Porter Auerbach

Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology James I. Porter I am Prussian and of the Jewish faith. —ERICH AUERBACH (1921)

Reading Erich Auerbach’s lead essay in Mimesis, one might well be struck by the willful perversity of that piece. Its comparison between Greek culture (focused by Homer) and the Bible (focused by the Old Testament) seems rather pointed and polemical, though the reasons for this boldness are anything but self-evident. Look closer and you will notice that the Jews in that chapter are a little too Jewish, while the Greeks are a little too, well, . . . German. How could this be anything but a provocation? Inquire further into the immediate historical and political background of “Odysseus’ Scar,” and it will quickly emerge that Auerbach’s apparent perversity has a good claim to being real, as does his seeming urge to provocation, though oddly neither the Jewishness of the Old Testament as he presents it there nor the politics of his position have attracted anything near the attention they deserve. A comparable provocativeness can, moreover, be detected in Auerbach’s other works from before and after the publication of Mimesis (1946), notably in his vision of time and history, in his view of the JudeoThomas G. Rosenmeyer (1920 –2007) in memoriam This essay first arose out of a book project in progress entitled Homer: The Very Idea. For assistance of various kinds I would like to express my gratitude to Sunil Agnani, Daniel Boyarin, William Calder, Eric Downing, Jonathan Freedman, Tony Grafton, Anna Guillemin, Susannah Heschel, Michael Kicey, Karen Lawrence, Miriam Leonard, Peter Machinist, Susan Marchand, Helmut Mu¨ller-Sievers, Richard Neer, Martin Ostwald, Andy Stewart, Martin Vialon, Silke Weineck, audiences at CUNY and the universities at Reading and Bristol, Stephen Ferguson and Meg Sherry Rich of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library, and the members of the editorial board at Critical Inquiry. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008) © 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/08/3501-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Christian tradition, and in his distinctive take on the secular scholarship— the philology—that embraces all of these things. But it is in Mimesis that everything comes to a head; it is here that Auerbach’s Jewishness spectacularly emerges, or rather, it is here that he discovers himself (or manifests himself) in his philology as a Jew—as is only intelligible given the circumstances of his life, his ousting from Germany, the persecution of Jews in his homeland and abroad (he remained under surveillance even in Istanbul), and the sheer horrors of the war around him. This, at least, is my interim finding in my own reading of Auerbach, of which this essay represents a distillation. What follows is an attempt to locate Auerbach in a particularly focused way through a close reading of “Odysseus’ Scar.” But the larger aim of my reading is to demythologize Auerbach, whose image in today’s popular and scholarly consciousness appears to be either colored by cliche´s (the lonely comparativist writing without the benefit of a library in a non-European land) or else hampered by ignorance (misunderstandings about the meaning of figural interpretation for Auerbach, about the ways in which his earlier writings in fact anticipate Mimesis, or about the range of his works and essays, many of which remain untranslated and hence unread, at least in the Englishspeaking world, and all of which are generally underexploited). My purpose is therefore to resituate and to reconfigure the enchanted narrative of Auerbach (1892–1957)—to move it away from the story of the deracinated scholar in Istanbul and to restore it to that of the scholar rooted in Germany, the land from which he was exiled but which he never really left, not least because it never left him. The local, German context, we shall see, is all-meaningful and all-determining.1 More than this, my essay is an attempt to trace the writing of a scholar at a moment of crisis in which he confronted his Jewishness as he never had (or had to) before and as he never would again in the aftermath of his wartime publication, Mimesis. This coming to terms with his Jewish identity is legible directly in all his work, as is a strong resistance to the tradi1. For the situation of Auerbach in Istanbul, see Kader Konuk, Mimesis in Istanbul: Secular Humanism and the Politics of Exile (forthcoming).

J A M E S I . P O R T E R teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (2000), The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (2000), and a forthcoming two-volume study on ancient Greek aesthetics. His current projects include Homer: The Very Idea and Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (forthcoming). His email is [email protected]

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tions that effaced Judaism or, at the very least, a powerful ambivalence towards them, both in this one work and in his writings leading up to it. Throughout, his position embodies what we might call a Jewish philology or a Judaizing of philology.2 His position is complex, but suffice it to say that it gradually evolves as an ethical stance towards human history and human reality (as he conceives these), one that stands opposed to figurality, allegory, legend, ideality, and idyllic representation. His postwar writings represent a powerful synthesis of his views of history and philology. And while this final synthesis is perhaps more Viconian than Jewish, at least outwardly, it is also the case that Auerbach must think through his Judaizing of philology in order to arrive at a final vision that appears in the end to be secular but that, given its point of origination, is never fully secularized. Nor can Christianity, in Auerbach’s eyes, ever fully free itself of its Jewish roots (for instance, the Old Testament). These larger vistas will be touched on in the final section of this essay, the bulk of which will be devoted to an exploration of Auerbach’s crisis in his Jewish identity at the time of his Mimesis project.

1. Time/Date Stamping Let us begin by asking a deliberately naı¨ve question: Just when was Auerbach’s seminal essay “Odysseus’ Scar” written? Behind that question lurks another: How essential to its presentational strategy are the clues to the dates that Auerbach’s essay, and the book that contains it, leaves out in the open? Close readers of the English version will point to the brief and startling parabasis that occurs towards the end of the essay in a lengthily developed contrast between legend and history: Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is sub2. I employ the term Judaizing somewhat faute de mieux. It is meant to conjure up two vulgar terms of art from the Nazi era: Verjudung, “making Jewish” or “Jewification” (signifying a perceived threat of domination by Jews of Germans and German culture), which in turn has its obverse in entjuden, “to deprive someone of their Jewishness” (noun form: Entjudung). Neither term is found in any contemporary German dictionary, yet both will appear below— ultimately, in a deliberate inversion of their Nazified meaning.

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ject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.3 I quote this passage at such length not only because of the personal note it sounds in an otherwise Olympian treatment of Western literature but also because of the echoes it sends reverberating through the rest of the essay. The alignment of Nazi Socialism with legend, and of both with simplicity and surface, forces a pairing of these entities with the major contrast that Auerbach has been building in this section and indeed throughout the essay, namely, that between Homeric epic and Jewish biblical narrative. The former is all surface, incapable of historical depth or truth; it is the stuff of myth and legend. The latter is all depth and disturbing complication, even containing abysses, and it is shaped by history and historical truth. The alignment is telling. But more on that in a moment. The passage is one of a handful containing temporal indices in a suite of brilliant literary critical essays (Mimesis) whose temporality is that of a quiet, historically bland, though not quite blind, philology, one that proceeds slowly and methodically from Homer to Virginia Woolf, covering much of the ground of literary history in between. The parting words of the volume, contained in its afterword, are conciliatory and soothing. But, if so, then they are at the same time touched with deep sadness: “I hope that my study will reach its readers— both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it is intended. And may it contribute to bringing together again those who have serenely preserved their love for our Western history [ohne Tru¨bung bewahrt haben]” (Mi, p. 557; M, p. 518; emphasis added; trans. mod.). Trask’s translation strikingly transmutes the original in at least two ways (in addition to misconstruing the underlying syntax and more, but that is another story).4 First, “ohne Tru¨bung” suggests less serenity than a darkness that has been fended off; for “serenely” we should understand 3. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendla¨ndischen Literatur 2d ed. (Bern, 1959), pp. 22–23, hereafter abbreviated M; trans. Willard R. Trask under the title Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953; Princeton, N.J., 2003), pp. 19 –20, hereafter abbreviated Mi, emphasis added. See also the first edition of Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendla¨ndischen Literatur (Bern, 1946). 4. The printed English reads, nonsensically: “those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered.” But even with “preserved” restored, the syntax has still been misrendered.

