The Temple is a novel written by Stephen Spender.
This novel was written after Spender spent his summer vacation in Germany in 1929 and recounts his experiences there. It was not completed until the early 1930s (after Spender had failed his finals at Oxford University in 1930 and moved to Hamburg). Because of its frank depictions of homosexuality, it was not published in the UK until 1988.
It was during this holiday in 1929 that Spender formed friendships with Herbert List (photographer) and Ernst Robert Curtius (German critic), the latter of which introduced him to and cultivated his passion for Rilke, Hoelderlin, Schiller, and Goethe.
The book is Spender's version of a Bildungsroman and its content and style are thus heavily influenced by German culture. Spender himself had a particularly significant relationship with German culture which he found heavily conflicted with his Jewish roots. His taste for German society sets him apart from some of his contemporaries; yet even after contemplating suicide if the Nazis invaded England due to his abhorrence of their regime he still maintained a love of the country itself, returning to Germany after the war and writing a book about its ruins.[1]