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Between 1927 and 1928 two curious studies were published in Germany with an historical-religious issue: Historische Psychologie des Karnevals by Florens Christian Rang, and a volume of dialogues – retracing the structure of the Macrobio's Saturnalia – by Werner Hegemann, Der gerettete Christus, oder Iphigenies Flucht vor dem Ritualopfer. In both texts we fi nd the theme of the "king of the Saturnalia", which – based on previous fragile conjectural interpretations by James George Frazer, that hypothesized a parallel between the sacrifi ce of the roman Saturnal-king and the crucifi xion of Christ – is interpreted as the sovereign of a carnivalesque interregnum that subverts the order of the cosmos, and founds in this space-time alternation a model of "closed destiny" from which man incessantly tries to escape.

"In these times, when my imagination is preoccupied with the most unworthy problems between sunrise and sunset, I experienced at night, more and more often, its emancipation in dreams, which nearly always have a political subject. I would really like to be in a position to tell you about them someday. They represent a pictorial atlas of the secret history of National Socialism." So writes Walter Benjamin to his friend Gershom Scholem on March 3, 1934. Benjamin was unable to tell this "secret history" after the seizure of power by the National Socialists; Nevertheless, the dream has a central importance in his thought. So it seems legitimate to read in this sense the text entitled "Cellar" in "One-Way Street", where he condenses reflections on friendship, on the psychological repression, and the sacrificial symbolism. This text Benjamin's can be compared with another dream-vision called "The monastery church" present in "The adventurous heart" Ernst Jünger's, which has also a sacrificial symbolism (a sacrifice that can be read as an allegory of the complicated relations of the author with the National Socialism). The juxtaposition of these two texts can bring out a so-called "Third Reich of Dreams" (as the title of a book of 1966 of the German-Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt), to examine in a metaphorical and historical sense, as antinomical issues of a visual paradigm between dream and politics in the literary discourse.

Es liegt die Vermutung nahe, dass es für 'die Jugend' gerade in den frühen Nachkriegsjahren einen großen Bedarf an Sinn und Trost, an Religion und 'Religioidem' (Simmel) gegeben habe. Aber war es tatsächlich so? Gerade die junge Generation hatte sich mit einer nie dagewesenen "transzendentalen Obdachlosigkeit" (G. Lukács) auseinanderzusetzen. Wenn sie das denn wirklich tat! Wie ging sie mit der Schuldfrage um? Griff sie auf das zurück, was sich in Literatur, Philosophie, Theologie längst 'bewährt' hatte? Konnten die Vergemeinschaftungsprozesse der historischen Jugendbewegung mit ihrer Semantik noch für die Bedürfnisse nach weltanschaulicher Zugehörigkeit einen Raum bieten? Nahm Jugend den Charakter eines Sondermilieus an, um sich abzugrenzen von denen, die die Katastrophe zu verantworten hatten? Diesen und anderen Fragen widmet sich der vorliegende Band.