Secret Germany: Myth in Twentieth-Century German Culture

An analysis of how a political myth is taken and treated as a metaphor that reflects how a country like Germany built its own destiny.

In the decades before the rise of the Third Reich, "Secret Germany" was a phrase used by the circle of writers around the poet Stefan George to describe a collective political and poetic project: the introduction of the highest values of art into everyday life, the secularization of myth and the mythologization of history. In this book, Furio Jesi takes up the term in order to trace the contours of that political, artistic, and aesthetic thread as it runs through German literary and artistic culture in the period--which, in the 1930s, became absorbed by Nazism as part of its prophecy of a triumphant future. Drawing on thinkers like Carl Jung and writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, Jesi reveals a literary genre that was transformed, tragically, into a potent political myth.

Author: Furio Jesi
Publisher: Seagull Books
Published: 03/08/2023
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN13: 9781803091945
ISBN10: 1803091940
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | European | Italian
- Foreign Language Study | Romance Languages (Other)

About the Author
Furio Jesi (1941-80) was an Italian writer, translator, mythologist, and Germanist. A correspondent of Thomas Mann and Károly Kerényi, he worked on a number of studies of Egyptian and classical mythology. Richard Braude is a translator who lives in Palermo and works for the NGO Borderline Sicilia.