Rovesciando Dante. L’Inferno secondo Peter Weiss

Abstract

This essay is dedicated to the reception and reuse of Dante’s Divina Commedia in the work Inferno by writer and playwright Peter Weiss. Dante’s supernatural journey becomes the return home of the exiled poet who, thrown into the contemporary world of manipulation and darkness, is exposed to ridicule, humiliation and torture. The land to which ‘Dante’ returns is the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1960s: a period in which West Germany began a literary reflection on the Third Reich and felt the need to analyse this period in light of the continuing influence of fascist structures in politics and economics.