Antigone's (mis)appropriations in Twentieth-Century Europe: Memory, Politics and Resistance

Abstract

In this paper, I will offer a historicized reading ofAntigone's conceptualization as a political play by analysing its reception in twentieth-century Europe. I will focus in particular on Friedrich H¶lderlin's adaptation (1804), which is one of the very earliest post- Revolutionary witnesses to the political understanding of the play: it is particularly interesting because it provides a context for Bertolt Brecht's and other twentieth-century adaptations of the myth and it represents a crucial step towards the current interpretative model in which Antigone is an icon of radical dissent and resistance. Appropriated both by the Nazi regime and by factions of the Resistance, H¶lderlin's Antigone was exploited as a political, subversive document or as representative of a nationalistic classical tradition. This account of the political reception of Sophocles' Antigone in the twentieth century will contribute to shed light on the ideological climate which produced such a high number of adaptations of the ancient play, as well as on the reasons for its pertinence to twentieth-century temporal-political conditions.