Furio Jesi

On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed, and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the League were killed, and the revolt was quashed....

An analysis of how a political myth is taken and treated as a metaphor that reflects how a country like Germany built its own destiny. In the decades before the rise of the Third Reich, Secret Germany was a phrase used by the circle of writers around the poet Stefan George to describe a collective political and poetic project: the...