Approaches to a history of European mentality in the modern age are derived here from the confrontation of thematically related works in German and Italian literature. The emphasis is on the following topics: the universal idea of Europe advanced in Romanticism and its replacement by national concepts, the corresponding forms taken by the historiography of national literature, the concepts of melancholy operative in the age of restoration, the specific national variations on the theme of decadence, the positions taken up by European conservatism and aestheticism, the comparison between Italian futurism and German expressionism, strategies for coming to terms with the First and Second World War, and literary memorialization of the holocaust.