From Dante’s 'Divine Comedy' to Peter Weiss’s 'Gottlose Komödie'. Allego-ry and Political Criticism in the Drama 'Inferno' (1964)
Abstract
Between the years 1964 and 1969, Peter Weiss worked on an ambitious project, a dramatic rewriting of the Divine Comedy that is known as DC-Projekt. That is considered one of the most original and fascinating instances of the creative reception of the poem that has taken place in the 20th century. This article focuses on the analysis of the drama Inferno (1964), a dramatic piece, still unpublished in Spain, and conceived as an integral part of that project. The examination of the work is done from a comparative perspective, especially attentive to the transcontextualization mechanisms that suffer the contents and images of the medieval poem to adapt, after the civilizatory crisis that Auschwitz supposes, to a horizon of meaning without a trace of religious transcendence. In particular, it is shown that the ambiguity of the extratextual referents and the allegorical polysemy of the piece implicitly convey contents of strong political criticism.
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