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“without being clouded” or “undimmed.” Second, Auerbach’s original language for “if they are still alive” addresses survival, not continued existence (“friends of mine from former years who have survived [meine u¨berlebenden Freunde von einst]”), while it also implies an allusion to unnamed others who failed to survive. Either way, the remark is strangely at odds with itself in its insistence that some, like Auerbach, have managed to preserve undimmed their love of Western history (and presumably also Western literary history), despite their diasporic or otherwise riven condition (“bringing together again”) even as the same remark contains a lament, an epitaph, and a reproach concerning the dead but not forgotten friends from the past. Consequently, Auerbach’s remark does not so much erase the final explicit temporal index in Mimesis, which appears earlier on the same page, as it heightens it and darkens it: “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul.” In other words, what the English version misses (or alters) is the force of Auerbach’s comparison in the closing lines of Mimesis, which we now see also contain an implicit temporal index. For with this parting remark, Auerbach is not saying that one group of friends outlived another group of friends. He is saying that one group survived the war and another did not.5 Finally, the first of the contemporary temporal indices in Mimesis appears in the front matter to the book that is prominently displayed in all of its editions: “Written [“in Istanbul” is added to the English translation] between May 1942 and April 1945.”6 But what about the opening chapter, “Odysseus’ Scar”? Auerbach’s language is confusing. In the quotation from which I set out, the phrase, “the history which we are ourselves witnessing” suggests immediacy, while “before and during the last war” suggests distance. Presumably this last phrase represents a modification authorized by Auerbach once he had escaped the ravages of war and permitted the book’s English publication in 1953, four years before his death—a modification and an erasure, for the German text could not be more razor-sharp in its coordinates: “vor und wa¨hrend des 5. Compare also Jesse M. Gellrich, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford, Calif., 1996), p. 112. Auerbach would have kept abreast of friends who had either fallen victim to the Nazi regime or else nearly so, such as his close colleague from Marburg Werner Krauss; see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Erich Auerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, pp. 14 –17; compare Auerbach, letter to Werner Krauss, 30 Jan. 1946, in Werner Krauss, Briefe 1922 bis 1976, ed. Peter Jehle, Elisabeth Fillman, and Peter-Voler Springborn (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 204 –5, and Auerbach, letter to Walter Benjamin, 23 Sept. 1935, in Karlheinz Barck, “Fu¨nf Briefe Erich Auerbachs an Walter Benjamin in Paris,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Germanistik 6 (1988): 689 –90. 6. Front matter (verso of the title page): German 1st ed. (1946): “Mai 1942 bis April 1945”; thereafter: “Geschrieben zwischen Mai 1942 und April 1945”; English edition (1953; rpt. 2003): “Written in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945.”

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gegenwa¨rtigen (1942) Krieges” (“before and during the present (1942) war”). And further below in the same passage, where the English reads, “as in the last war,” the German more pointedly reads, “wie jetzt durch den Krieg” (“as now, as a consequence of the war”). The original text thus leaves no doubt as to just how immediate the war was in the mind of the exiled Jewish scholar from Germany when he penned his famous essay on Homer and the Bible in Istanbul. For whatever reasons, these last named temporal indices have been altered from the English translation of “Odysseus’ Scar.”7 As a result, the urgency of Auerbach’s essay, and of his argument at the point of this alteration in the opening essay, has been blunted to a considerable degree, but by no means completely. What scars did the war leave on this essay and, indeed, on Auerbach’s view of Greek and classical literature? I want to show that Auerbach’s juxtaposition of the two traditions, Homeric and Jewish, is a pointed and polemical one and that it implies a powerful critique of the (characteristically German) tradition of classical philology, which had constructed a certain reading of Homer that Auerbach then goes on to expose and dismantle in his essay. Nor is this all. In taking the particular stance that he does towards the Old Testament, Auerbach is also taking on contemporary German biblical criticism, both academic and popular (or rather vo¨lkisch). So, while Mimesis at once advertises and occludes its historical and situational indices, both in its original printing and in its later English edition, these indices were nevertheless written unmistakably into the very fabric of the opening essay, into its form, structure, and argument. Far from constituting a project in comparativism, thanks to which Auerbach would be remembered as the father of modern comparative literature, his juxtaposition of the two major literary and cultural traditions of the West creates a dissonance within the projects of reading, of classicism, of Biblical scholarship, and of literary history and criticism—in short, of philology. Auerbach ought to be remembered as the father of incomparative literature! By indexing the present moment in his materials, Auerbach, the displaced German Jew in Istanbul, is historicizing philology. At the same time he is 7. There appear to be no traces of decision making in the files of correspondence in the holdings of the Princeton University Library; see C0728, folder 9, box 1, Princeton University Press records, Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library. This is a mystery, as in a few cases entire sentences are dropped from the English translation, which must surely have been authorized by Auerbach, and in others there are small but crucial changes, which may or may not have resulted from consultation with him. One thing is certain: the Princeton files show that Auerbach was very closely and painstakingly involved in the translation process, making changes to his own text, to Trask’s translation, and signing off on Trask’s renderings. Any earlier correspondence, including the copy-edited manuscript and galleys, did not make it into this archive. Their whereabouts, alas, are unknown.

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inverting the political polarities of philology, not least by contrasting the two treatments (Homeric/biblical-Jewish) of time, truth, and revelation in the two traditions that he is less comparing than he is critically pitting against each other. And he is undertaking all of this in opposition to the ingrained tendencies of an anti-Semitic classical philology and in the context of efforts in Germany to de-Judaize Christianity. Auerbach is in a sense Judaizing philology. That is, he is constructing a new oppositional Jewish philology. One last clue that this is so comes in the epigraph to Mimesis, printed on the title page of the German edition and on a separate page in the English translation and drawn from the first stanza of Andrew Marvell’s midseventeenth-century poem, “To His Coy Mistress”: “Had we but world enough and time . . . .” It is the essay’s very first temporal index, though its contemporary relevance is somewhat disguised. Read a few lines further into the poem, and you will see that the reference in these lines is not only to a mistress refusing the advances of a lover (the speaking I) but also to her refusing them with all the obstinacy of a Jew: “I would / Love you ten years before the flood: / And you should, if you please, refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews,” which is to say, until the end of time.8 Auerbach’s Mimesis is thus inscribed with a Jewish refusal from the very first word before you turn to page one. In what immediately follows, I will attempt to disentangle the various themes and problems I have just been touching on as they appear in Auerbach’s work of exile or at least to make a start on such a reading. It is one that could be sustained through the whole of Mimesis, but again my focus will be on the opening essay, which in any case deserves the closest possible scrutiny.

2. Entjudung: Decanonization of the Jewish Old Testament The passage we started out from above gives a first clue to the deeper significance of “Odysseus’ Scar” and then embeds some of that essay’s 8. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London, 2003), ll. 7–10, p. 81. See also Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York, 2002), pp. 256 –57, and Martin Vialon, “Had We but World Enough and Time,” in Auerbach-Alphabet: Karlheinz (Carlo) Barck zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Robert Stockhammer (Berlin, 2004), n. p. [13] on Auerbach’s use of the epigraph. See Smith’s commentary on “To His Coy Mistress” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, pp. 75–78, on the (still much disputed) meaning of “till the conversion of the Jews.” As Michael Kicey suggests (in a private communication), there is an undeniable emphasis on world here, indeed, on its extension to an absolute limit—to the end of time. On the all-important theme of world, which appears elsewhere in Auerbach in the guise of the earthly (das Irdische) and the this-worldly, see below.

