This text has as its central theme the romantic desire for nature as a response to the contemporary political conflicts. Taking some examples from the 1920's, I discuss the way Macunaíma, a work of Mário de Andrade, was based on an image of a natural space without any history. By contrast, I present the extremely conflictuous area in which Koch-Grünberg has collected the narratives about Makunaima. The aestheticized nature invented by the romantics had as its result the covering of the violence constitutive of what indeed today is understood as national reality.
Macunaíma; Romanticism; Nature