A real fascination with Greece arose in Germany at the end of the 18th century with the works of Winckelmann, the founder of scientific archeology. The subject of this text is the German nostalgia for Greece which developed at that time in the circle of the first romanticists and among the thinkers of German idealism. The emphasis will be put on three of the most important figures of German poetry and philosophy of this period: Schiller, Hegel and Hölderlin. But it will be shown that it is only with Hölderlin that for this idealized image of Greece a new image of Greece as profoundly divided between Occident and Orient was substituted.
