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The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the Boy Who Inspired It Paperback – July 23, 2003

by Gilbert Adair (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 15 ratings
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In the summer of 1911, the German writer Thomas Mann visited Venice in the company of his wife Katia. There, in the Grand Hotel des Bains, as he waited for the dinner-gong to ring, the author’s roving eye was drawn to a nearby Polish family, the Moeses, consisting of a mother, three daughters, and a young sailor-suited son who, to Mann, exuded an almost supernatural beauty and grace. Inspired by this glancing encounter with the luminous child, Mann wrote Death in Venice, and the infatuated writer made of that boy, Wladyslaw Moes, one of the twentieth century’s most potent and enduring icons. According to Gilbert Adair in his sparkling evocation of that idyll on the Adriatic, Mann wrote his novella, “as though taking dictation from God.” But precisely who was the boy? And what was his reaction to the publication of Death in Venice in 1912 and, later, the release of Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation in 1971? In this revealing portrait, including telling photographs, Gilbert Adair brilliantly juxtaposes the life of Wladyslaw Moes with that of his mythic twin, Tadzio. It is a fascinating account of a man who was immortalized by a genius, yet forgotten by history.
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  1. Print length
    112 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Carroll & Graf
  4. Publication date
    July 23, 2003
  5. Dimensions
    5 x 0.5 x 7 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0786712473
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0786712472
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Carroll & Graf (July 23, 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 112 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0786712473
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786712472
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 7 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

About the author

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Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair

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GILBERT ADAIR was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1944 and moved to Paris as a young man, because, as he told an interviewer, "If you were a film buff in the sixties, you went to Paris." Adair later returned to the UK and spent his time writing experimental fiction, as well as film and literary criticism. His works include The Death of the Author, The Holy Innocents, later made into Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Dreamers; The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, a book of literary criticism; and the novel Love and Death in Long Island. Adair lives in London.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
15 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

hnorth153
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2010
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A great companion to the Death in Venice book/film. This book tells the real story behind what inspired Thomas Mann to write Death in Venice, and the story of the real "Tadzio." The story is unforgettable, and a quick, easy read. I would definitely recommend that anyone who is a fan of the book/film read this book as well.
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H. Hewett
3.0 out of 5 stars Tone and scholarship somewhat lacking
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2014
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I picked up Adair's book after reading Ronald Hayman's biography of Mann and I'm afraid I was expecting something better. I believe Adair's essay was originally published as a magazine article, but I was disappointed by the tone, often informal (someone is described as "bitching" instead of "complaining") or unnecessarily precious ("a tissue of longueurs and languerurs") - more importantly, at least the Kindle edition, contains no citations or notes, even of direct quotes, other than an author's thanks to Maria Tarchalski and Wojciech Fudawkowski for their recollections.

I did appreciate the additional information and sketch of Moes' life, and so I'm grateful to Adair and glad to have read the book. I just felt it was less than I had hoped.
9 people found this helpful
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DONALD WHIPPLE FOX
5.0 out of 5 stars Informative!
Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2002
This is fine writing. I was especially struck by the opening and closing pages in which Mr. Adair looks at Mann's story and Viconti's film and contextualizes them within the world of the real Tadzio. Just what is it that makes "Death in Venice" so remarkable? What are those themes that shake the public and mesmerize gay (and straight) men? Mr. Adair is an adept writer and thinker. Take the time to read this small tome. You will be glad you did.
5 people found this helpful
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Loves the View
4.0 out of 5 stars A Private Life Made Public
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2010
This short book gives something of the life of Wladyslaw Moes, the model for Thomas Mann's Tadzio in his classic novella:  Death in Venice . It also tells of his friend Jaschiu Fudakowski who is also described in the famous work. The sources seem to be Wladyslaw's daughter and Fudakowski's son.