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terms and polarities into its political commentary (legend, surface, simplicity; history, complexity, contradiction). It takes more than a little temerity for an exiled Jew writing in the throes of a Nazi-led world war to set up a comparison between Homer, claimed long ago by German philology as the high priest of all classicism, and the older Bible, which Auerbach emphatically claims as a Jewish text and as the embodiment of Jewish spiritual tradition. These moves would have been more than simply controversial at the time. They would have been deeply provocative. Worse still, merely to fasten onto the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–18) was to court disaster, a fact that Auerbach cannot have ignored. All this needs to be explained. In Germany during the 1920s and into the Nazi era, a debate was raging, above all in Lutheran Protestant circles, over the question whether the Old Testament belonged in the Christian Bible at all owing to its Jewish origins. To label the Old Testament Jewish was tantamount to a racial slur; the Old Testament was felt to be un-German and therefore to have no place in the German church. While pro-Nazi Protestant pastors, leading the swelling popular movement of the Deutsche Christen, sought to banish the Jewish Old Testament from the Bible, its defenders (some of them Catholic) were reduced to desperate and often specious arguments, claiming for instance that the Old Testament was not a Jewish book but an anti-Jewish book, given the denunciations of Israel by the prophets, or that parts of it were genuine while other parts were proto-Gospels.9 Figures among the German Christian intelligentsia such as Walter Grundmann and Reinhold Krause, mostly forgotten today, were instrumental in this battle against the Old Testament in the early 1930s, while on the Catholic side stood individuals like Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, who was on the surface conciliatory but was in fact no less virulent than the Protestants he opposed.10 The Jews were being squeezed out from the middle. One scene that particularly drew the ire of the German Christians was the binding of Isaac.11 Singled out by the church authorities in Schleswig9. Thanks to Susannah Heschel for invaluable help with this historical background and for some of these formulations. See, further, Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), pp. 142–71; John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 1–2, 8 –9, 83– 84; Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London, 2004); and Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (forthcoming). 10. See Michael von Faulhaber, Judentum, Christentum, Germanentum: Adventspredigten (Munich, 1933). 11. Compare ibid., p. 15: “I know the objections against the Old Testament concept of God: God demanded of Abraham a human sacrifice” (emphasis added).

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Holstein as one reason among others to limit or prohibit the teaching of the Jewish Old Testament in schools in 1933, the episode was deemed too “un-German” (undeutsch) to be representative of religious faith.12 No doubt the echoes between human sacrifice and the Crucifixion, for which Jews were being blamed, only compounded the indigestibility of this one scene, which anyway had a fraught history among Christian interpreters.13 Auerbach does not overtly suggest this kind of connection in the essay, but he does so in a later chapter.14 As he writes of the Isaac story in “Odysseus’ Scar,” “everyone knows it [ein jeder kennt sie]” (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11), and indeed his choice of this scene in Mimesis seems overdetermined. By 1939 an entire institute was formed to eliminate the Jewish influence on German church life (this was part of the institute’s name) under Grundmann’s tutelage.15 Auerbach would have been exposed to these outrages. He was dismissed from his post in October 1935 and left Germany the following summer, but returned once in 1937 and remained in touch with friends to the extent that he could.16 Plainly, in this climate of anxiety no claim about the Bible could help but be politicized by the time that Auerbach was writing his essay in 1942, any more than writing about Homer in opposition to the Bible could in itself avoid political engagement, given the nature of the German philological tradition in classics alone. That tradition was itself thoroughly contaminated by the Jewish Question from the time of F. A. Wolf ’s lectures on Altertumswissenschaft in the early nineteenth century in Berlin, which founded classics on the exclusion of the Near East and the Semitic tribes in particular, to the second of Johann Droysen’s doctoral defense theses from 1831, titled A doctrina Christiana Graecorum quam Iudaeorum religio propius abest (The Religion of the Greeks Is Closer to the Christian Doctrine Than the Religion of the Jews), and Droysen’s three-volume master12. Bergen, Twisted Cross, p. 144. 13. See David Lerch, Isaaks Opferung christlich gedeutet: Eine auslegungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Tu¨bingen, 1950), and Isaaks Opferung (Gen. 22) in den Konfessionen und Medien der Fru¨hen Neuzeit, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger and Ulrich Heinen (Berlin, 2006). See too Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) and Hegel’s youthful anti-Semitic work, Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal (1799), with the excellent discussion of the latter in Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Postwar French Thought (Oxford, 2005), pp. 150 –52. 14. “For example, if an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ” (Mi, p. 73; M, p. 75). 15. See Walter Grundmann, Die Entjudung des religio¨sen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscher Theologie und Kirche (Weimar, 1939), and, generally, Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” Church History 63, no. 4 (1994): 587– 605. 16. See Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’” esp. pp. 15–19, 251 n. 27.

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piece, Geschichte des Hellenismus (1836 – 43), which made similar claims, to the activities of many of the leading scholars in classical studies during the 1920s and 1930s, who appeared to be either dubiously conservative and sympathetic to National Socialist ideology or else were actively instrumental to it.17 We will want to return to Auerbach’s stylization of Homer in this same light below. Nor could Auerbach keep private and professional politics apart, as his autobiographical statement quoted in the epigraph to this essay, drawn from his published dissertation of 1921 (his appended Lebenslauf), suggests. Two telltale clues from his correspondence with Walter Benjamin should suffice to indicate how inseparable philology and religious identity were in Auerbach’s mind at the time. Here is the first, from the fall of 1935: “At Marburg [the university] I am completely surrounded by people who are not of our origin (unserer Herkunft) [namely, who are not Jewish], whose conditions are entirely different [because they are not threatened with imminent dismissal]—and [nevertheless they] all think [in the end] the same way as I do [about the Nazi regime].”18 The second bit of evidence comes from a report on his new digs in Istanbul a year later: “Spitzer left me 7 German assistants, 6 of whom are Christian (christlicher Abkunft), all having emigrated in 1933, each excellent in his own way.”19 In other words, whenever Auerbach stepped into a department of romance philology, he knew exactly which side of the religious divide anyone stood on—and so, in all likelihood, did his colleagues, Christians and Jews alike. We should hardly be surprised, then, to find brief interludes like the following, from 1932, on Voltaire’s “hatred of the Jews (Judenhaß), so ill-suited to an enlightened mentality.”20 This bitter comment may be a remarkable and dar17. For background, see Anthony Grafton, “Juden und Griechen bei Friedrich August Wolf,” in Friedrich August Wolf: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Reinhard Markner and Giuseppe Veltri (Stuttgart, 1999), pp. 9 –31; Arnaldo Momigliano, “J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews,” in A. D. Momigliano: Studies on Modern Scholarship, ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 147– 61; James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, Calif., 2000), pp. 273– 86; and William M. Calder and Maximilian Braun, “‘Tell It Hitler! Ecco!’ Paul Friedla¨nder on Werner Jaeger’s Paideia,” Quaderni di storia 22 (Jan.–June 1996): 211– 48. 18. Auerbach, letter to Benjamin, 6 Oct. 1935, in Barck, “Fu¨nf Briefe Erich Auerbachs an Walter Benjamin in Paris,” p. 690; my supplements (confirmed by Barck and Martin Vialon). Auerbach’s immediate replacement is likely to have been an NSDAP member; see Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’” p. 15. 19. Auerbach, letter to Benjamin, 3 Jan. 1937, in Barck, “Fu¨nf Briefe Erich Auerbachs an Walter Benjamin in Paris,” p. 692. ¨ ber den historischen Ort Rousseaus” (1932), Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur 20. Auerbach, “U romanischen Philologie (Bern, 1967), p. 292. He further labels Voltaire’s attitude an “atavism” of Christian apologetics (ibid.).

