Aschenbach is a man in his prime, with a grip on life as a writer and in control of his emotions. However, a chance meeting will be the beginning of the end of his orderly life. In Venice, where decadence and decay ferment, he sees the divinely beautiful young Tadzio. Forgotten and repressed feelings creep under Aschenbach’s skin, and he is languishing in unrequited longing as the eternal spectator. Tadzio, the boy, as the object of the spectator, curiously plays with the sexual power, which he discovers he has over another human being. Life opens for the young boy, while gradually it closes in for the older man. It is one of literature’s most famous, erotic obsessions on which Jakob Weis has based his text, but where Mann lets the story be about Aschenbach, Weis also allows young Tadzio to have his say.
