The spell of Italy: The Goethe-effect and the German literary imaginatio

When Goethe undertook a journey to Italy he established a pattern that has been a constant pre-occupation of German writers ever since. Italy serves as the very real space in which German classical culture comes to understand and realize itself. Peculiar to this pre-occupation is the idea that Italy is the space of the "other"--the site of the ancient, the Catholic and the "hot-blooded." Accordingly, for all those writers who have identified themselves with Goethe and the German literary tradition in general, Italy functions as a necessary destabilizing moment. This dissertation analyzes the different functions assigned to the literary space Italy occupies for German writers and how it enables them to produce and contribute to this self-conscious tradition.;Although Goethe travels to Italy in search of liberation, this first trip is already modeled on others--on that of Winckelmann and on that of his father. By privileging copies over original works of art, Winckelmann constructed a vacated space or a site of vacation that lent absence an ideal character. For Goethe that space is haunted by his father, who from birth had prepared Goethe for an Italian vacation. Escape from the "fatherland" thus becomes a return to the father--a paradox that is even more binding for everyone who follows Goethe to Italy. Subsequent repetitions, however, bear a marker of difference. For Heine, Italy is a place where he comes to terms with his Jewishness, which, in turn, forces him into exile. For Nietzsche, Italy serves as a third term to escape the Greco-German alliance as it was presented in The Birth of Tragedy, but it is also haunted by the ghosts of that alliance. Italy, for Freud, is the locus of his "Hannibal complex" and of the uncanny experience of the excision of the Jew from the body politic. Finally, in our century, as a result of these previous journeys to the South, Italy becomes a site to consort with the devil.