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ing intrusion of racial politics into scholarship, yet it is hardly an aberration for Auerbach. Against this background, Auerbach’s defiance—and one is tempted to say defiantly pro-Jewish position (some early critics apparently did not shrink from labeling it “anti-Christian”)21—is unmistakable, not only in the lead essay in Mimesis but also elsewhere, for instance in his famous essay on biblical reading, “Figura,” which was likewise composed in exile, and which resonates with the contemporary debates in Germany: The Old Testament controversies of the ensuing period [namely, after Paul’s intervention into Biblical exegesis] kept [Paul’s] conception and interpretation alive; true, the influence of the Judaeo-Christians with their fidelity to the law soon diminished, but a new opposition came from those who wished either to exclude the Old Testament altogether or to interpret it only abstractly and allegorically—whereby Christianity would necessarily have lost its conception of a providential history, its intrinsic concreteness, and with these no doubt some of its immense persuasive power. In the struggle against those who despised the Old Testament and tried to despoil it of its meaning, the figural method again proved its worth.22 The decanonization of the Old Testament under the German National Socialists, a process that would soon be called de-Judaization (Entjudung), had ancient and medieval precedents (Marcion in the second century, the Cathari in the twelfth). Recent scholarship had kept that memory alive, especially thanks to the redoubtable biblical scholar and Marcion specialist (and latter-day Marcionite) from Berlin, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), whose final monograph on Marcion was published in 1920 and again in expanded form in 1924. Harnack, too, urged the decanonization of “the book of the inferior, Jewish God.”23 Though Auerbach mentions Harnack (but not his work on Marcion) in his surviving writings, it is hard to imagine that he would have agreed with this verdict by Harnack, let alone with the resurgence of Marcionism in contemporary Germany. Quite the contrary. To what extent is Auerbach’s essay on figura a meditation on the 21. “Several reviewers called the book . . . anti-Christian (antichristlich),” an idea that Auerbach replies “was far removed” from his aims (Auerbach, “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” trans. Jan M. Ziolkowsi, in Mi., p. 570; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated “E”). 22. Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, trans. Ralph Mannheim (1938; New York, 1959), pp. 51–52. 23. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Darmstadt, 1960), p. 224.

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present-day status of the Jewish Old Testament and the strategies that had either preserved its ultimate meaning and dignity or that were seeking to abolish these? Unlike “Odysseus’ Scar,” “Figura” does not index itself in the present. Yet its stance towards history as a touchstone of lived reality is comparable to that of Mimesis. Far from being a defense of allegorism and its spiritual abstractions, the essay argues for the concrete reality of the Jewish tradition and, only as a last resort, its figural interpretation.24 What is more, the passage just quoted is a powerful indictment of the Christian reduction of Judaic religion, by allegory, to a prelude to itself. The topical ironies of the last sentence (“those who despised the Old Testament and tried to despoil it of its meaning”) are unmistakable. They are typical of Auerbach’s argumentative strategies in Mimesis, to which we can now turn. Given what we have seen, one could hardly expect the later essay to offer an impartial assessment of the two literatures it sets out to compare, and it does not do so. On the contrary, “Odysseus’ Scar” is heavily weighted and politically charged—not only in favor of the Jewish tradition but also against the Homeric tradition, as can be quickly indicated.25 A first set of indices: Auerbach cites and analyzes the Hebrew original once (Hinne-ni) but never Homer’s Greek—a telling omission in itself.26 He knew no Hebrew27 but plenty of Greek, as he could demonstrate elsewhere when he wanted to do so—for instance, later on in Mimesis itself, where he does finally quote and analyze Homer’s original Greek (see Mi, p. 108; M, p. 106).28 In “Odysseus’ Scar” Auerbach had, in other words, to go out of his way to suppress what he knew (Greek) and to foreground what he knew next to nothing about (Hebrew) in order to make a point that is and is not philological, not least because the argument he is making has as much to 24. See Auerbach, “Figura,” p. 50 (writing contra Pauline allegorical interpretation). The concrete reality of Jewish tradition is secured by the definition of figura as “something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical” (p. 29). 25. For the general point about this bias, which is rarely noticed, see Carl Landauer, “Mimesis and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing,” German Studies Review 11 (Feb. 1988): 92 (though I do not accept his thesis about Auerbach’s self-mythologizing). See esp. Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York, 2000), pp. 249 –50 n. 39, a prescient note. 26. Abraham “says, indeed: Here I am— but the Hebrew word means only something like ‘behold me,’ and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God” (Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10). The Hebrew transliteration is given on the next page: “the words in which [Abraham] answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here” (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11). 27. Thanks to Martin Vialon for confirming this for me. 28. Lerer, Error and the Academic Self, p. 225 also notices that not a single word of Greek appears in the essay, but he fails to note the corresponding fact about Hebrew—possibly because he assumes that the Bible is merely “a foil” for Homer in Auerbach’s eyes (pp. 221, 239).

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do with his own tacit attentiveness and inattentiveness to language as it does with any of the features of the languages in question. One suspects his strategy of neglect succeeded, to judge from the reactions of contemporary classicists; the imbalance could be sensed at the time even if its staging can only be fully appreciated today. But more on this below. Second, he uses the words Jewish or Israel and their equivalents nearly a dozen times, casually but insistently—and, now we can see, provocatively, in a kind of re-Jewification (Verjudung) of the biblical text.29 Further, and no less important, in treating the Old Testament as a counterexample (Gegenbeispiel; see Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13), Auerbach is not so much offering a comparison as he is creating a stark contrast or, rather, as I want to show, an incommensurability that renders comparisons and contrasts moot. But, in order to appreciate the full reach of this countering of examples, we will need to get clear on the terms involved. By Homer and what we would call the Homeric tradition Auerbach means us to understand first Homer and next the Greek mentality that Homer embodies and then eventually passes on to Rome and into later antiquity, as this was understood in modernity.30 Homer for Auerbach is not the historical, original rhapsode. He is merely an emblem, ultimately, for the uses to which Homer has been put in the course of his reception, particularly in the classicizing tradition in modern Germany and above all in the immediate contemporary present. In point of fact, Homer has no real existence for Auerbach, any more than he did for Vico (or Wolf, for that matter): he appears principally as an adjective—Homeric— or else as an equivalent expression for his poems or their style, which perform all the actions and claim all our attention. Ultimately, Homer and Homeric come to stand for the whole of the classical past in Auerbach, under the sway, and enchantment, of its founding literary tradition. By Jew and Jewish Auerbach is in the first instance pointing to a countertradition to the Western classical tradition, but also to the Semitic Other of the anti-Judaic and increasingly anti-Semitic tradition of classicism itself. That is to say, he is pitting one cliche´ against another. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Auerbach virtually condemns the classical tradition to a kind of blindness inherited from “Homer’”s own; that tradition is an 29. “The (so-called) Elohist” (Mi, p. 8; M, p. 9); “the so-called Jahvist” (Mi, p. 12; M, p. 15); “the Jews” (this appears three times in one paragraph on Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10 alone); “the Jewish writers” (Mi, p. 13; M, p. 15); “the Jewish view of man” (deleted from the English; M, p. 23); and so on. 30. Compare the essay’s close (Mi, p. 23; M, p. 26) and the sequel essay, esp. Mi, p. 38; M, p. 41– 42. Auerbach does not actually use the term Homeric tradition; he merely invokes the concept.

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empty fiction celebrating shallow and empty fictions, while the Jewish tradition flourishes historically in the biblical past, circulating around a felt historical reality (whether or not that reality is verifiable; such is the nature of belief [see Mi, p. 14; M, p. 16]), or at the very least one that is presented as real (see Mi, p. 18; M, p. 21), and then as the memory of that past viewed from Auerbach’s present. Auerbach’s historicizing stance towards the Jewish Bible, like his “return” to the Old Testament itself (a striking if momentary novelty in his scholarship), is very much in keeping with the modern European Haskalah, a Jewish secular movement, which since the nineteenth century if not earlier had accorded the Old Testament a newfound prominence as a text to be read and studied, as a reservoir of Jewish identity, and “as a treasury of moral examples, but also as a history.” Critical distance and identification worked hand in hand here.31 Moreover, historicizing claims about Auerbach’s “anachronistic” use of the terms Jews and Judaism or about his mistaken simplification of either Jews or Greeks fall wide of the mark.32 The terms are perfectly legible in contemporary biblical and classical scholarship and agitprop. Auerbach is simply working within the schematic frameworks of his own day in which such terms, characterizations, and even cliche´s were commonplace, and he is giving them one last rigorous—and critical—reduction.33

