FROM DREAM TO TOWER: HOFMANNSTHAL'S LAST DRAMA AS A REACTION TO THE FIRST WAR

In 1928, Hugo von Hofmannsthal published The Tower, his last play and his legacy, based on La vida es sueno by Calderon de la Barca. The fictional plot presents an ancient Poland shaken by a lost war and oscillating between three kinds of government: the traditional, the legal and the charismatic. Sigismund, the son of the dethroned despot, fails to establish himself as a new and humane ruler and so does the millenaristic revolution of the orphan children; the triumph falls to the soldier Olivier, supported by radical amorality and brutal troopers. This scenario can be seen as an allegory of the Austrian post-war context and of the rising of fascist movements in Europe. Hofmannsthal also integrates elements from the works of M. Weber, W. Benjamin and C. Schmitt in The Tower, so it can be understood as a fictional complement to the perceptive analyzes made by these intellectuals of the European society after the catastrophe of the war.