An analysis of how a political myth is taken and treated as a metaphor
that reflects how a country like Germany built its own destiny.
In the decades before the rise of the Third Reich, "Secret Germany" was
a phrase used by the circle of writers around the poet Stefan George to
describe a collective political and poetic project: the introduction of
the highest values of art into everyday life, the secularization of myth
and the mythologization of history. In this book, Furio Jesi takes up
the term in order to trace the contours of that political, artistic, and
aesthetic thread as it runs through German literary and artistic culture
in the period--which, in the 1930s, became absorbed by Nazism as part of
its prophecy of a triumphant future. Drawing on thinkers like Carl Jung
and writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, Jesi reveals a
literary genre that was transformed, tragically, into a potent political
myth.