The Temple (Stephen Spender)
Encyclopedia
The Temple is a novel written by Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...

.

This novel was written after Spender spent his summer vacation in Germany in 1929 and recounts his experiences there. It was not completed until the early 1930s (after Spender had failed his finals at Oxford University in 1930 and moved to Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

). Because of its frank depictions of homosexuality, it was not published in the UK until 1988.

It was during this holiday in 1929 that Spender formed friendships with Herbert List
Herbert List
Herbert List was a German photographer who worked for magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life and was associated with Magnum Photos...

 (photographer) and Ernst Robert Curtius
Ernst Robert Curtius
Ernst Robert Curtius was a German literary scholar, a philologist and Romance language literary critic....

 (German critic), the latter of which introduced him to and cultivated his passion for Rilke, Hoelderlin
Hoelderlin
Hoelderlin is a German progressive rock band that was formed in 1970 as Hölderlin by Joachim and Christian von Grumbkow with Nanny de Ruig. They are influenced by rock, jazz, and folk music...

, Schiller, and Goethe.

The book is Spender's version of a Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...

and its content and style are thus heavily influenced by German culture. Spender himself had a particularly significant relationship with German culture which he found heavily conflicted with his Jewish roots. His taste for German society sets him apart from some of his contemporaries; yet even after contemplating suicide if the Nazis invaded England due to his abhorrence of their regime he still maintained a love of the country itself, returning to Germany after the war and writing a book about its ruins.
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