Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth [Paperback]

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and theVolkcloser together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’sDivine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts,Dante in Deutschlandshows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.Around 1800, German Romantics fixated on Dante’sDivine Comedyas a model for the creation of a new mythology of reason. This book traces that fixation across Romantic and Neo-Romantic texts, showing how the Romantic Dante cult in fact generated ominous amalgams of art, myth, and fascism in the twentieth century.DANIEL DiMASSAis an assistant professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Translation
Introduction: Orienting Romanticism
Part I: Romanticism
1. Discovering Dante and Theorizing Myth: The Schlegel Brothers and the Origins of the Romantic Project
2. Schelling, Novalis, and the Legitimation of a Dantean Mythology
3. Goethe’s Dantean Mythologies of the Self and of the World
Part II: Neo-Romanticism
4. Trespassing the Sign: The Mad Flight of Gerhart Hauptmann
5. Abolishing History: New Dal“/