In 1927, The Austrian Writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal gave a lecture at the University of Munich with the significantly untranslatable title “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation.” One might reasonably render it as “Literature as the Spiritual Domain of a Nation.” But it is notable that the first three operative words in the English version — namely, “literature,” “spiritual,” and “domain” — are of Latin origin, whereas the original words “Schrifttum,” “geistig,” and “Raum” are all unmistakably and intractably Germanic. And that was, in part, the point of Hofmannsthal’s lecture: he proposed that the literature of a people, the concentrated linguistic expression of its collective identity, was, or should be, the unique reflection of its characteristic qualities, indeed that it should be and preserve an abode in which the distinctive intellectual life of an entire people properly resided, where it found refuge, where it was most truly at home. But Hofmannsthal also argued that in an intact, well-functioning state or nation, there was a direct link between literature, or the vital intellectual tradition that constituted it, and the real world of actual events. “Der Raumbegriff, der aus diesem geistigen Ganzen emaniert,” he explained, “ist identisch mit dem Geisterraum, den die Nation in ihrem eigenen Bewußtsein und in dem der Welt einnimmt. Nichts ist im politischen Leben der Nation Wirklichkeit, das nicht in ihrer Literatur als Geist vorhanden wäre, nichts enthält diese lebensvolle, traumlose Literatur, das sich nicht im Leben der Nation verwirklichte.” There was, Hofmannsthal thought, an unbroken ring uniting the spiritual life of a people as expressed in the writings of its intellectual leaders with the political experience of that people as expressed by the social reality of the state in which they live.

Or at least that was how things ideally ought to be. Hofmannsthal was speaking in 1927 and describing a state of affairs that he thought held true preeminently for France, but that, at that point, did not exist in Germany. The reasons why Hofmannsthal thought that was so are complex and occupy the bulk of his speech. But he was optimistic that, as in France, the day might yet come in Germany in which this synthesis would be achieved, when, as he put it, “der Geist Leben wird und Leben Geist, mit anderen Worten: zu der politischen Erfassung des Geistigen und der geistigen des Politischen, zur Bildung einer wahren Nation.”