Tadzio

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Thomas Mann's wife Katia recalls that the idea for the story came during an actual holiday in Venice, which she and Thomas took in the spring of 1911:

All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice — that he didn't do — but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: "What a story! And a married man with a family!" 1

Mann himself mentioned this story in a letter to his friend Phillipp Witkop on 18 July 1911, as he was working on it:

I am in the midst of work: a really strange thing that I brought with me from Venice, a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist. You say, "Hum, hum!" but it is quite respectable.2

The boy who inspired "Tadzio" was Baron Władysław Moes, whose first name was usually shortened as Władzio or just Adzio. This story was uncovered by Thomas Mann's translator Andrzej Dołęgowski around 1964, and was published in the German press in 1965. Some sources report that Moes himself did not learn of the connection until he saw the 1971 film version of the novel.

Moes was born in 1900, and was aged 11 when he was in Venice, significantly younger than Tadzio in the novella. Moes died in 1986 and is interred at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. Moes was the subject of a biography The Real Tadzio (Short Books, 2001) by Gilbert Adair.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Venice#The_Real_Tadzio