‘Konturen’ and ‘Trübungen’: Der Tod in Venedig and Rilke’s ‘Dritte Elegie’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article compares two canonical works of modern German literature completed in 1912–13: Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig and the third of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien. It uses the metaphors of visual art suggested by Rilke in his criticism of Mann’s novella to develop a reading based on the idea of the ‘contour’ and on poetic form, spanning travel and place, literary genre, sexuality and psychoanalysis, as well as antecedents in classical and neoclassical aesthetics and philosophy. This is not a historicist approach nor one that belongs to reception studies, but rather a reconstruction of the German-speaking cultural landscape in the first decades of the twentieth century and its bearing upon Rilke and Mann.