The two were more or less stumbled upon by a novelist. In this randomness they can be said to stand as proxy for their fellow aristocrats and how they fared in the forces of history. While Mann's novel is not about this, it does draw a portrait upper class European life at the dawn of the twentieth century. Tadzio's generation would be the last to inherit life as is depicted in Mann's novel. Both the real Tadzio and his friend were soon to lose their lives of privilege, and eventually, everything. Their summer on the beach, beautifully described by Mann was not to be bestowed on their children as it was on them.

This book discusses the two friends, how they were portrayed in the film and how so soon after this summer they both went to war. In the next war, both became POWs. Both eventually lost lands, businesses and status. Later in life, both saw themselves and their carefree youth epicted in the Viscounti film.

There is an update on Bjorn Anderson who played Tadzio in the Viscounti film. Young Anderson's career peaked with the film.

The book is short. Perhaps this is all readers of the novel may want to know. For historians, these families are would make excellent case studies and are worthy of a more in depth work.
3 people found this helpful
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Edmund Marlowe
3.0 out of 5 stars Who was really Mann's boy?
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2014
Until Thomas Mann's diaries were posthumously published, it was not well known that he was a pederast, a lover of adolescent boys, or that his most famous work, Death in Venice, was almost autobiographical; in his own words, "nothing was invented." So who was the boy "Tadzio" with whom he fell in love in Venice in the summer of 1911?

In 1964, an elderly Pole named Wladyslaw Moes came forward to the Polish translator of the novella and said "I am that boy!" So far as I can gather, no one ever sought to question this sensational revelation, though no one made much of it either until Gilbert Adair had the brilliant idea of writing this book.

Adair was a gifted writer; his book is witty and very readable, though regrettably peppered with unfair waspish comments, of which two will suffice as examples here. For noting that his sister used a massive amount of cyanide to kill herself, Mann is said to have shown " an unnerving absence of sibling warmth." How so? Luchino Visconti, the other giant in the story thanks to his famous film of the novella, is put down for his "evident, malicious pleasure in showing himself in the process of inspecting bevies of schoolboys" auditioning for Tadzio's part. I should think Visconti probably did feel pleasure, but it is not at all evident to me there was anything malicious about it. To remarks like this, I am tempted to reply with the royal motto "Honi soit qui mal y pense."

More seriously for a book that claims to be a real work of research, I suspect Adair rolled it off in a week or so. There is no bibliography or footnotes. No sources are referred to except Moes's daughter and his friend's son, and it appears that interviewing these two was the total sum of his research. Such information as they could give ninety years after the event and when the protagonists were all long dead falls largely under the euphemism of "family tradition." Anyone who has done serious genealogical research inspired by one can attest this is usually distorted and often no more than self-glorifying fantasy. Adair admits this, but it doesn't stop him reproducing an entirely gushing account of the noble Moes family, beginning with Wladyslaw's "extremely enlightened" grandfather and continuing through his "compassionately liberal" father to the man himself, "evidently capable of charming the birds off trees" (another "evidently" for which no evidence is presented).

My gravest criticism goes however to the heart of the book: I have serious doubts Moes was Tadzio at all. The nearest Adair gets to any criticism of Moes is in his daughter's description of his great vanity, presented as an endearing foible. I see no reason to doubt he visited Venice in childhood, very likely staying in the cosmopolitan Hotel des Bains. But if this happened when he was ten, as would have to be the case if he were Tadzio, what details would he remember in old age sufficient to identify himself as such? The month, for example? I doubt that very much, and since the Moes family were only allowed to retrieve one suitcase of personal possessions from communist confiscation, it would be astonishing if he had documents to support the claim. Surely it would not be hard for any vain and pampered Pole who remembered visiting Venice in roughly the same era to suspect and then convince himself he was the one soon after described in Visconti's advertising as "the most beautiful boy in the world."

Let us now turn to some of the known discrepancies, bearing in mind we are strictly limited here to such as chance to emerge from Adair's uncritical account. Given how serious these are, we may expect that far more would have emerged from a cross-examination in the '60s. Bear in mind also that we have the words of both Mann and his widow Katia that, having already decided to write a story about a great writer who succumbs to passion for a youngster and to base the writer physically on the recently deceased composer Mahler, the rest of the story fell into place in detail. There is therefore no reason to expect discrepancies at all, one reason why Adair's attempted explanations of them come across to me as special pleading.

