In a manner similar to Vienna, the historical, social, and aesthetic contradictions of Venice have led to its engagement as both backdrop and narrative subject by writers for centuries. German literature's most famous treatment of the Italian city's bifurcated character, its oscillation in a subject's perceptual field between ornate, elaborately staged beauty and concomitant putrefaction and decadence, is Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig (1912). Because their own capital, Vienna, has also been imbued throughout its existence by these polar but intertwined attributes, Austrian writers do not tend to treat Venice in the antithetical, alienated manner of Mann. Austrian writers and their characters, in my view, do not possess the ascetic North German sensibilities of a Mann or Gustav Aschenbach, and are more inured to both the shock and the seduction of Venice. Then too, it is worth remembering that Venice was part of the Austrian empire from 1797–1805, 1814–1848, and from 1849–1866. Thus, even in much later periods, Austrian authors such as those discussed here have literally felt “at home” there, and their characters evince less of a sense of alienation in Venice than those of Mann.

Because Vienna, particularly at the turn into the twentieth century, was marked by the interconnected antipodes of voluptuousness and decay, the dialectics that inform Austrian literature's engagement with Venice at both the nineteenth and twentieth century fins de siècle are quite different from those obtaining in Der Tod in Venedig.