Editing Death in Venice (section)

==The real Tadzio==
[[File:Hotel des Bains 02.jpg|thumb|upright=2|The former [[Grand Hôtel des Bains]] in Venice where [[Thomas Mann]] stayed and where he set action in the novel.]]

In her 1974&nbsp;''Unwritten Memories'', Mann's wife [[Katia Mann|Katia]] recalls that the idea for the story came during an actual vacation in Venice at the [[Grand Hotel des Bains|Grand Hôtel des Bains]] on the Lido, which they took in the summer of 1911:

{{Blockquote|[A]ll the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from actual experience [...]. [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. 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. […] I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: "What a story! And a married man with a family!"|author=Katia Mann|title=Unwritten Memories{{Sfn|Mann|1975|pp=60-63}}}}

The boy who inspired "Tadzio" was perhaps Baron [[Władysław Moes]], whose first name was usually shortened as Władzio or just Adzio. This story was uncovered by Andrzej Dołęgowski, Thomas Mann's translator, around 1964, and was published in the German press in 1965.

Moes was born on 17 November 1900 in [[Wierbka]], the second son and fourth child of Baron Aleksander Juliusz Moes. He was aged 10 when he was in Venice, significantly younger than Tadzio in the novella. Baron Moes died on 17 December 1986 in Warsaw and is interred at the graveyard of [[Pilica, Silesian Voivodeship]]. He was the subject of the biography ''The Real Tadzio'' (Short Books, 2001) by [[Gilbert Adair]]. Ironically, while in the novella Aschenbach is [[Silesia]]n, it was Moes who was really Silesian.

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.<ref name=Spiegel>{{cite magazine|language=de|page=152|issue=52|year=2002
|url=https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tadzios-schoenes-geheimnis-a-1d60811d-0002-0001-0000-000025990846|title=Tadzios schönes Geheimnis|magazine=Der Spiegel|access-date=22 March 2025}}</ref> 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.<ref name=Spiegel/>