The most serious discrepancy is that Tadzio was a youth of "about fourteen" in the novella, or "about thirteen" according to Katia, who was there, and later spoke frankly of her husband's pederasty, whereas Moes was a child of ten and six months (Adair first calls him "not quite eleven" and thereafter conveniently drops the "not quite"). The difference between ten and thirteen or fourteen is enormously important. Mann's diaries abound in evidence of his attraction to pubescent boys, but there is not a shred of evidence to link him to true paedophilia or attraction to pre-pubescent children. The older age is also that towards which pederasts have typically been attracted since antiquity and the novella is rich in Greek pederastic imagery; the whole canon of Greek literature and art contains not a single reference to erotic attraction to the truly pre-pubescent.

Secondly, Mann is at his most eloquent describing the perfect "godlike beauty" of Tadzio, also described by Katia as a "very charming, beautiful boy." As Adair admits, pudgy-faced Moes looked like a "lump." To explain this discrepancy, he points out our ideas of beauty are subject to fashion and suggests "that everyone appears to get sexier in proportion as we draw closer to our own era." It is a fascinating observation and undoubtedly true up to a point, but we are dealing here with extremes which well exceed that point. The numerous busts of the most celebrated loved boy in history, the Emperor Hadrian's deified Antinous, continue to seduce after nineteen centuries, as do the Davids of Michelangelo and Donatello after five.

These were not the only physical differences between the two boys. Tadzio had "twilit grey eyes" and "lovely hair that curled ... about his brows, above his ears, longer still in the neck"; Moes had water-blue eyes and his hair was straight above his brow, covered his ears with a hideous pronged fringe and was not longer in the neck.

Turning to the boys' respective families, Tadzio was the youngest of three children, Moes the fourth of six. Adair admits on photographic evidence that the actress who played Tadzio's mother in the film "bore no resemblance" to Moes's mother, "but was the very image of Mann's description of her fictional equivalent."

Moes recalled being stalked by an "old man", but Katia was emphatic later (but too late for Moes to correct his memories) that it wasn't true her 36-year-old husband followed him around the city: "He didn't pursue him through all of Venice -- that he didn't do". Isn't this then a typical example of the kind of false memory, created out of what its victim is expected to recollect, often ready to ensnare biographers.

Finally, there is the question of the boy's name, which Mann concluded after hearing called repeatedly was "Tadzio a shortened form of Thaddeus", but is convolutedly explained by Adair as a mishearing of Adzio, said to be short via Wladzio for Wladyslaw. It's possible, but I would opt first for the most simple solution, that Mann got it right.

If I had tried to find the real Tadzio, I would have looked for a Thaddeus who was a beautiful fourteen in 1911. It signifies little that such a claimant hasn't presented himself. Even if Mann's prognosis that "he is sickly, he will never live to grow up" had turned out to be pessimistic, when Armageddon erupted three summers later he would have been about seventeen and getting ready to join the carnage. As young officer material, the odds for his survival will sadly not have been high.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, a story of similar but requited love, www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112
15 people found this helpful
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stephen coppin
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 25, 2015
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FXT
3.0 out of 5 stars Why not ?
Reviewed in France on October 28, 2012
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A book not really substantive, but anecdotally interesting. In the light of this, it is generally overpriced on the second hand market.
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kristypappy
5.0 out of 5 stars 存在した美少年
Reviewed in Japan on November 30, 2012
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トーマス・マンが恋した美少年は確かに存在したのですね。ビョルン・アンドレセンと同様に彼は美しく崇高な精神の持ち主だったことが分かり、とても清清しい気持ちになりました。
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Edmund Marlowe
3.0 out of 5 stars Who was really Mann's boy?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 31, 2014
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Who was really Mann's boy?

Until Thomas Mann's diaries were posthumously published, it was not well known that he was a pederast, a lover of adolescent boys, or that his most famous work, Death in Venice, was almost autobiographical; in his own words, "nothing was invented." So who was the boy "Tadzio" with whom he fell in love in Venice in the summer of 1911?

