This thesis consists of an intertextual study in which the main goal is to examine how Erich Auerbach, a reader of Dante, absorbed the previous and contemporary reception of the Florentine poet in Germany. Its objective is to reflect on the concept of unity as an interpretive key for The Divine Comedy, whose implications in the auerbachian reflection would assume a dimension that is both epistemological and ethical. When observing the long path of Dante s readers on German soil, it became clear that the history of opinions traced by the philologist contained numerous omissions, which, far from reflecting nescience, marked his position in the minefield that characterized the German Dantology from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, the 19th-century phase of the critique on Dante s work is analyzed in its philological-historical aspect, in which the question of the comedy s unity would assume the disciplinary and methodological horizon solidified by Croce and Vossler in the following years. Lastly, the studies produced by Auerbach in the 1920s and 1930s are investigated to highlight the theoretical and political rivalries that cut across the academic environment in which he was inserted. Among the interpretative trends that were established after the First World War, the search for the present relevance of The Comedy for German society is highlighted. On the one hand, this inclination was used as the basis for chauvinistic and racialist readings of Dante s work, and on the other, it supported the defense of the unity of European culture that, to some extent, his poem would allow to glimpse. Auerbach s texts are placed in the second category since in Dante s verses he found the meaning of his involvement in the world as a European philologist.