3. Verjudung: Greeks and Jews in “Odysseus’ Scar” That’s a lot to claim, so let me try to substantiate all this now in what follows. Some of the details will be familiar, though I suspect that these will become increasingly unfamiliar as we proceed. In literary and stylistic 31. Yaacov Shavit, Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew, trans. Chaya Naor and Niki Werner (London, 1997), p. 374; see pp. 184 – 85, 263, 374 –75.The Bible thus supplanted rabbinic literature and Talmudic exegesis. Hermann Cohen is a near-contemporary parallel and a proximate one as well (he had a prominent following at Marburg). See his essays comparing the Jewish prophets and Plato, Ju¨dische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1924), 1:262– 83, 306 –30. Chapter 1 of Mimesis obviously fits into the same broad genre. 32. See David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” Comparative Literature 47 (Spring 1995): 112, and Gellrich, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,” p. 114. Both notice the “anachronism” of Jews but do not point to contemporary literature from the time. On Greeks, see the discussion of the philological critiques of Auerbach below. (Damrosch is, moreover, among the majority who read Auerbach as an exponent of Homeric classicism; see Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile,” pp. 112–13.) 33. One telltale sign that he has done so is his otherwise outrageous claim that Homer’s epics cannot be allegorized or otherwise submitted to “interpretation”; they are too flat for this, they contain no meaning and no content, as he says in a rather savage (and possibly perverse) moment; see Mi, p. 13; M, p. 16. The claim rivals Plato’s condemnation of Homer’s lack of content in the Ion. Here, Auerbach is merely being rigorously consistent; the poems must remain superficial so as to be true to their identity as projections of modern German ideology (see below).

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terms, the Odyssey is marked by a series of qualifiers that can be rattled off: the epic narrative is all foreground, no background, all surface, no depth; its action is clear and “uniformly illuminated” (Mi, p. 3; M, p. 5); appearances are “visible and palpable” (Mi, p. 6; M, p. 8); its narrative follows the principle of out of mind, out of place. What it doesn’t see it forgets, and once it picks up the thread again, it returns to where things were left off as if no time had passed in between (this is now known as Zielinski’s Law). Hence, there is no past, no narrative perspective or depth, no layering, only a perpetual sequence of present moments, each equally to hand, all equally significant. The Old Testament is by contrast Homer’s photographic negative. Shrouded in mystery and obscurity, it is in fact marked by privatives and privations, all of them deriving from the attributes of God, who is without form, without place, alone, “not there [nicht dort]” (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11). Actions take place in a purely abstract way, rigorously unqualified—“without an epithet” (ohne Epitheton), Auerbach writes (Mi, p. 9; M, p. 11), using, and negating, a conscious Homericism (“epithets” [Epitheta]: Mi, p. 17; M, p. 21)—voided of material and phenomenal character, silently routed to their predestined goal, the way Abraham marches through empty, blank space for three days to arrive at the sacrificial altar indicated to him by Yahweh. The space Abraham moves through is that of an abstract moral universe, not one with spatial extension, while the time that lapses is that of a symbolic eternity that finds its meaning in a retroactive fulfillment only. In place of the unbearable lightness of being from Homer, we have in the Bible only an oppressive intensity or “overwhelming suspense [dru¨ckende spannung]” (Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13), filled with terror, indeterminacy, uncertainty, vacillation, and interruption, and all the more so for everything’s being left unsaid; it is a Kafkaesque world. Where the Homeric epic is all foreground and appearances contain nothing more than themselves, calmly (ruhig) and blissfully concealing nothing, patently revealing themselves to be the fictions they are (see Mi, p. 13; M, p. 15), the Bible is all background; meaning lies in the depths, forever receding anxiously into obscurity and symbolism, into moral intensity, into truths, indeed into sublime abysses. So, too, Homer is simplicity itself, charming, always coherent, overseen by prudential divinities, while the Bible is riven with conflict and fraught with complication, disunity, and doubt, characterized by a lack of obvious coherence, and propelled by the search for ultimate meaning and coherence. Two more significant differences need to be stated. For here, differences in style amount to differences in mentalities, a point that Auerbach’s stylistic analysis, indeed his whole theory of style, is aimed to establish in any

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event. First, where Homer’s fictions are horizontal, paratactic, static, and the stuff of legend, the Jewish Bible is vertical, developmental, layered (geschichtet), and historical (geschichtlich).34 The difference is mirrored in the characters of each literature. Homeric heroes are frozen in time, similar to the fixed epithets they wear like so many decorations; they do not develop; they do not even age (Auerbach cites the example of Odysseus). Biblical characters, by contrast, do develop and age. Battered by time and events, they grow within; they mature: “Herein lies the reason why the great figures of the Old Testament are so much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own biographical past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes,” and so on (Mi, p. 17; M, p. 20). They are thus deeply “historical” creatures, and their weathered physiognomies are merely the outward signs of their moral fortunes and misfortunes (Mi, p. 18; M, p. 20). Second, the Homeric delight in naı¨ve fiction betrays a less enviable trait: a desire to cater to the audience, to win their affections, indeed, to flatter them. Hence, Auerbach writes, while making an effortless glissando that starts off with a cliche´ of classicism: Delight in physical [or sensuous] existence is everything to them, and their highest aim [ihr ho¨chstes Streben] is to make that delight perceptible to us . . . in order that we . . . may take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their savory present. . . . And thus they bewitch us and ingratiate themselves to us [schmeicheln sich bei uns ein] until we live with them in the reality of their lives. . . . It does not matter whether we know that all this is only legend, “make-believe.” [Mi, p. 13; M, p. 15; emphasis added] The Homeric poems are like narcotics, intentionally so; they seek “to make us forget our own reality for a few hours” (Mi, p. 15; M, p. 18)—and not only our own reality but their own unreality, too. The Hebrew Bible, on the contrary, is a tyrannical force that coerces its readers into compliance, unapologetically and without a trace of seduction. And as such, as a coercive force, winning over the reader is hardly the objective:

34. See Mi, p. 12; M, p. 14 –15 for the latter pairing. The English translation obscures the proximity of the terms by rendering the first with “stratified” and the latter with “story.” Compare also Mi, p. 23; M, p. 26: “die Pha¨nomene des geschichtlichen Werdens und der Vielschichtigkeit menschlicher Problematik” (“the phenomena of historical becoming and of the ‘multilayeredness’ of the human problem”) (my emphasis). The other pairings are more familiar and obvious, but see Mi, p. 17; M, p. 19 in particular for the horizontal-vertical imagery.

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The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories . . . insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy [Alleinherrschaft]. . . . The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject [unterwerfen] us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. [Mi, pp. 14 –15; M, p. 17; emphasis added] We can overhear in Auerbach’s description of the narrative style of the Bible the religious and spiritual fervor of Judaism—its claims to monotheism, its exclusivity, its obstinacy, its vaulting universalism, its doctrines of worldly and messianic promise, its arresting moral rigor.35 If we listen hard enough, we will also hear in this same account the voice of God addressing Abraham and then the bewildered but finally submissive response of Abraham. The choice of scene is symbolic and resonant (Alleinherrschaft cannot help but conjure up another, darker kind of interpellation for a Prussian Jew in 1942 and a radical uncertainty as to who exactly it was that issued his marching orders—was it Hitler or God?), as is, of course, the very focus on Abraham, the exilic founder of the Jewish race (Gen. 12:1– 4).36 The contrast in this case would be with Odysseus’s nostos, or return, which is significantly scarred, but also with Odysseus’s violent repression of his naming (by Eurycleia), in contrast to Abraham’s open acceptance of his naming (by God): “Here I am!” Not for nothing did Auerbach wish for his essay to be remembered—literally scarred— by the word scar (Narbe) in the title, signaling a wound, a trauma, and a stigma, but also its concealment and its hardened (if not healed) condition. But there is more to Auerbach’s essay than an allegory of exile and hoped-for return, not least of all because it is unclear that an identification between Auerbach and Odysseus can be sustained. But let us return to Abraham. Auerbach’s description of the scene of God’s call to Abraham and his gradual weaving of it into his larger account of the Bible is nothing short of brilliant. The scene is, perforce, an illustration of the very subjection that Auerbach is describing above. Only, here the coercion is filtered through an abrupt and baffling interpellation: 35. Compare Peter Scha¨fer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). 36. Gen. 12:1: “Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.” About this passage, Robert Alter writes, “The divine imperative to head out for an unspecified place resembles, as Rashi [a canonical French medieval commentator on the Old Testament] observes, God’s terrible call to Abraham in [Gen.] chapter 22” (Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary [New York, 1996], p. 50 n. 1)—an insight that will not have escaped Auerbach.