In 1964, an elderly Pole named Wladyslaw Moes came forward to the Polish translator of the novella and said "I am that boy!" So far as I can gather, no one ever sought to question this sensational revelation, though no one made much of it either until Gilbert Adair had the brilliant idea of writing this book.

Adair was a gifted writer; his book is witty and very readable, though regrettably peppered with unfair waspish comments, of which two will suffice as examples here. For noting that his sister used a massive amount of cyanide to kill herself, Mann is said to have shown " an unnerving absence of sibling warmth." How so? Luchino Visconti, the other giant in the story thanks to his famous film of the novella, is put down for his "evident, malicious pleasure in showing himself in the process of inspecting bevies of schoolboys" auditioning for Tadzio's part. I should think Visconti probably did feel pleasure, but it is not at all evident to me there was anything malicious about it. To remarks like this, I am tempted to reply with the royal motto "Honi soit qui mal y pense."

More seriously for a book that claims to be a real work of research, I suspect Adair rolled it off in a week or so. There is no bibliography or footnotes. No sources are referred to except Moes's daughter and his friend's son, and it appears that interviewing these two was the total sum of his research. Such information as they could give ninety years after the event and when the protagonists were all long dead falls largely under the euphemism of "family tradition." Anyone who has done serious genealogical research inspired by one can attest this is usually distorted and often no more than self-glorifying fantasy. Adair admits this, but it doesn't stop him reproducing an entirely gushing account of the noble Moes family, beginning with Wladyslaw's "extremely enlightened" grandfather and continuing through his "compassionately liberal" father to the man himself, "evidently capable of charming the birds off trees" (another "evidently" for which no evidence is presented).

My gravest criticism goes however to the heart of the book: I have serious doubts Moes was Tadzio at all. The nearest Adair gets to any criticism of Moes is in his daughter's description of his great vanity, presented as an endearing foible. I see no reason to doubt he visited Venice in childhood, very likely staying in the cosmopolitan Hotel des Bains. But if this happened when he was ten, as would have to be the case if he were Tadzio, what details would he remember in old age sufficient to identify himself as such? The month, for example? I doubt that very much, and since the Moes family were only allowed to retrieve one suitcase of personal possessions from communist confiscation, it would be astonishing if he had documents to support the claim. Surely it would not be hard for any vain and pampered Pole who remembered visiting Venice in roughly the same era to suspect and then convince himself he was the one soon after described in Visconti's advertising as "the most beautiful boy in the world."

Let us now turn to some of the known discrepancies, bearing in mind we are strictly limited here to such as chance to emerge from Adair's uncritical account. Given how serious these are, we may expect that far more would have emerged from a cross-examination in the '60s. Bear in mind also that we have the words of both Mann and his widow Katia that, having already decided to write a story about a great writer who succumbs to passion for a youngster and to base the writer physically on the recently deceased composer Mahler, the rest of the story fell into place in detail. There is therefore no reason to expect discrepancies at all, one reason why Adair's attempted explanations of them come across to me as special pleading.

The most serious discrepancy is that Tadzio was a youth of "about fourteen" in the novella, or "about thirteen" according to Katia, who was there, and later spoke frankly of her husband's pederasty, whereas Moes was a child of ten and six months (Adair first calls him "not quite eleven" and thereafter conveniently drops the "not quite"). The difference between ten and thirteen or fourteen is enormously important. Mann's diaries abound in evidence of his attraction to pubescent boys, but there is not a shred of evidence to link him to true paedophilia or attraction to pre-pubescent children. The older age is also that towards which pederasts have typically been attracted since antiquity and the novella is rich in Greek pederastic imagery; the whole canon of Greek literature and art contains not a single reference to erotic attraction to the truly pre-pubescent.

