Dante in Deutschland

An Itinerary of Romantic Myth

Daniel DiMassa

2022
228 pages
$35.95
ISBN 9781684484188
New Studies in the Age of Goethe

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 the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante's Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows 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.

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Reviews
"Well-organized, broadly researched, and engagingly written." - Oxford German Studies, March 2025

"[A] model of Comparative Literature research. . . . Bucknell University Press deserves accolades for an excellently edited book that is elegantly produced with illustrations to support a very erudite and stimulating study." - Utopian Studies, June 2024

"[O]ne of those rare scholarly books that is both game-changing and thoroughly embedded within existing scholarship - well conceived, beautifully written, solidly documented and argued, and, most importantly, connecting traditional German studies of poetics and philosophy with significant new impetuses in cultural studies." - The German Quarterly, Winter 2024

"DiMassa's masterful book traces the fate of Dante in Germany, but in doing so tells a story of Romanticism and its many afterlives in Germany." - Adrian Daub, author of What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley

"DiMassa's erudite, intelligent, and elegantly written book offers an excellent overview of Dante's reception in Germany in the context of Romanticism around 1800 and Neo-Romanticism in the early 20th century." - Vittorio Hösle, author of Dante's "Commedia" und Goethe's "Faust"

"The German Romantics made Dante the ideal of modern poets. He became a mythical authority, with an absolute claim to the roles of truth-teller and guide. Dante in Deutschland traces this dream from its creative power to its megalomaniac tendency - a unique case of one name becoming the measure of all things." - Stefan Matuschek, author of Der gedichtete Himmel. Eine Geschichte der Romantik

"It is still widely assumed that The Divine Comedy, given Goethe's distaste for Dante, played little part in forming German modernity, and in shaping myths of a German return to medieval national and imperial glory. By leading us from a 1799 Jena reading circle to Stefan George and Thomas Mann, DiMassa fills in missing tranches of literary history to revise this potent, and ultimately tragic, narrative. Warmly recommended." - David Wallace, editor of Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418

"An illuminating lens through which to reread the multi-faceted, discursive formation known as 'German Romanticism.'" - Kirk Wetters, author of Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present

"[E]xhaustive in the documentation of every phase.... It emerges convincingly that there is more Dante in the deep history of German culture than might have been expected." - T.J. Reed, author of Genesis: The Making of Literary Works from Homer to Christa Wolf

About the author:

Daniel DiMassa is an assistant professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 9781684484195; EPUB: $35.95, 9781684484201