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Dear Dante Alighieri, you don't write letters to dead poets.

If I do it anyway, it will only be because it supports the state.

And because I know that my writing will reach you in the afterlife.

Who but you turned Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory into a poetic packing station with 99 lockers?

My dear Dante, the Germans don't mean well with you.

Years ago they spread the rumor that you weren't an Italian poet at all, but a Brazilian central defender at Bayern.

And now a German columnist believed he was particularly original by comparing apples with pears for the Dante year.

Shakespeare, wrote his colleague Arno Widmann from the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, “seems light years more modern to us”.

Than you, Dante!

This touched an old, delicate point in German-Italian relations.

The saying goes like this: “Germans love Italians, but don't appreciate them.

The Italians appreciate the Germans, but don't love them. ”So the proverbial amount of offense played a role.

The Italian, I don't need to tell you that, dear Dante, doesn't have fun when it comes to football, pasta and Dante poetry.

TS Eliot on Dante and Shakespeare

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Why the stupid comparison at all?

Because TS Eliot, also not a bad poet, is supposed to have said: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between themselves.

There is no third ”.

And now, of all people, a Teuton is bringing the two stars down from heaven.

That was concentrated feed for populists like Matteo Salvini (Team Dante) and a replica for journalists like Roberto Saviano (Team Widmann and Dante).

This was followed by exciting reports from all over Europe from the “Corriere della Sera” to the “Guardian”.

What do Widmann allow?

My dear Dante, it could be worse for you than heating up continental tempers 700 years after your death and being a little less fashionable than Shakespeare.

In the Dead Poets Club, you are my hero.

In your “Divine Comedy”, you inspected the afterlife and wrote 99 songs like no one before and after you.

You otherworldly reporter, you!

On Good Friday of the year 1300 you entered the territory of the Church in literary terms and dared to send five popes to hell.

Today you will receive applause from the incumbent pontiff.

Francis honored you with an instructional letter.

You are a real prophet.

The Church takes her poetry seriously, as a vision.

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Forget the German feature section!

You have inspired visual artists through the centuries, gave computer game developers the idea of ​​different levels and donated consolation to well-read people from all over Europe in Auschwitz, because there were no terms for hell on earth except your verses.

You taught me personally that Hell is not just hot with blood, but deep down where Lucifer is frozen, freezing cold.

Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio

To be honest, as a German I have always admired how early Italian literary history started with its

tre corone

: Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio.

In Florence, world literature was happening six centuries earlier than in Goethe-Schiller-Weimar.

In conclusion, dear Dante, I won't tell you a secret (but if you feel like it, you can still pass it on to Salvini): In no other language in the world are there more Dante translations than German.

When in doubt, even kings in Germany used the hobby of translating Dante: Think of Johann von Sachsen alias Philalethes, his monument is in front of the Semperoper in Dresden.

I think, dear Dante, I can apply for a guided tour of hell with you at any time.

Cordialmente, your Marc Reichwein