Hofmannsthal e la religione

This essay, included in an issue of the review «Humanitas» entirely dedicated to the relationship between German literature and religion, analyses the presence of the “sacred” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s writings, not as a merely objective content but as a subjective dimension capable of becoming formal and compository principle. Thus it focuses on early poems such as the Ballade des äußeren Lebens (1894), as well as on the later comedies Der Schwierige (1921) and Der Unbestechliche (1923), where the Pauline motif of a love which covers and forgives all things becomes compository principle in analogy with Hofmannsthal’s coeval reflections on the literary-philosophical concept of romantic irony.