La crisi dell’‘anima bella’ nella Germania bismarckiana e guglielmina. I romanzi storici di Felix Dahn

This essay investigates and reconstructs the corrosion process undergone by the humanistic ideal of Weimar classicism in the second half of the 19th century in Germany, and the contextual elaboration of a new ideal of man, no longer inspired by Goethe’s universalism and by the aesthetic and moral harmony of Schiller’s “beautiful soul”, but marked by a tragic-heroic nationalism, which was peculiar of German culture in the Bismarckian and Wilhelminian age. This contribution examines in particular the historical novels of Felix Dahn (1834-1912), in which the reversal of the anthropological and cultural paradigm is more evident. The German author did not just accompany, but promoted with a militant attitude the transition from a classicism, now emptied of all moral depth, to a new model of heroic humankind, thus radicalising the Prussian “virtues” of discipline, obedience and self-sacrifice for one’s own Nation.