Published in 1959, the book recounts the sensations of his post-war journey to Germany. It is named after a verse of Goethe’s Faust, which tells of the guardian of the tower that scrutinizes and sees down overnight fires and signs of massacre everywhere “durch den Linden Doppelnacht” (“for the double night of linden trees”). The cover of the first edition reads: “Carlo Levi’s countries always become ‘his own’, related to this guest in a perpetual state of grace by a relationship (as if of consanguinity or identification with an inner reality) with a lyrical, existential, rational and historical symbol. Germany is and remains for Levi, the antithesis, the other from himself. Even his cognitive solicitude would lead him to attack it from all sides, to try to incorporate it, to bring forth that which, beyond the glittering showcases of the “German economic miracle” and the shutters of the oblivion of the past, is his soul”.
