Of Lounging and Longing: Modernist Impatience and Hotel Time in Thomas Mann’s <i>Death in Venice</i>

ABSTRACT Hotel spaces are constantly between movement and stasis, progress and tradition, exclusion and inclusion, and residence and homelessness; this betweenness is punctuated by the hotel’s temporary inhabitants experiencing feelings of anticipation, waiting, and sometimes even “paralysis and hopelessness” (Short 2019). In many cases, literary representations of waiting in hotel rooms or lobbies became spaces for waiting out a social or personal crisis, thus infusing the space with feelings of impatience for an uncertain future. The familiarity of the hotel became a steady landmark that authors employed to provide their characters with temporary relief from everyday personal and social traumatization, marking the hotel as not only a non-place (Augé 1995) but a different temporality altogether. This article explores this temporality—in particular, impatience and modernist time—in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). Ultimately, the case is made for impatience as an operative affect of modernist time.