Il romanzo storico tedesco di fine Ottocento come scuola di inumanità: Felix Dahn (1834-1912). Una biografia critica

This book collects the results of long and in-depth research conducted by the author on the figure of Felix Dahn (1834-1912), professor of legal discipline and history of law in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany, but above all a successful author of historical novels, whose enormous fortune contributed to spreading and popularizing a tragic-heroic Germanism fatal to the corrosion of every principle of humanity, with unfortunate repercussions on the education of entire generations of young Germans up until the Second World War. The volume reconstructs the origins of the Germanic myth in Dahn’s work through an in-depth biographical investigation that highlights the connections between the writer’s personal story and the cultural and political history of his time, drawing for the first time on a wealth of unpublished documentation, consisting in particular of family correspondence and letters from friends and colleagues, kept at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Hauptstaatsarchiv München, never used by scholars until now.