Hellas-Kitsch. Griechenland als Antidot zur Gegenwart in der deutschen Lyrik des späten 19. Jahrhunderts

In the German poetry of the second half of the 19th century, decades after the Epanastasi, Greece remains a popular subject that is now being forced into epigonal poetic forms. In the texts of poets and scholars such as Ziel, Geibel, Altwasser or von Schack, Greece is antiqued and transformed into a kitsch scenography, into a refuge for bourgeois idyllic fantasies. Greek antiquity has now lost all metamorphic potential; what remains is a Mannerist landscape of ruins that proves to be functional for the development of a conservative, apolitical, anti-realist aesthetic and in which the concretely existing Greece, which is in deep distress after the successful revolution, finds no place—as in the philhellenic discourse, by the way, mostly the case is. Is such poetry still readable today? If you decontextualize them and look for their unintentionally frivolous effect, then surprisingly this fake Greece can be appreciated as a kind of stage for pop operettas.