Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Moravia’s Il dio Kurt: Oedipus as βάσανος of a Nazi Experiment and The Ideology of Race

Abstract

The play Il dio Kurt («God Kurt») written by Alberto Moravia in 1968 offers a brilliant re-elaboration of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in terms of denouncement of the terrible truth of the Nazi-legacy and the experiences of the Holocaust. Setting the story within the so-called univers concentrationnaire, through his titular character, Kurt, Moravia re-enacts the tragedy of Oedipus by presenting it as a Nazi ‘cultural experiment’, which is in line with the infamous ‘scientific’ experiments promoted by the Führer to pursue his racial ‘dream’, i.e., restore the purity of the Master Race, the Aryan, polluted by the Jews. This paper intends to provide a systematic analysis of Moravia’s play in terms of reception of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex by offering a comparative reading of the Greek model and its Nazi adaptation. It thus explores the author’s subtle mechanisms of appropriation of the Greek original within the context of Nazi ideology, to show how the modern author has re-proposed and adapted the essence of the ancient play to make it a vehicle of criticism of that ideology.