Der Tod in Venedig

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Aschenbach's first name is almost an anagram of August, and the character's last name may be derived from Ansbach, Platen's birthplace (however, Aschenbach is a real ancient German name, for instance, the founder of the Kishkin family).

If I wish to read this on my travels, I'll tolerate it, but at home I'll stick with the print version.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. The title helps create the obvious set-up, of death hanging like a sword of Damocles, of a protagonist who could move out from under the sword but chooses not to out of the adoration of a child he does not know and who his caretakers - alerted to the man's voyeurism - clearly do not want him to know.

Afterward, he begins staring at the boy so openly and following him so persistently that Aschenbach feels the boy's guardians have finally noticed, and they take to warning Tadzio whenever he approaches too near the strange, solitary man. As the story opens, he is strolling outside a cemetery and sees a coarse-looking, red-haired foreigner who stares back at him belligerently.Only then can the viewer begin to understand how the author (Aschenbach) of his own work, Der Elender, could himself spiral downwards - as does the city Venice in its veiled attempt to hide the ravages of the plague infested city - into an "Elender" (sufferer, one in misery) himself , dying of plague, suffering unrequited love and engulfed in physical and mental deterioration.