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The following is a corrected reprint of the summary to ‘Dionysos in Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice’ by G. D. Astrachan, published in the January 1990 issue (Vol. 35, No. 1), from which two lines were omitted by the printer.
Dionysos, the enlivening and invigorating God of classical Greek culture, the ‘loosener’, has become corrupted and diseased for our time. This naturally liberating God has been forced through centuries of harsh repression to seek release through the darker sides of human nature. Thomas Mann, in his brilliant novella Death in Venice, written around 1912, prophetically illustrates the disastrous consequences for the Western psyche of denying the Dionysian impulse as it appears in our lives. Through the novella's main protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, we witness the gradual disintegration of an individual soul caught in the rending hands of the savage God. Mann urgently presses upon twentieth-century man an awareness of the need for new rituals and new vessels to honour and contain the God Dionysos, in order to avert his horrors and ensure his blessings.