Externe Wirksamkeit literarischer Imagination. Überlegungen am Beispiel schweizerischer imagerie culturelle

This article deals with the interactions of literary imagination, cultural identity for-mation processes and cultural policy strategies. Literature here is understood not just as a reflection of collective memory, and it is not reduced to a representation of the col-lective mentality of a society at a particular moment in time. Instead, using the Swiss cultural imagination during the era of ›intellectual national defence‹ against Nazi Ger-many as an example, the influence of literary imaginings on the formation and trans-formation of models of collective identity models is examined. The analysis will focus on the specific potential of literary imagination, which, under certain conditions, can achieve a high level of effectiveness in the socio-political area.