Modern Greece in the shadow of its past

Philhellenic discourse in German poetry

Abstract

European solidarity for the Greek insurrection of 1821 is only one of the modalities of the philhellenic discourse, which, in the modern era, was born with Winckelmann’s neoclassicism and has continued to operate over the centuries—until today, in the interest in Greece at a time of economic crisis, perceived as an ‘exotic’ land for its resistance to globalized capitalism and aggressive neoliberal­ism. What unites the different forms of philhellenism in the German literary texts analyzed here (from the epigonic poetry of the nineteenth century with Greek topics to Grünbein’s poem about the Acropolis, from the description of Athens in the first of Wolf’s lessons, which introduce the novel Kassandra to the poem in which Grass accuses the EU of the austerity measures imposed on Greece) is their idealization of Greece, whose counterpart is the denial of real Greece. The latter is perceived as disappointing if compared to ancient or pre-modern Greece, which conversely embodies the paradigm of classicism or of ‘authenticity’.