Guerra, rivolta, rinuncia: sull’Antigone di Walter Hasenclever

Written between 1916 and 1917, between the battlefields of the First World War and the admission to a war psychiatric hospital, Walter Hasenclever’s Antigone provides an ideal ground – even if extremely problematic – to problematize the impact of the figure at the center of Sophocles’ tragedy on modern German culture and literature. Placed at an almost symmetrical distance between Hölderlin’s famous translation/rewriting and the Brechtian reworking of the years after the Second World War, Hasenclever’s drama hints at new potential meanings and transformations of the Sophocles myth, without succeeding in carrying out its potentialities. Beyond the historicalliterary categories, the aporias of this rewriting of Sophocles tragedy can constitute, today, the main reason for a re-reading of this drama.