Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Color of Classicism

Abstract

Reflecting on the role of color as a racial marker in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s writings on Greek antiquity, this article argues that the author’s modernist displacement of classicism is at the same time a conflicted reckoning with Europe’s racialized primal scene. Analyzing the 1903 tragedy Elektra as well as later writings on his Greek journey, I show how Hofmannsthal’s re-articulation of Germany’s fictive kinship with the ancient Greeks also re-writes the racial imaginaries that have colored this figure of the ‘beginning’ since the 18th century. Hofmannsthal’s fascination with the ancient Greeks serves me as a prism through which I trace how the discourse on the Greek ‘beginning’ of European culture was also a discourse about racial difference. Reading Elektra in relation to contemporaneous discourses on blood, kinship, and purity, I argue that the play reflects on how meaning is attributed to a body, reproducing but also interrogating a set of deeply ingrained images from Europe’s colonial archive. Hofmannsthal’s writings about his Greek journey, by contrast, are an attempt at recuperating the phantasy of a (racially) pure origin, while also bearing the mark of the author’s encounter with a racial hybridity he decided to excise from his text years after the journey.