French Literature Reviews - 2026
Thomas Hunkeler, Le masque de Hegel
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
An article discussing this book can be found in Acta Fabula:
"La véritable histoire d’un faux authentique", by Mihai Duma…
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This is a literary and historical investigation focusing on an object as singular as it is revealing of the era that gave birth to it: the death mask of the philosopher Hegel.
Preserved at the German Literary Archives in Marbach, this plaster facial cast raises numerous questions regarding its authenticity and the circumstances of its creation. Above all, it traces the history of the living who sought to appropriate the legacy, capital, and energy of which this mask served as both emblem and tangible trace. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this eventful narrative brings together molders and collectors, legal scholars and politicians, philosophers and artists, from Elias Canetti to Virginia Woolf, and from André Breton to Paul Éluard.
Browse the book on the publisher's website…
Thomas Hunkeler is a literary critic and professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He is the author of Échos de l’ego dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett (L’Harmattan) and Paris et le nationalisme des avant-gardes (Hermann). He has conducted research on European modernism for many years.
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The death mask holds a long-standing place in European cultural history as a tangible link between a departed thinker and posterity, often functioning as both a relic and a symbolic cornerstone for philosophical and artistic movements. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, physical casts of notable figures frequently became objects of intense fascination, contestation, and appropriation among intellectuals and collectors seeking to claim a portion of a predecessor's intellectual capital.
Thomas Hunkeler examines the plaster facial cast of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel preserved at the German Literary Archives in Marbach. The volume traces the history of the various actors who sought to appropriate the legacy and energy of this object, a trajectory involving molders, legal scholars, politicians, philosophers, and artists such as Elias Canetti, Virginia Woolf, André Breton, and Paul Éluard. Readers interested in the intersections of modern European intellectual history, cultural memory, and the material afterlife of authors may find this study relevant.