The Politics behind the Story
p. 55-56: W. E. B. DuBois divided Europe into the following regions: Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, Slavic, and Latinate, and these divisions may help us understand this part of Mann's story. Foster explains Aschenbach's watchful distance from the boy Tadzio as "Teutonic-Slavic tension." The feelings Tadzio expresses towards the Russian family reflect his feelings against the country which now rules most of his formerly independent homeland, but the story glosses over the fact that Poland was dismantled in the nineteenth century by Prussia, and Austria (Teutonic states) as well as Russia (Slavic) (Foster 197-198).
See, on the map below, how much territory was taken away from Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria:
Source: Wikipedia
Works Cited
"Poland" Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland Accessed on July 9, 2008.
Foster, John Burt, Jr. "Why is Tadzio Polish? Kultur and Cultural Multiplicity in Death in Venice," Death in Venice: complete, authoritative text with biographical and historical contexts, critical history, and essays from five contemporary critical perspectives. Boston: Bedford, 1998, 192-210.
Mann’s Political Views
The following passages sourced from Wikipedia provide some supplemental information for this page regarding Mann’s political views, especially during the time “Death in Venice” was written. These passages can be amended and expanded with information from other sources or evidence from the text.
During World War I Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II conservatism and attacked liberalism. Yet in Von Deutscher Republik (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. He also gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, which appeared in Die neue Rundschau in November 1922, in which he developed his eccentric defense of the Republic, based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. [2] Hereafter his political views gradually shifted toward liberal and democratic principles.
In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929 (see below). Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. A few months later he moved to the United States.
However, already in 1933, in a personal letter dated 26 October 1933 but published only recently (in the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dated Oct. 30, 2007), Thomas Mann expressed views on Nazism, which corresponded to the much later novel Doktor Faustus. In the novel, the author refers in several places to the historical debt of the German population, leading to World War II with all its cruelty.
During the war itself, Mann regularly made anti-Nazi broadcasts from California (transmitted by the BBC to Germany), each broadcast beginning with the words "German listeners!" While not widely listened to, they had a dedicated following.
"Images of Disorder", by social critic Michael Harrington in his collection The Accidental Century, is a highly literate account of Mann's political progression from the right to the left.
Works cited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann#Political_views
Russian Colonialism
Russian Colonialism comprises the period of expansionism and social, political, economic and cultural policies Russia extended over regions forming modern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland and the Baltic countries and Alaska primarily during the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. Russian policies of frontier expansionism are present in colonization of Crimea, Siberia and Alaska, as well as the aborted attempt to control the Bosporus Strait during the Russo-Turkish war.
Works Cited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Colonialism
Russification
Russification (in Russian: русификация rusifikátsiya)is an adoption of the Russian language or some other Russian attribute (whether voluntarily or not) by non-Russian communities. In a narrow sense, Russification is used to denote the influence of the Russian language on Slavic, Baltic and other languages, spoken in areas currently or formerly controlled by Russia, which led to emerging of russianisms, trasianka and surzhyk. In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia, aimed at Russian domination.
The major areas of Russification are politics and culture. In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading administrative positions in national institutions. In culture, Russification primarily amounts to domination of the Russian language in official business and strong influence of Russian language on the national ones. The shifts in demographics in favor of Russian population are sometimes considered as a form of Russification as well. Russification, as a process of changing one's ethnic self-label or identity from a non-Russian ethnonym to Russian has been distinguished from Russianization, the spread of Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions, distinct also from Sovietization.[1] In this sense, Russification is usually conflated across Russification, Russianization, and Russian-led Sovietization with regard to the policies of the former Soviet Union—although each can be considered a distinct process with separate results. One example of 19th century Russification was the replacement of the Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian languages by Russian in those areas, which became part of the Russian Empire after the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It intensified after the 1831 uprising and, in particular, after the January Uprising of 1863.[2] In 1864, the Polish and Belarusian languages were banned in public places; in the 1880s, Polish was banned in schools and offices of the Congress Kingdom, and research and teaching of Polish language, history or Catholicism were forbidden. This led to the creation of a Polish underground education network, which included the famous Flying University. A similar development took place in Lithuania.[2] Its Governor General, Mikhail Muravyov, prohibited the public use of spoken Lithuanian and closed Lithuanian and Polish schools; teachers from other parts of Russia who did not speak these languages were moved in to teach pupils. Muravyov also banned the use of Latin and Gothic scripts in publishing. He was reported saying, "What the Russian bayonet didn't accomplish, the Russian school will." ("что не доделал русский штык — доделает русская школа.") This ban, which was only lifted in 1904, was disregarded by the Knygnešiai, the Lithuanian book smugglers, who brought Lithuanian publications printed in the Latin alphabet, the historic orthography of the Lithuanian language, from Lithuania Minor, a part of East Prussia, and from the United States into the Lithuanian-speaking areas of Imperial Russia. The knygnešiai became a symbol of the resistance of the Lithuanians against Russification. The campaign also promoted the Russian Orthodox faith over Catholicism. The measures used included closing down Catholic monasteries, officially banning the building of new churches and giving many of the old ones to the Russian Orthodox church, banning Catholic schools and establishing state schools which taught only the Orthodox religion, requiring Catholic priests to preach only officially approved sermons, requiring that Catholics who married members of the Orthodox church convert, requiring Catholic nobles to pay an additional tax in the amount of 10% of their profits, limiting the amount of land a Catholic peasant could own, and switching from the Gregorian calendar (used by Catholics) to the Julian one (used by members of the Orthodox church). After the uprising, many manors and great chunks of land were confiscated from nobles of Polish and Lithuanian descent who were accused of helping the uprising; these properties were later given or sold to Russian nobles. Villages where supporters of the uprising lived were repopulated by ethnic Russians. Vilnius University, where the language of instruction had been Polish rather than Russian, was closed in 1832. Lithuanians and Poles were banned from holding any public jobs (including professional positions, such as teachers and doctors) in Lithuania; this forced educated Lithuanians to move to other parts of the Russian Empire. The old legal code was dismantled and a new one based on the Russian code and written in the Russian language was enacted; Russian became the only administrative and juridical language in the area. Most of these actions ended at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, but others took longer to be reversed; Vilnius University was reopened only after Russia had lost control of the city in 1919. Works Cited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Poland_and_Lithuania Poland and Lithuania
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