Il demone della nostalgia. L’invenzione della Grecia da Nietzsche a Arendt

The storm that swept across Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was also a battle of ideas, identities and world views: a story of men and women, philosophers and philologists, writers and intellectuals who, in those troubled times, sought to understand who they were – and who we are – by looking in one specific direction: ancient Greece, the only true homeland from which everyone felt exiled. What was then, and is now, the weight of the past in the construction of our identity, both individual and collective, as Europeans and Westerners? What is the secret that Greece guards so jealously? Mauro Bonazzi reconstructs the fascinating genealogy of these debates, in which returning to the ancients is the only way to come to terms with a modernity that is in crisis. And in reconstructing it, he evokes all those figures who, in a brilliant, provocative and surprising way, proposed “another idea of Greece”: from Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Adorno and Popper to Hannah Arendt. Because there is nothing less peaceful than the past, and it is the way we imagine it that shapes our future. Between the 19th and 20th centuries, a heated debate raged throughout Europe, and particularly in Germany, about the Greek legacy. How much and how of what had been written in that distant time should survive in modern times? This debate re-emerges in all its liveliness in these richly documented pages, which make up a great story that has never ceased to speak to us. Discussing the Greeks means discussing ourselves, our identity as Europeans and Westerners, and it is essential to do so now, in a rapidly changing world. The starting point is the man who most attacked the 19th-century myth of an ideal, perfect, rational Greece. The year is 1872, the book is The Birth of Tragedy, and the protagonist is Friedrich Nietzsche. He was the first to reveal all the mystifications of nineteenth-century classicism, leading his readers towards a completely different Greece, much darker and more intoxicating, archaic, of which European modernity is a traitor and certainly not an heir. The sirens of this Greece would then attract many others – we are at the turn of the two world wars – intent on grasping its political potential. At the centre of it all is Plato, a human Plato, all too human, for whom theoretical contemplation must translate into concrete action. It is by appropriating this Greece that the Nazis were able to present themselves as the guardians of Germany, and of Europe as a whole, the only ones capable of protecting a tradition that seemed on the verge of collapse. Is this only an aberration, or is the story more complicated? In 1933, Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl discussed precisely this in a dialogue at a distance. For those who fled Nazism, such as Auerbach, Adorno, Weil and Bespaloff, the same guardian deities of the ancient world took on other, less monolithic and more critical connotations. Resistance also came through books. This led to Arendt and Strauss, who were convinced that it was necessary to return to the origins to bring the modern world out of the doldrums in which it had run aground: to return to Greece, where it all began, to understand the reasons behind everything that would happen later. Bonazzi guides us, with the knowledge of a scholar and the light touch of a storyteller, through the twists and turns of a web of thought and stories that concerns our ever-changing relationship with the past and can help us decipher the chaotic times we are living in.