Le opere come spazio spirituale della nazione

This is the first ever annotated edition of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essay, Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation, the famous speech given by the Austrian poet on 10th January 1927 at the University of Munich. The text, considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century German essay writing, is presented here in a new Italian translation, accompanied by critical notes and enriched by a long introductory essay, which illustrates its genesis and the many philosophical and cultural suggestions that inspired it. An in-depth investigation of the sources and contemporary documentation has thus allowed us to unleash the semantic richness of this text, until now reduced by a ‘political’ reading to a document of European conservative thought.