Abstract
The literary critic, Edward Said (1935–2003), examined literature in light of social and cultural politics. He analyzed in his words the close connection between history and literature, and exile and history, a subject that occupied much of his life of the mind. Ironically, Said was totally silent about the force, the passion, the drive to write and invest texts with history in his approach to the writings of the German-Jewish philologist and literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892–1957). In discussing his works, Said gives no sense of the historical, ideological and philological context within which the famous philologist wrote his works, while nevertheless acknowledging that Auerbach always referred to the “social environment” of a given writer. My goal is not only to illuminate the suspicious absence of historical and ideological context in Said’s treatment of Auerbach’s works, but also to offer possible answers why he did so. For Said was decisive in creating “narratives of oppression,” and in epitomizing them as well. Thus it seems that his obsession with Western “narratives of oppression” led him to ignore their content and form within the West, when another exiled scholar composed them.
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Notes
Edward Said, “History, Literature, and Geography,” 1995, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), p. 453.
Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. xv (emphasis in original).
Ibid., p. xviii.
Ibid., xix. Emphasis in original. For Said’s discussion of the meaning and significance of texts, see also Said, “Preface,” in Literature and Society, ed., Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 1–14, and Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 31–53.
Said, “Opponents, Audience, Constituencies, and Community,” 1982, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 140.
Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” in Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 6.
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 1984, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, p. 185.
Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition” of Mimesis, in Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. xvi. See also Said, “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World,” Boundary 2 31:2 (2004), p. 550.
Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” p. xv. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., p. xxi.
Said, Representation of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 41.
Auerbach, “Figura” (1938), in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 11–76.
Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” pp. ix-xxxii. This Introduction was later published in Said Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 85–118.
Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Said, Representation of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994).
Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” p. xv.
Ibid., p. xxii.
Ibid., p. xv.
Ibid., p. xxxv.
Ibid., p. xxxii.
Ibid., p. xxxiv
Ibid., p. xxviii.
Ibid., p. xxxiv
Said indeed wrote that “Adorno, Benjamin, [Ernst] Bloch, Horkheimer, and Habermas” were “steeped in the experience of fascism in Germany” and hence “erected immense theoretical and formal bulwarks against it in their writings.” But he did not elaborate on this important point. See, Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” p. xviii. Strangely enough he did not include Auerbach’s works written in exile as part of this general humanist struggle against Nazism.
Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” pp. xxviii, xxxi.
Ibid., p. xxxi.
Ibid., p. xxxii.
Said, Representation of the Intellectual, p. xiv (emphasis added).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. xiv.
“Resolution of the German Christians,” rally at Berlin Sportpalast, 13 November 1933, in Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Judaism, Christianity and Germany (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 35.
Peter M. Head, “The Nazi Quest for an Arian Jesus,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2 (2004), p. 76 (emphasis added).
Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 67–105.
Head, “Nazi Quest,” pp. 76–77.
Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” Church History, 63 (December 1994), p. 591.
For an analysis of the ideological, historical and philological, context of Auerbach’s “Figura,” see Avihu Zakai and David Weinstein, “Erich Auerbach and His ‘Figura’: An Apology for the Old Testament in an Age of Aryan Philology,” Religions 3 (2012), pp. 320–338. http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/3/2/320
Auerbach of course was not alone in his struggle against the völkisch, chauvinist, racist, and anti-Semitic premises of Aryan philology, which eliminated the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, from German culture in particular, and Western culture and civilization in general. Thomas Mann, for example, told the audience in his address in the Library of Congress on Nov. 17, 1942: “some people were inclined to regard ‘Joseph and His Brothers’ as a Jewish book, even merely a novel for the Jews.” And he indeed agreed that “the selection of the old testamental subject was certainly not mere accident; most certainly there were hidden defiantly polemic connections between it and certain tendencies of our time which I always found repulsive from the bottom of my soul; the growing vulgar anti-semitism which is an essential part of the Fascist mob-myth, and which commits the brutish denial of the fact that Judaism and Hellenism are the two principal pillars upon which our occidental civilization rests. To write a novel of the Jewish spirit was timely, just because it seems untimely.” See, Mann, “The Theme of the Joseph Novels,” 1942, in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949 (Washington: Library of Congress, 1963), pp. 11–12.
Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition,” pp. xx, xvi. See also Said, “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World,” Boundary 2 31:2 (2004), p. 550.
Said, “History, Literature, and Geography,” p. 457.