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“And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt [versuchte] Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, here I am!” [Gen. 22:1]. Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. . . . Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly [so schrecklich]. . . . Unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! [Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10; emphasis added]37 Auerbach first adduces the scene in the guise of a stylistic analysis. But he immediately raises the stakes when he goes on to observe that the Jewish conception of God that governs the laws of his unrepresentability, as here, is also directly related to the Jews’ deepest views and outlooks on the world, which is hardly a stylistic point: “The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things [ihre Auffasungs- und Darstellungsweise]” (Mi, p. 8; M, p. 10). And so, too, the way Auerbach treats the scene is to set it up as an object lesson in symptomatic reading, as a kind of Jewish philology of Jewish texts and their underlying Jewish spiritual mentality. The scene itself is very much an allegory of reading—not of reading pure and simple but of Jewish reading. More specifically, it is introduced as a way of illuminating Abraham’s reception of God’s terrible imperative, which is to say his baffled but finally accepting response to it; everything else fades away into insignificance, including the moment of sacrifice itself (see Mi, pp. 10 –11; M, pp. 12–13). Pared down to its essentials like this, the scene represents a scene of reading— of obscure and mysterious signs—while the essay presents us with another scene of reading, that of one Jew (Auerbach) reading the way another Jew (Abraham) attempts to read God. In between the two appeals from God, each deafening and harrowing, each equally abrupt and inexplicable, each requiring utter submission and moral interpellation (or else unthinkable rebellion and exile), comes the string of minimalist descriptions we have been discussing: the privations of form, of local and spatial markers, the absence of landscape, the sheer abstraction of a moral action transpiring in the barest of outlines, inexorably, filled with oppressive suspense, and the silent aging of Abraham, bewildered at his having been so chosen. Again, all this stands in sharp contrast to the Homeric poems, which, owing to their elaborate use of 37. The English translation cites the King James version; Auerbach pointedly cites Luther’s version, which I have rendered here. On the heated politics of the Lutheran Bible during the Nazi era, see Bergen, Twisted Cross, p. 147, and, for example, Grundmann, Die Entjudung des religio¨sen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscher Theologie und Kirche, p. 10.

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epithets, their thick description, and their multiple digressions, actually “prevent the reader from concentrating exclusively [einseitig] on a present crisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment of an oppressive suspense” (Mi, p. 11; M, p. 12; trans. mod.; emphasis added). Reduced to an absolute minimum (of terror), the Bible is tyrannical indeed, morally oppressive and tyrannical, while the Homeric epics are not so much digressive as they act to dull one’s moral focus altogether, at least on Auerbach’s strong reading of them. So put, the Homeric epics appear in a somewhat less enviable light. In sheer comparative terms, Homer shrivels beside the Jewish Bible, which in turn excels in every way. As the essay progresses, the points in the Bible’s favor mount up. Indeed, in Auerbach’s hands the Bible is destined to usurp the classical labels of (Schillerian) “tragedy” and finally of “epic” itself (Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13). Summing up, Auerbach concludes, “the Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains [covered in the essay]: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology,” whereas Homer is limited to legend only (Mi, p. 21; M, p. 24), a limitation that, as we have seen, has ominous echoes of its own. The Old Testament indeed spans creation to the end of time, but not so Homer; the former takes in not only history but also Weltgeschichte (see Mi, p. 16; M, p. 18) and not only world history but also history with moral and ethical significance, capable of the “imitation of real life,” which is after all the thrust of Mimesis (Mi, p. 119; M, p. 116). But where the truly radical thrust of Auerbach’s comparison comes to the fore is where all comparisons cease to matter. For if you add up the two notional columns in which the respective qualities of the two epics have been arrayed, it quickly becomes apparent that the Homeric and the biblical epics—the secular and Judeo-Christian bibles (already an eighteenthcentury conceit)—are not merely incomparable, they are actually incommensurable; there is no common measure by which to gauge them. Thus, “scenes such as those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his sons, between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, between Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau, and so on, are inconceivable [or unrepresentable: nicht vorstellbar] in the Homeric style” (Mi, p. 22; M, p. 25). The point is phenomenological and not just stylistic. “Auffassungsweise” here discloses its full meaning. It is not just that Homer’s style cannot encompass, and therefore cannot grasp or know (“represent”), a deep and intimate degree of emotional freight. It is that such scenes and events would be opaque to Homer’s characters and therefore also to the author of the epics himself: “complications arise which would be utterly incomprehensible [unfaßbar] to the Homeric heroes.” The reason is that “the latter must have palpable [hand-

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festen] and clearly expressible reasons for their conflicts and enmities, and these work themselves out in free battles,” whereas the biblical heroes are forever rent by deep, smoldering conflicts involving moral dilemmas that lie well below the surface (Mi, p. 22; M, p. 26). In its largest implications, Auerbach’s argument suggests the need to uncouple or at the very least to rethink “Athens and Jerusalem,” a conceptual pairing that has dominated Western ideologies for centuries. But Auerbach has more immediate targets in mind. What we have in the contrast between the two epics is a contrast between two conceptual schemes or psychologies that are being shown to be mutually untranslatable. Once again, the terms favor the Jewish case. Nor is this all. The Homeric psychology that Auerbach unveils through his narrative analysis is symbolically charged, for it can be shown to match up point for point with the psychology that was conventionally ascribed to Homer and to Homer’s Greeks from the age of Winckelmann, Humboldt, and Schiller and then well into the nineteenth century and beyond.38 Its distinguishing traits are naı¨vete´, simplicity, superficiality, sensuousness, and so on—in other words, traits that Nazi propagandists would embrace in their image of the Greeks and then reapply to other aspects of contemporary German identity, as for instance in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), with its bold celebration of classical forms, or in Ernst Buschor’s Vom Sinn der griechischen Standbilder (On the Meaning of Classical Statues) (1942), all following Hitler’s very own cues in Mein Kampf.39 Auerbach’s Homer is in a sense a caricature of the inherited classicized Homer, itself a cliche´ familiar already to Nietzsche in the mid-nineteenth century; he is all surface, no depth, all foreground, momentary presence, clarity, brilliance, sensuousness, simplicity, tranquil appearance (pure phenomenality), Apollonian.40 From one angle marmoreal, from another these 38. See Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, pp. 167–224. 39. See George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996) for this and other examples; volume 1 of Werner Jaeger, Paideia: Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1934), with the fascinating (and damning) marginalia by Paul Friedla¨nder in his personal copy (on which, see Calder and Braun, “‘Tell It Hitler! Ecco!’”); Ernst Buschor, Vom Sinn der griechischen Standbilder (Berlin, 1942), esp. fig. 46; Andrew F. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 1:31, whose commentary on Buschor’s Nazism is invaluable; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. in 1 (1925–27; Munich, 1942), pp. 453, 470; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edward Jephcott (1944; Stanford, Calif., 2002), pp. 36 –37; and, generally, Volker Losemann, “Classics in the Second World War,” in Nazi Germany and the Humanities, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach (Oxford, 2007), pp. 306 –39. 40. See Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (Stanford, Calif., 2000) and Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, pp. 225– 80. Nietzsche summed it all up in a note from 1869 –70, which Auerbach’s language echoes: “The ‘Hellenic’ since

