Leone Traverso e Germanica

Germanica was published in 1942, concomitantly with Elio Vittorini’s Americana, and shows the negotiation of three dominants (Jakobson): first, the editorial one, i.e. Valentino Bompiani and his invention of the anthological series “Pantheon”; the second dominant, the political one, was the fascist censorial politics, which proved particularly restrictive towards German literature. Third, the literary dominant was represented by Leone Traverso, the editor and an acknowledged hermeticist, and Elio Vittorini, “Pantheon” director and promoter of a new realist poetic. Despite its innovative potential in the Italian repertoire of German literature, Germanica, differently from Americana, did not succeed in establishing as a post-war literary manifesto.