«Fingere di infangarsi». Aporie e prospettive critiche in Germania segreta di Furio Jesi

With the publication of Secret Germany. Myths in 20th-century German Culture, in 1967, Jesi realised an ambitious project from both a historical-literary and historical-psychological perspective: to show the influence of myths in German culture, from Thomas Mann to Nazism, from Rilke to the history of religions, from Brecht to Nietzsche. The aim of this essay is on the one hand to retrace the theoretical-biographical issues that accompanied its conception and drafting (mainly the relationship with Károly Kerényi), and on the other hand to show the internal tensions of Jesi’s argumentative proceeding within this work with its broad and airy perspectives, which are however sometimes accompanied by errors of interpretation and hasty reconstructions, especially with regard to the attempt to trace the cultural genesis of Nazi esotericism.