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features are somewhat disturbing, for what do they conceal? The brilliance of the present conceals the obscurity (Dunkel) of the past, which is dimly felt but never articulated (see Mi, p. 6; M, p. 8). For all its tranquility, there is a compulsiveness to the Homeric narration, which restlessly moves from foreground to foreground; it is driven by a need (Bedu¨rfniss) (see Mi, p. 5; M, p. 7). Why? The retarding effect, while seemingly lacking a goal (see Mi, pp. 4; M, p. 6), acts like a diversion, in every sense of the word. Staked on pure pleasure, on the sheer pleasure of sensuous existence and aesthetic play, and on lies (see Mi, pp. 13, 14; M, p. 15, 16), the Homeric poems betray a less flattering side, as we saw. Now we can see one more of its attractions: disavowal. The Homeric world is ahistorical (another inherited cliche´).41 Indeed, it represents a diversion from history and reality (“even when the most terrible things are occurring” [Mi, p. 11; M, p. 13]) and a flight into fictional legend and myth. Its resemblances to the current situation in Nazi Germany are all too evident in Auerbach’s eyes; the allure of ideology, with its easy simplifications, is a dangerous path: “To write [true, complex] history [in times such as these, in 1942] is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.” Auerbach will have none of these concessions and therefore will make no concessions to the historical blindnesses of Homer, construed in the way they are by Auerbach, which is to say, by the tradition he has squarely in his sights. But if Auerbach’s project fails as a literary and philological comparison from the very start owing to the way he has set up his two texts as incommensurable entities, it nevertheless succeeds critically and ethi-

Winckelmann: an intense superficialization (Verflachung). . . . Beauty and superficiality (Flachheit) in league, indeed necessary. Scandalous theory!” (quoted in Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, p. 251). He goes on to denigrate this kind of classicism with an unfortunate (and very un-Auerbachian) term in the next breath: “Judea!” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869 –1874, vol. 7 of Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin, 1999], p. 81). Remarkably, these Apollonian traits persist unchanged with Hermann Fra¨nkel’s account of Homer in his Dichtung und Philosophie des fru¨hen Griechentums: Eine Geschichte der griechischen Epik, Lyrik, und Prosa bis zur Mitte des fu¨nften Jahrhunderts (1951; Munich, 1993), pp. 75–93. 41. For the cliche´, see Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, pp. 192, 206, 222. Auerbach surely knew that Homer’s epics contain a strong sense of historical depth, even profundity, as for instance whenever they gesture to the distant past from the future (in the poet’s present), as in the case of the ancient burial mound at Batieia (Iliad 2.811–14) or in the case of the soon-to-be-vanished Achaean Wall (Iliad 12.3–33; compare 7.454–63—so the ancient Greek commentaries on the passage), or whenever they gesture to the uncertain future from the epic past (as in haunting epitaphic utterances spoken by characters: “Somebody will say someday, ‘So-and-so once fought here and died’”). See most recently Jonas Grethlein, Das Geschichtsbild der Ilias: Eine Untersuchung aus pha¨nomenologischer und narratologischer Perspektive (Go¨ttingen, 2006).

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cally. Indeed, it is Auerbach’s finely discriminating ethical sensibility that renders the project of comparison and evaluation possible, albeit on a nonliterary level. What is more, if his strategy of aligning himself with Jewish biblical history and against the German present strikes us as unusual today, it was in fact an obvious option for intellectuals who were seeking to oppose the political realities of the time. Thomas Mann had chosen to confront prevailing ideologies through his mere choice of subject matter in his exilic epic narrative from 1933, Josef und seine Bru¨der. And Sigmund Freud had done the same with his rewriting of Jewish history in Moses and Monotheism (1934 –38), which likewise sought to disturb contemporary ideologies of myth and religion,42 though it might be added that the actual twist in Freud’s essay lay in cutting the ground out from under the National Socialists and their sympathizers and in showing how, unbeknownst to themselves, “their hatred of Jews is at bottom a hatred of Christians.”43 Of these three instances of strategic undoing, Freud’s is undoubtedly the most perverse, while Auerbach’s is the most subtly insistent yet straightforward in its reversals of accepted social and religious values. Auerbach’s undermining of the classical ideal from within, by reducing Homer to a reflective surface with no access to itself and one that is moreover denied all possible escapes in Dionysian ecstasy (see Mi, p. 14; M, p.16), is nevertheless as powerful an intervention into canonical German culture as any other from the time.44 One of the most appealing features of Auerbach’s essay is the exquisite historical consciousness that it discovers in the Jewish biblical narrative or else that he ascribes to it. The Old Testament is drenched in history; this is what gives it its terrifying depth and verticality. It is “genuine” history, “die echte Geschichte,” which is to say a history without “the tendency to a smoothing down and harmonizing of events . . . a simplification of motives, . . . which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development,” but instead actually brings to light “the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes”—the very sorts of things, in other words, that Homeric legend and Nazi propaganda would each disown and evade (Mi, p. 20; M, p. 23). And so it is now possible to see how in 42. See Eric Downing, After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung (Detroit, 2006), pp. 169 –73 on both Mann and Freud, and p. 322 n. 33 on the fantasy of the distinctness of Semites and Hellenes in the German racial consciousness at the fin-de-sie`cle (a boundary that Nietzsche was far more willing to breach). 43. Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, 11 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1969 –75), 9:539. 44. I should note that because Auerbach’s quarrel is strictly with the German traditions, he does not even implicitly allude to the Arnoldian concept of “Hebrews and Hellenes” in Mimesis.

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assuming the parti pris of the biblical drive to history, some of which is subsumed in his own attempt to historicize the Bible, Auerbach is at the same time endorsing the critically minded imperative “Always historicize.” By investing the Old Testament narrative with perspectival depth, historical possibilities, and a quest for moral truth, not ingratiating and entertaining lies, Auerbach is inverting the modern edifice of philology; he is Judaizing it and thereby enacting a kind of philological revenge in the name of a tyrannical, terrifying, all-seeing but hidden Jewish god. Nor should we ignore the methodological fierceness of Mimesis itself. In a sense, what Auerbach is laying claim to in that work is nothing less than Alleinherrschaft. There is a capriciousness to his position; he is every bit as arbitrary and demanding with his subject matter as is Yaweh imposing his will on Abraham (see Mi, pp. 556 –57; M, pp. 517–18). This may be no more than a pose. But relative to his previous scholarship, which was modest by comparison, Mimesis is a striking declaration by Auerbach of his total mastery of Weltliteratur well beyond the confines of romance philology. He was plainly out to make a statement, a fierce, proud, and contumacious one, in the teeth of the German establishment that had deprived him of his Lehrstuhl, library, and home. The current attempts in some quarters to “correct” or “refute” Auerbach’s philology miss the contextual premises of his essay entirely.45 The attempts in other quarters to elevate Auerbach as the hero of a “secular” world literature, a critical tack begun by Edward Said, likewise serve to remove the sting from Auerbach’s pointed and even strongly Jewish critical writing, while at the same time glossing over its unmistakable political cast in the context of German National Socialism—though again, the politics of Auerbach’s wartime writing may be largely lost on his postwar readers.46 45. For example, see Helmut Kuhn, “Literaturgeschichte als Geschichtsphilosophie,” review of Mimesis, by Auerbach, Philosophische Rundschau 11 (Feb. 1963): 222– 48; Norman Austin, “The Function of Digressions in the Iliad,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 7 (Winter 1966): 295–312; Irene J. F. de Jong, “Eurykleia and Odysseus’s Scar: Odyssey 19.393– 466,” Classical Quarterly 35, no. 2, n.s. (1985): 517–30; and Adolf Ko¨hnken, “Die Narbe des Odysseus: Ein Beitrag zur homerisch-epischen Erza¨hltechnik,” in Homer: Die Dichtung und ihre Deutung, ed. Joachim Latacz (Darmstadt, 1991), pp. 491–514. Mimesis met with an initial onslaught of criticism from German classicists, such as Ludwig Edelstein and Otto Regenbogen, as Auerbach notes in “E.” The more recent criticisms by philologists are in the same spirit, merely updated. 46. See Edward W. Said, “Secular Criticism,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 5–9, “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition,” in Mi, pp. ix–xxxii, and “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World,” Boundary 2 31 (Summer 2004): 11–34 — unless, that is, one accepts the attempted retrieval by Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical

