It's crazy how boomers considered a film about having gay pedophile fantasies a classic
>>220101111
>>220101111You're too american and too zoomer to get it.
>>220101111The flashbacks about theory of art are devastating and kino
>All the details of the story... 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 13 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...[3]
>Numerous homoerotic crushes are documented in his letters and diaries, both before and after his marriage. Mann's diary records his incestuous attraction to his own 13-year-old son, "Eissi" – Klaus Mann: "Klaus to whom recently I feel very drawn" (22 June). In the background conversations about man-to-man eroticism take place; a long letter is written to Carl Maria Weber on this topic, while the diary reveals: "In love with Klaus during these days" (5 June). "Eissi, who enchants me right now" (11 July). "Delight over Eissi, who in his bath is terribly handsome. Find it very natural that I am in love with my son ... Eissi lay reading in bed with his brown torso naked, which disconcerted me" (25 July). "I heard noise in the boys' room and surprised Eissi completely naked in front of Golo's bed acting foolish. Strong impression of his premasculine, gleaming body. Disquiet" (17 October 1920).[52] His younger son Golo, homosexual like Klaus, suffered lifelong from the lower esteem his father showed him, the less handsome and somewhat clumsy – but ultimately he inherited more of his father's literary talent than the older one.
>Thomas' son Klaus Mann openly dealt with his own homosexuality in his literary work and open lifestyle and referred critically to his father's "sublimation" in his diary. On the other hand, Thomas's daughter Erika Mann and his son Golo Mann came out only later in their lives. Thomas Mann reacted cautiously to Klaus's first novel The Pious Dance, Adventure Book of a Youth (1926), which is openly set in Berlin's homosexual milieu. Although he embraced male–male eroticism, he disapproved of gay lifestyle. The Eulenburg affair, which broke out two years after Mann's marriage, had strengthened him in his renunciation of a gay life and he supported the journalist Maximilian Harden, who was friends with Katia Mann's family, in his denunciatory trial against the gay Prince of Eulenburg, a close friend of Emperor Wilhelm II.[62] Thomas Mann was always concerned about his dignity, reputation and respectability; the "poet king" Goethe was his role model. His horror at a possible collapse of these attributes found expression in the character of Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Cases like that of the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, who felt driven to suicide after a homosexual affair became public, were not uncommon and had a deterrent effect. But as time went on Mann became more open. He tolerated his son Klaus bringing his various lovers to lunch in Pacific Palisades, and was only appalled when these – navy sailors and the like – had never heard of him or his works, which, unfortunately, was mostly the case, leading to short, surly diary entries about their lack of culture.
