4 Rütten, “Cholera in Thomas Mann’s”, p.3 Thomas Rütten, “Cholera in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice,” Gesnerus.The protagonist Gustav Von Aschenbach’s journey into Venice and contracting cholera ultimately establishes the threat of any contact with the “other” due to the “disease burden” 2 that becomes a “symbolic register” to facilitate colonialism and suggests a fear of contact with the “othered” body. Venice, in Mann’s text becomes a liminal space that opens up to a “contact” with the East – within this space two binaries are set up – the sanitized trope of the West against the source of unclean bodies in the East. Yet, the illness of cholera works in a larger metaphor (using Susan Sontag’s phrase) 1 to enable a colonial discourse that serves as a cautionary reminder of barring contact zones, “the horrors of diversity” as Mann’s text states when first describing the emergence of Asiatic cholera in the text. The historical context of the 1911 cholera epidemic in Italy is indeed significant in the contextualization and the production of the text. Thomas Mann wasn’t factually and historically incorrect when recording the presence of an “Asiatic cholera” originating from India in 1912 in his novella.

This article focuses on the notion of tropicality, and the diseased body and what it means in terms of imagining the colonized spaces as represented in the novella, through the discourse of nineteenth century imperial medicine. 2 David Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, (.)ġThomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice ( Der Tod in Venedig) was published in 1912, and written during a time when cholera as a fatal disease had made its presence felt in Italy in 1911 and caused a series of fatalities.1 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.

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