The Nazi, Aryan flight from reason and reality to myths, legends and heroes, can be clearly seen in the works of Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologist of the Nazi party. In his infamous book Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the 20th Century, 1930), he argued: “Today, a new belief is arising: the Mythus of the blood; the belief that the godly essence of man itself is to be defended through the blood; that belief which embodied the clearest knowledge that the Nordic race represents that Mysterium which has overthrown and replaced the old sacraments.” Accordingly, Rosenberg interpreted the German defeat in World War I in light of the dark, legendary, mythical and demonic, powers of Norse mythology, arguing more specifically that the victories of the Allies Powers in that war are evidence of “an age when the Fenris Wolf [‘fame-wolf’] broke his chains, when Hel [giantess and goddess who rules over Helheim, the underworld where the dead dwell] moved over the earth and the Midgardschlange [the Midgard Snake, a demonic monster which looped the whole earth with its giant length, whom Thor, the God of the thunder, killed] stirred the oceans of the world. Millions upon millions were ready to sacrifice themselves to attain but one result embodied in the phrase: for the honour and freedom of the Volk. The world inferno continued to the end; nonetheless, sacrifices were demanded and made by all. All that was revealed, however, was that behind the armies daemonic powers had triumphed over divine ones. Unrestrained, they raged abound throughout the world, stirring up new unrest, new flames, new destruction.” See, Race and Race History and Other Essays by Alfred Rosenberg, ed. Robert Pois (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 96–7.
In his last work The Myth of the State (1946), the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, attempted to understand the intellectual origins of Nazi Germany. He saw Nazi Germany as a society in which the dangerous power of myth is not checked or subdued by superior forces and claimed that in 20th century politics there was a return back to the irrationality of myth, and in particular to a belief that there is such a thing as destiny.
Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), p. 4. Lukács wrote these words in 1948.
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 3, 287.
Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 1821, trans. T. N. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 14 (emphasis in original).
See Editor’s “Explanatory Notes” # 14 in Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 326–7.
Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition,” p. xvi.
Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” p. xxi.
Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 19–20 (emphasis added).
Ibid., p. 411.
Ibid., pp. 402–3 (emphasis added).
Ibid., p. 404 (emphasis added).
Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 491.
William Calin in a personal letter to the author, August 2, 2013. Calin was Auerbach’s research assistant at Yale during the 1950s. See Calin, “The paperback edition of Mimesis came out while I was Auerbach’s research assistant. I remember his speaking on the telephone with the publisher. He wanted the Christ of Amiens as the cover illustration, and insisted that Christ’s hands should appear in the picture. Which was done.”
Ibid., p. 563.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
It should be noted that in 1942, Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer, committed suicide in Brazil when he felt that “the world of my own language sank and was lost to me and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.” He concluded, “I salute all of my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after this long night! I, all too impatient, go before them.” The above words of Stefan Zweig are taken from his suicide letter of February 22, 1942. See Matti Friedman, “70 years later, a handwritten note recalls the end of a literary life,” at http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/israeli-library-uploads-suicide-letter-of-jewish-writer-stefan-zweig-1.414312 See also, Leo Carey, “The Escape Artist: The Death and Life of Stefan Zweig,” New Yorker (August 27, 2012), p. 70, and Oliver Matuschek, Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (London: Pushkin Press, 2011).
Auerbach, “Letter to Dr. Martin Hellweg, 22 June 1946,” in “Scholarship in the Times of Extremes: Letters of Erich Auerbach (1933–46), on the Fiftieth Anniversary of his Death,” eds., Martin Vialon and Robert Stein, PMLA 122 (January 2007), p. 757 (emphasis added).
Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur” (1952), trans. Maire and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13 (Winter 1969), p. 17. See also Said, “Reflections on Exile,” p. 185, and Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry, 25 (Autumn 1998), p. 97.
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” p. 185. Said expressed the same views in “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” pp. 6–9.
Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” p. 17. By “pre-national medieval culture” Auerbach referred to Europe during the High Middle Ages (950–1350), a time in which took place the Europeanization of Europe, “an epoch of economic growth, territorial expansion and dynamic cultural and social change” in “western Europe,” to which historians referred to as “The Making of Europe.” To this new and well-defined European Christian civilization, without nations and nationalities, Auerbach referred to. See, Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 2, 269–91. I would like to thank Ayelet Even Ezra who brought to my attention the pre-national character of the High Middle Ages.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History; Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 209. According to Solomon, “‘Geist’ refers to some sort of general consciousness, a single ‘mind’ common to all men.” See, R. C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Concept of ‘Geist,’” Review of Metaphysics 23 (June 1970), p. 642.
Said, “History, Literature, and Geography,” pp. 456–7.
Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 574.
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” p. 176.
Said, “Introduction: Criticism and Exile,” p. xxviii. Said discussion of Imperialism may be found, among others, in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), and “Yeats and Decolonization,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 1990).
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” p. 177.
Richard Bernstein, “Edward W. Said, Polymath, Scholar, Dies at 67,” at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/obituaries/26SAID.html?pagewanted=2 (emphasis added).
Malise Ruthven, “Edward Said: Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian cause in America,” at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/sep/26/guardianobituaries.highereducation
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Zakai, A. Exile and Criticism: Edward Said’s Interpretation of Erich Auerbach. Soc 52, 275–282 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-015-9898-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-015-9898-y