate matters of nature conservation and biodiversity, culture and society, resources and economy… as well as health and welfare. Clean water and sanitation are the 6th Sustainable Development Goal, established by the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, and a basic right for human dignity.
That Venice from the book was a consequence of poor health infrastructure and absent public policies to prevent the widespread of the disease. Nonetheless, several governments still repeat this irresponsible definition of priorities: pride over truth, economy over people. Pride of your country or city should not shade the critical thinking regarding flaws and challenges to be addressed. Economic development should not be an excuse to postpone or neglect people's life and health.
We have been talking about cholera, but not only about cholera. Doesn't it remind you of all countries and cities which were negligent, inept, or reckless towards the COVID-19 pandemic?
Curiosity! At Thomas Mann’s time, there was no cure for cholera, which motivated an enormous public fear. The fear also fed a prejudice regarding the origins of the disease: the protagonist is very blunt when referring to the outbreak of the disease as a consequence of the interaction between the western world (Italy) and the Eastern world (India). According to Amrita Ghosh (2017): “Thomas Mann wasn’t factually and historically incorrect when recording the presence of an ‘Asiatic cholera’ originating from India in 1912”, because, at that time, there were, indeed, cholera outbreaks in the Ganges area. However, the speech of his work reproduces a colonial discourse that favors barring contact zones, thus the disease represents a metaphor of the western intolerance towards the East. Venice is presented, in the book, as a place that opened its frontiers and became an environment contaminated by East’s diseases. For Ghosh, it is apparent that Mann’s work confirms a certain perspective of colonized spaces, as “tropical dangerous space”. Cited by Ghosh (2017), Sontag also explains the metaphorical meaning of diseases, for “any important disease whose causality is murky” is associated with the social disorder where the disease is born, with the “decayed, polluted, corrupt” environment where it is originated. In the case of the 20th Century cholera outbreak, if the source of the disease was indeed the Ganges delta in India, then this area could become a colonized space, in need of supervision, medicine, and western civilized modernity. At that time, another dangerous supposition, also based on social prejudice and intolerance, was the automatic conclusion that certain human groups (such as Jews, gypsies, prostitutes, and so on) would be surely infected, so they should be barred or put in quarantine. On the other hand, Amrita Ghosh explains that, ironically, despite the proud imperialist speech, the British doctors were deeply inspired by Indian counterparts for prescription of similar drugs, such as black pepper, calomel, ginger and asafetida mixed with opium, and so on. |
References:
[1] GHOSH, Amrita (2017). The Horror of Contact: Understanding Cholera in Mann’s Death in Venice. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/779
[2] TAVARES, José Luis Cordeiro Diaz (2017). Mal-estar em Veneza. Available at: http://pepsic.bvsalud.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-58352017000200026
[3] WHO (2019). Cholera fact sheet. Available at: https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cholera
[4] WHO (2019). Environmental risk factors. Available at: https://www.who.int/cholera/environmental_health/en/
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