Secondly, Mann is at his most eloquent describing the perfect "godlike beauty" of Tadzio, also described by Katia as a "very charming, beautiful boy." As Adair admits, pudgy-faced Moes looked like a "lump." To explain this discrepancy, he points out our ideas of beauty are subject to fashion and suggests "that everyone appears to get sexier in proportion as we draw closer to our own era." It is a fascinating observation and undoubtedly true up to a point, but we are dealing here with extremes which well exceed that point. The numerous busts of the most celebrated loved boy in history, the Emperor Hadrian's deified Antinous, continue to seduce after nineteen centuries, as do the Davids of Michelangelo and Donatello after five.

These were not the only physical differences between the two boys. Tadzio had "twilit grey eyes" and "lovely hair that curled ... about his brows, above his ears, longer still in the neck"; Moes had water-blue eyes and his hair was straight above his brow, covered his ears with a hideous pronged fringe and was not longer in the neck.

Turning to the boys' respective families, Tadzio was the youngest of three children, Moes the fourth of six. Adair admits on photographic evidence that the actress who played Tadzio's mother in the film "bore no resemblance" to Moes's mother, "but was the very image of Mann's description of her fictional equivalent."

Moes recalled being stalked by an "old man", but Katia was emphatic later (but too late for Moes to correct his memories) that it wasn't true her 36-year-old husband followed him around the city: "He didn't pursue him through all of Venice -- that he didn't do". Isn't this then a typical example of the kind of false memory, created out of what its victim is expected to recollect, often ready to ensnare biographers.

Finally, there is the question of the boy's name, which Mann concluded after hearing called repeatedly was "Tadzio a shortened form of Thaddeus", but is convolutedly explained by Adair as a mishearing of Adzio, said to be short via Wladzio for Wladyslaw. It's possible, but I would opt first for the most simple solution, that Mann got it right.

If I had tried to find the real Tadzio, I would have looked for a Thaddeus who was a beautiful fourteen in 1911. It signifies little that such a claimant hasn't presented himself. Even if Mann's prognosis that "he is sickly, he will never live to grow up" had turned out to be pessimistic, when Armageddon erupted three summers later he would have been about seventeen and getting ready to join the carnage. As young officer material, the odds for his survival will sadly not have been high.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, a story of similar but requited love, www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1481222112
10 people found this helpful
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Nicholas Casley
4.0 out of 5 stars Family History and Cultural Commentary Intertwined
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 14, 2011
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This is a review of the original 2001 edition. I read this 105-page and well-illustrated book in one session. Being a fan of Thomas Mann, Luchino Visconti, and Benjamin Britten, I was bound to find Gilbert Adair's subject of great interest. But then, I am also a fan of Mr Adair too, having read his own novel's take on `Death in Venice' (`Love and Death on Long Island') and enjoyed his screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci's `The Dreamers'.

In this extended essay, Adair first appraises us with the autobiographical nature of Thomas Mann's story, as well as highlighting the differences too. But, whereas Mann never troubled "to ascertain who precisely was the little Polish boy on the beach of the Lido or what might have become of him," Adair has done some marvellous detective work. Adair cautions that, "What follows, however, is not a biography; it might more accurately be viewed as an extended, belated specimen of the biography's less garrulous cousin, the obituary." Or rather, obituaries, for Adair also traces the life of the boy's friend and compatriot on that fateful beach in Venice in the summer of 1911. He has managed to track down and interview descendants of both boys, Wladyslaw Moes and Jas Fudakowski. Being Polish, their remaining lives were not without incident and were as turbulent at times as their own country's.

There is much insightful commentary too by Adair on the film by Visconti and (less so) the opera by Britten. Adair perceptively notes that, "The miracle of Visconti's film version was the casting of [Bjorn] Andresen. Had he been less beautiful, the film would have been less good. It really is as elementary as that." In the book's final moments, Adair compares Thomas Mann with other noted twentieth-century gay and bisexual authors, and concludes that Mann has no equal.

The photographs include extracts from the family albums, but alas some of these are not as clear as one would have wished. This is the only quibble I have with this book, which is otherwise an engrossing family history and a perceptive cultural commentary rolled into one.
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