Gustav René Hockes Abenteuer in Italien

In 1939, Gustav René Hocke published the first version of the travel novel The vanished face.An adventure in Italy, in which he searches for a reconciliation between tradition and modernity thought possible in southern Italy and especially in Calabria and Apulia, far from the usual travel routes.The sea, the landscape, where a mythical atmosphere is unexpectedly still perceived, and the people of Italian Magna Graecia, which proves to be a contact zone of cultures, evoke an ecstatic experience that captivates the protagonist of the text.This article aims to analyse the literary imagination of the Mediterranean area and the southern Italian regions explored by the German journalist, narrator and cultural historian Hocke in fascist Italy in more detail.In its marginality, this ›southern perspective‹, which once again delves into the relationship between Europe and its Other, can indeed offer, or at least hint at the possibility of a pause and an alternative life project, and make one particularly feel the distance to an insane time.