In The Footsteps Of Mann And Rilke
Berlin can be overwhelming. It is the largest city in the European Union and pulsating with a vibrant, even violent, intensity. The clubbing never stops and days turn into nights and into days again without proper rest or respite. Based on these facts, I made the decision to flee to my friend’s Venetian apartment for a week in Canareggio. It wasn’t the first time someone living in the bustling nation of Germany had sought refuge in northern Italy.
In May 1911, Thomas Mann left Munich for Venice with his wife Katia. His experience on the beach island of Lido and his sighting of a beautiful Polish boy would inspire the novella Death In Venice, published in 1912. Gustav von Aschenbach, the novella’s protagonist, becomes unhealthily (and creepily) obsessed with the Polish boy Tadzio’s beauty and, in the end, dies from a cholera epidemic. The novella is modernist, enigmatic, and subtly pedophilic. It is a controversial masterpiece and one I was thinking about constantly as I visited the beaches of Lido.
After wandering around San Marco for a couple of days, I decided a change of scenery was in order and bought a ticket to Trieste – the refuge, famously, of James Joyce while writing Ulysses. While there, I took a bus into the mountains overlooking Trieste to a village called Duino where Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet, penned his Duino Elegies. The Castello di Duino itself where Rilke stayed was a tad underwhelming although perhaps this was Rilke’s point. He was seeking a pastoral refuge away from Prague and the numerous other cities he lived in and, in Duino, he found it. While nursing an Aperol spritz, I began to consider why Germans were so drawn to northern Italy. Was it the comparative simplicity of village life? Was it the immeasurably better weather and cuisine? I didn’t come to any concrete conclusion, but these questions addled me as I ventured back to Venice.
Every writer hopes that a certain location will spark a renaissance in their work. This is the reason why writer’s retreats have proliferated today and it is why writers have for centuries indulged in travel as a means to jettison their creativity. Despite this rich past, I am unsure of travel’s effect on the creative spirit. Do the words come easier because I can hear the gondoliers' chatting in Italian out the window? Do the sentences form more easily after sipping an ombra alongside some cicchetti? I don’t know. But I am ready to return to the bad weather and poor cuisine of Berlin. It is where I will read and write.
