[1] It presents an ennobled writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a boy in a family of Polish tourists—Tadzio, a nickname for Tadeusz.

After a false start in traveling to Pula on the Austro-Hungarian coast (now in Croatia), Aschenbach realizes he was "meant" to go to Venice and takes a suite in the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the island of Lido.

Soon the hot, humid weather begins to affect Aschenbach's health, and he decides to leave early and move to a cooler location.

When he reaches the railway station and discovers his trunk has been misplaced, he pretends to be angry, but is really overjoyed; he decides to remain in Venice and wait for his lost luggage.

Aschenbach next takes a trip into the city of Venice, where he sees a few discreetly worded notices from the Health Department warning of an unspecified contagion and advising people to avoid eating shellfish.

During this period, a third red-haired and disreputable-looking man crosses Aschenbach's path; this one belongs to a troupe of street singers who entertain at the hotel one night.

Aschenbach listens entranced to songs that, in his former life, he would have despised—all the while stealing glances at Tadzio, who is leaning on a nearby parapet in a classically beautiful pose.

After being repeatedly assured that the sirocco is the only health risk, he finds a British travel agent who reluctantly admits that there is a serious cholera epidemic in Venice.

The awareness that he was complicit, that he too was guilty, intoxicated him...."[2] One night, a dream filled with orgiastic Dionysian imagery reveals to him the sexual nature of his feelings for Tadzio.

He loses sight of the boy in the heart of the city; then, exhausted and thirsty, he buys and eats some over-ripe strawberries and rests in an abandoned square, contemplating the Platonic ideal of beauty amid the ruins of his own once-formidable dignity.

A few days later, Aschenbach goes to the lobby in his hotel, feeling ill and weak, and discovers that the Polish family plans to leave after lunch.

[3] The May 1911 death of composer Gustav Mahler in Vienna and Mann's interest in the boy Władzio during a summer 1911 vacation in Venice were additional experiences occupying his thoughts.

Mann also was influenced by Sigmund Freud and his views on dreams, as well as by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had visited Venice several times.

The trope of placing classical deities in contemporary settings was popular at the time when Mann was writing Death in Venice.

Aschenbach's name may be an allusion to Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of the Middle High German medieval romance Parzival, whose reimagining and continuation of the Grail Quest romance of Chrétien de Troyes contained themes similar to those found in Mann's novella, such as the author's fascination with and idealization of the purity of youthful innocence and beauty, as well as the eponymous protagonist's quest to restore healing and youthfulness to Anfortas, the wounded, old Fisher King.

[I]n 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.

However, serious doubts about this identification were raised in an article in "Der Spiegel" in 2002, mainly because of the significant differences in age and physical appearance between the Tadzio figure of the novella and Moes.

[10] The same article offers another candidate in the form of Adam von Henzel-Dzieduszycki, a Polish-Austrian, who was also on vacation in the same hotel in the summer of 1911 and was 15 years old at the time.

[13] In the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation it is criticized for its "puritanism", which saw Lowe-Porter "tone down Mann's treatment of sexuality, especially homoeroticism".

Other English translations include those by David Luke (1988), Clayton Koelb (1994), Stanley Applebaum (1995), Joachim Neugroschel (1998), Martin C. Doege (2010), and Damion Searls (2023).