Table Of ContentAvihu Zakai
Erich Auerbach
and the Crisis
of German
Philology
The Humanist Tradition in Peril
Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology
Avihu Zakai
Erich Auerbach and the
Crisis of German Philology
The Humanist Tradition in Peril
Avihu Zakai
Department of History
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem , Israel
ISBN 978-3-319-40957-3 ISBN 978-3-319-40958-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40958-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948202
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For my four grandparents, who were
murdered in the Holocaust, and my
grandchildren, Ori, Rahm, and Mika,
the joy of my life.
Pref ace
Philology itself, the branch of literary studies that most loudly cultivates distance from
ideology and engagement with the most arcane details, might instead be an authentically—
and repeatedly, in one strong voice after another—political activity. (María Rosa Menocal
1994, p. 99)
T he science which seeks, by interpreting documents, to determine what they held to be true
is called philology . Thus philology is enlarged to mean what in Germany is called
Geistesgeschichte, to include all historical disciplines, including the history of law and
economic history. (Auerbach LLP , 115)
Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology analyzes Auerbach’s life and
mind in the wide ideological, philological, and historical context of his time, espe-
cially the rise of A ryan philology and its eventual triumph with the N azi Revolution
or the Hitler Revolution in 1933 in Germany. It deals specifi cally with his struggle
against the premises of Aryan philology, based on v ölkisch mysticism and Nazi
historiography, which eliminated the Old Testament from German Kultur and
Volksgeist in particular and Western culture and civilization in general, and led to
his great apologia for, or defense and justifi cation of, Western Judaeo-Christian
humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment. His ultimate goal was to coun-
ter the overt racist belief in the community of blood and fate of the German people,
which sharply distinguished K ultur from civilization and glorifi ed völkisch nation-
alism over European civilization.
A uerbach began his struggle against A ryan philology in Germany in 1933 in his
famous essay Figura, which he published in exile in I stanbul in 1938. Figura is
traditionally regarded as a brilliant philological and literary study, but it should be
seen, above all, as an apologia for the Old Testament’s validity and credibility.
Auerbach made clear that, in contrast to the premises of A ryan philology, völkisch
mysticism, and N azi historiography, Western culture and civilization are based upon
the fi gural interpretation of history . which establishes an intrinsic, inextricable con-
nection between the Old and New Testaments. Figural interpretation , he wrote,
“wished to preserve the full historicity of the Scriptures along with the deeper
meaning.” As it “asserted both the historical reality of the Old and the New
Testaments and also their providential connectedness,” it fully supports the credibil-
vii
viii Preface
ity, validity, and authority of the Old Testament, in opposition to the premises of
Aryan philology . Far more than a mere philological study, F igura was a mission of
grand proportions. It seeks to defi ne the humanist ramifi cations of F igura as
deployed by Saint Paul , Augustine, Aquinas , and Dante. In Auerbach’s hands,
Figura , born “in the nexus of Judaism and Christianity,” embodies “one of the con-
ditions of the literary project of the West.” Philology becomes an integral and for-
midable ideological tool, and fi gural i nterpretation is transformed into a powerful
weapon against A ryan philology, mysticism, and historiography. With Auerbach,
ideology becomes an essential, inseparable part of philology.
In 1942, the most crucial year of World War II , which witnessed the battles of
Stalingrad , Midway , and El Alamein , Auerbach started writing M imesis in exile in
I stanbul. It constitutes a grand a pologia for Western Judeo-Christian humanist tradi-
tion as it confronted erasure. Like Augustine and Pascal , to name only two other
famous apologists, Auerbach wrote in defense of Western Judeo-Christian humanist
civilization at the time of its greatest existential challenge. Like F igura , M imesis
was not only a philological, literary study, which inaugurated, among other things,
the fi eld of c omparative literature; this celebrated work was based on the idea that
the Old Testament, not the classical Greek culture of myths, legends, and heroes
recently revived by the Nazis, is the source of history and, hence, the representation
of reality in Western culture. In contrast to the received view that M imesis ’s literary
space extends from Homer, Auerbach sets the history of European literature “from
Genesis all the way to Virginia W oolf, ” clearly revealing his main aim: to demon-
strate that Scripture leads “from distant legend and its fi gural interpretation into
everyday contemporary reality” (M , p. 159), while the premises of Aryan philology
and culture lead from legend to lunacy—S chwarmerei .
Both Figura and M imesis begin with the Jewish Bible. For Auerbach, the Old
Testament’s authority informed the content and structure of Western humanist civi-
lization. However, while F igura is directed against the specifi c crisis of German
philology , M imesis was constructed against the grave threat to Western European
humanist civilization as a whole in the face of Nazi barbarism. Legends, myths, and
the culture of heroes had become a crucial part of the Nazi worldview and Aryan
ideology, and building myths and heroes was an integral part of their cultural drive.
Against the fl ight from reason inherent in Nazi racist and anti-Semitic ideologies, or
their “racial barbarism,” M imesis stresses the rational, realist, and humanist view of
history, a teleological, progressive view in which the representation of reality
advances toward democracy in a unique grand drama. It was written, in Auerbach’s
words, to “those whose love for our western [humanist] history has serenely pre-
served” them during the horrors of World War II. At the same time, he saw early
twentieth-century works by Virginia Woolf , Marcel Proust, and James Joyce as a
departure from humanist, rationalist, and democratic progress in the representation
of reality, substantiating Oswald Spengler’s claims in The Decline of the West .
Rejecting his previous adherence to Vico and Hegel’s belief in teleological, histori-
cal progress, Auerbach found at the end of M imesis that modern literature led to
dissolution.
Preface ix
The decline of the West , then, was inextricably connected to the failure of real-
ism in its literature and culture. Auerbach’s growing pessimism is more than under-
standable; many years of hard life in exile and constant struggle against Nazism and
Aryan philology left their indelible marks. Indeed, while Auerbach strongly
defended the humanist Western Judeo-Christian tradition in M imesis , he could not
ignore the terrible impact of the two bestial world wars.
Several colleagues and friends read the whole or part of my work and offered
valuable comments and criticism, among them Martin V ialon, the late María Rosa
Menocal, Stephen G. Nichols, Jan M. Ziolkowski, the late William Calin, Martin
Elsky , James Porter , Paul Mendes-Flohr, David Weinstein, Stephen Whitfi ld, and
Malachi HaCohen. I owe special thanks to my long-time editor Julie Edelson, who
made my work shine in a new light. Finally, I would like to thank my agent, Leslie
Gardner, who made things happen.
Part of Appendix 1, “ Constructing and Representing Reality : Hegel and the
Making of Erich Auerbach’s M imesis ,” appeared in D igital Philology: A Journal of
Medieval Cultures, 4, 1 (Spring 2015): 106–133, and part of Appendix 2, “Exile and
Criticism: Edward Said’s Interpretation of Erich Auerbach,” appeared in S ociety, 57
(2015): 275–282 (both in somewhat different versions). I am grateful to the editors
of these journals for the permission to use the material here.
Jerusalem, Israel Avihu Zakai
