Un’Ellade kitsch. La Grecia come antidoto al presente nella lirica tedesca del tardo Ottocento

In the German poetry of the second half of the 19th century Greece, decades after the uprising (in Greek Epanàstasi, 1821) against Ottoman rule, remains a popular subject. However, in the style of poets such as Ernst Ziel, Emanuel Geibel, Theodor Altwasser, Franz Binhack or Adolf Friedrich von Schack, the real Greece is antiqued and transformed into a kitschy scenography, into a refuge for bourgeois idyllic fantasies. Greek antiquity has now lost all metamorphic potential; what remains is an artificial image that proves to be functional for the development of a conservative, apolitical, anti-realist aesthetic and in which the concretely existing Greece finds no place – as in the philhellenic discourse, by the way, mostly the case is. Is such poetry still readable today? We can easily dismiss it as ‘epigonal poetry’, because the classicism it claims to embody is reduced to little more than a mannerist landscape full of ruins, olive trees, shepherds, and dancing women, and to the elegiac lament for irretrievably lost Hellas. But 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.