Luft als Element: Literatur, Klima und Thomas Manns Tod in Venedig

Contemporary interest in atmospheric phenomena like weather and climate has so far focused primarily on the engagement of literature with early meteorology. This essay proposes broadening the perspective both in terms of a history of knowledge and of aesthetics. Its focuses on the much older, yet extremely persistent tradition of understanding the air as an element. From Ancient medicine to the late nineteenth century air – as weather, local climate, or medium of noxious vapors – was a tangible and intensely effective dimension of the environment, affecting bodies, souls, and society. While receding in modern science, this tradition survived in literature which insisted on the connection between the air and human senses, affects, and ways of life. While the emerging atmospheric sciences set about desensitizing the air, literary texts preserved a sensorium of its qualities and efficacy which needs to be deciphered anew. This essay provides an example of such a ›meteorological reading‹ with attention to Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), situating the text at a moment of transition from the old theory of air as an element to a modern understanding of atmosphere and contagion. Read from this perspective, the moods and weather conditions meticulously unfolded in the text come to the fore and prove to both resonate with and set the pace for Aschenbach’s demise.