The Path to The Cemetary by Thomas Mann

"The Road to the Churchyard" (German: Der Weg zum Friedhof) is a short story by Thomas Mann. It initially appeared in 1900 in Simplicissimus and then in 1903 in an anthology of Mann's six short stories, entitled Six Novellen. It was published in 1922 as "The Way to the Churchyard" in Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter's translation of Mann's Stories of Three Decades, and in 1988 in Death in Venice and Other Stories, translated by David Luke. It has also been translated as "The Path to the Cemetery".

This work parodies Naturalism (e.g. the alcoholism) and Mann's own Nietzschean influences. The recurrent protest present here in a comic vein, as well as in many other Mann's works, is against ignorant vitality epitomized here as the young boy on the bicycle.