ABSTRACT
Reinhard Koselleck's work was based on a profound life experience: being born in 1923, he experienced Nazism and World War II from the inside, and was particularly concerned about the impact exerted by Utopian thinking on the phenomena. German Romanticism had three peculiar features, each closely linked to the sudden German interest in William Shakespeare: a special focus on theatre; an obsession with dreams; and a presumptuous fascination with Titanic figures, especially Prometheus. Bla Hamvas was a Hungarian essayist, historian and philosopher of religion; arguably, together with his one-time friend and fellow journal editor Kroly Kernyi, he was the most important figure of Hungarian intellectual life in the 20th century. The idyllic is best evoked in a few special works of art: in some paintings of Corot or Raphael, in the music of Bach or Mozart, in the poems of Hlderlin, Wordsworth or Keats, or in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
