«Benedizioni dal cielo e benedizioni dall'abisso». Giuseppe e le sue fonti

The article is a survey of Thomas Mann’s Joseph und seine Brüder, concerning his employment of the manifold sources, from which he draws inspiration and whose contents he transfuses into his own work. After describing the author’s technique of expanding the scanty plot of the stories of Genesis and the theory of mythical circularity which lays at the basis of his biblical tetralogy, the article moves on to analyze the use Thomas Mann makes of ideologically oriented sources, which are part of the German right-wing galaxy and which demonstrate the author’s fascination for the irrational and the obscure even after his democratic turn and behind his public defence of the Weimar republic.