Pietre e pietrificazioni: metamorfosi dell’inorganico dal mito al Novecento

This contribution retraces some of the stages of the metamorphosis of ‘stone’ from the myth of Medusa, through the animated statues of the Gothic, the ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’ of the Romantic mines and marble Venuses, the Hauffian ‘heart of stone’ and George’s ‘black flower’ until the 20th century. If the invisible wall and the petrification of civilisation in Haushofer’s Die Wand give rise to a new myth of ‘ecocentric’ and ‘matriarchal’ re-foundation, the stone of the lagers resurfaces as a backlit memory in Jelinek and Ransmayr and in the archaeological operation of excavation in the stratifications of memory of Sebald, Salomon and Celan, symbolised by the organic/inorganic short-circuit of the metaphor of the witness’ “petrified eye” by the latter.