After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective.

The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning.

Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics is objectively constrained. It's not the case that "anything goes".

Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations.

Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.

Aschenbach is not only a projection of Mann in the obvious ways - same daily routines, author of the works Mann had planned - nor even in sharing his author's aspirations, doubts, and sexual identity. His watchword, "Durchhalten!" [persevere, keep going] could be Mann's own.