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4. The “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (1953) My argument is that the time and date stamp of “Odysseus’ Scar” is best read off the essay itself, which is not to deny that there are abundant clues in the remainder of Mimesis that point in the same direction, though no single essay is as powerfully telling or moving as the opening chapter. But there is one more document that leaves absolutely no doubt as to the temporal indices of that essay and its encompassing work, namely, the “Epilegomena” that Auerbach published in 1953 from his new post at Yale and in defense of Mimesis. Mimesis had come under a good deal of harsh criticism by reviewers, the most stinging example being that of Ernst Robert Curtius, a fellow heavyweight romance philologist and exile after the war (though he had sat out the war as an inner exile in Germany, a fact that Auerbach never ceased to underscore), while a number of the criticisms came from the side of classical philologists of all places, as if Mimesis consisted in only the first three chapters (out of twenty). Curtius’s attack likewise took the form of philological complaints and Kleinigkeiten, though it plainly disguised a larger and deeper antagonism between these two titans in romance philology. Auerbach responded in kind, and tellingly. I won’t have space to dwell on this document but will instead restrict myself to three points. First, the piece opens with a magnificent salvo that reveals Auerbach’s truest original aims, while also sidelining Curtius from the start (whose objections are evidently not deemed “substantial”): “classical literature is treated in my book above all as a counterexample (Gegenbeispiel)” (the same term again), while the aim was to show “what classical literature does not possess”—with inescapably disturbing results (but no apologies are given) (“E,” p. 559; trans. mod.).47 Auerbach will return to Curtius’s objections after a few pages and then will drop them just as suddenly when he moves on to larger vistas in the final pages (Europe, history, Weltgeschichte, realism, style, method, and so on). Second, at the end of the essay Auerbach goes on to clarify which classical philology he has in mind: classical and then, more broadly, humane philology in the tradition of “German romanticism and Hegel,” of the sort

Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95–125 and others who would “world” the humanism of Said’s reading of Auerbach, unconvincingly in my view. 47. Compare Mi, p. 119; M, p. 116: “In our earlier chapters we attempted to show that the first effect of the Judaeo-Christian manner of dealing with the events in the world of reality . . . brought about a dynamic movement in the basic conception of life, a swing of the pendulum in the realms of morals and sociology, which went far beyond the classic-antique norm for the imitation of real life and living growth” (emphasis added).

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that he absorbed in his youth: “Mimesis attempts to encompass Europe, but it is a German book, not only owing to its language. . . . It would never have been written without the influences that I experienced in my youth in Germany” (“E,” p. 571; emphasis added; trans. mod.). Third, the paragraph that closes the essay at the same time makes up for any deficiencies in temporal marking that Mimesis may appear to have exhibited, whether now in 1953 or at the time of its publication after the war in 1946. Addressing one last objection, namely, that his book was too “time-bound” (zeitgebunden), “all too determined by the present” (whatever that meant), Auerbach replies, “that, too, is intentional,” and he goes on to give his rationale first a quasi-philosophical justification that has to do with contextualizing one’s point of view and then a more hauntingly open-ended one in the essay’s final words. In the course of defending himself against the objection, it becomes obvious that Auerbach has already answered the objection earlier, albeit implicitly. But an explicit response is warranted, one that links together themes he touched on earlier (Europe, his own formation or Bildung), in a paragraph that contains the memorable line or, rather, chastising reminder: “It is better to be consciously rather than unconsciously time-bound (zeitgebunden).” Then a final envoi: “Mimesis is quite consciously a book that was written by a particular person in a particular place at the start of the 1940s” (“E,” pp. 573–74).48

5. Auerbach’s Jewish Philology and His Philosophy of History What, one might well ask, are the larger consequences that follow from this one episode in Auerbach’s life and from the kind of reading proposed here? In closing, I want to indicate briefly how Auerbach’s Judaizing of philology was by no means a one-off from 1942. The first essay of Mimesis reverberates throughout the whole of that book, right through to the final chapter on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), in which the contrast between the Bible and Homer suddenly reappears in a ringlike form. The Bible is not named, but its attributes are reintroduced, for instance, in the guise of stream of consciousness, which accedes to all manner of depths: Zeitentiefe (time-depths), Bewußtseinstiefe (depths of consciousness), and “a more actual, deeper lying, indeed even more real reality [ja sogar wirklichere Wirklichkeit].” There are, moreover, telecommunications with the divine to be heard, in the form of disembodied voices “between heaven and 48. Auerbach’s political commitment persisted beyond exile. See Robert Fitzgerald, Enlarging the Change: The Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism, 1949 –1951 (Boston, 1985), chap. 1, for a re´sume´ of Auerbach’s first Gauss lectures on the “‘political’ theory of Pascal” (p. 15) and the ensuing, often heated discussion at Princeton.

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earth” (conveyed now by telephone) that, like Abraham’s connection to God, are spatially and temporally unlocatable (Mi, pp. 540, 532; M, pp. 502, 496; trans. mod.). All this contrasts with a surface reality that, as in the scar episode of the Odyssey, is clearly demarcated both spatially and temporally and that, Auerbach insists (and here he is explicit about the reference), the novel eschews.49 But Auerbach’s Judaizing project also culminates a life of engagements with religion, history, and literature that in retrospect can be shown to be completely harmonious with the purposes of “Odysseus’ Scar.” The polemics of that essay may be sharper, more pitched, and more pointed than anything Auerbach wrote ever before, but there is much in common with his earlier writing that deserves to be brought out, even at the essay’s most polemical core. Indeed, the main substantive theses of Mimesis were already in place in Auerbach’s earliest publications from 1921 and 1929, from his dissertation to his Dante book, as was Auerbach’s Judaizing philology, which involves as much a methodological commitment as it does a set of views about time, literature, and history—and, more broadly, views about human, this-worldly reality, that vast realm of complexly layered, often obscurely lit and conflicting motivations and impulses of the kind that he so deeply admires in the Jewish Old Testament.50 But, in order to show all of this, one would need to begin by examining Auerbach’s relationship to Vico and Auerbach’s own evolving philosophy of history. A brief look is all that can be afforded here. From Vico, Auerbach derives an appreciation of the concrete, singular, and historical nature of historical reality, which is emphatically manmade. Indeed, Auerbach’s closing statement from his “Epilegomena” in 1953, quite apart from its immediate personal and historical resonances, might as well have been a remark from The New Science (the 1744 third edition), which Auerbach cites in one of his many essays on Vico and which he renders thus: “The nature of [human or historical] things is 49. “Even in the case of the telephone scene [between Mr. Banks and “the enigma Mrs. Ramsay”] we have only an inexact indication of when it occurred” (Mi, p. 539; M, p. 501; emphasis added), which Auerbach contrasts with “the successive episodes of the story of Odysseus’ youth” or “the footwashing scene” (Mi, p. 539; M, p. 501). Karen Lawrence suggested to me that Auerbach might well have in mind here Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness imagining of a telephone conversation with the biblical beyond in the Proteus chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, a` la the Derridean Ulysses-gramophone motif: “Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (James Joyce, Ulysses, the 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson [Oxford, 1993], p. 38). 50. Compare Auerbach, Zur Technik der Fru¨hrenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich (Heidelberg, 1921), p. 1. Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin, 1929) anticipates the thesis of Mimesis in its entirety; see esp. pp. 7, 113–15, 117, and 217–18; trans. Mannheim under the title Dante: Poet of the Secular World (Chicago, 1961).

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nothing else but their coming into existence at certain times and under certain conditions.”51 A bit further on, Auerbach argues against historical blindness by way of Molie`re’s Monsieur Jourdain: “Most of us are as little conscious of our historicism as Monsieur Jourdain is of his prose” (“VC,” p. 252). Nothing could be further from the ideal of historical consciousness that Auerbach gladly inherited and adapted from Vico, the critical science of which he likewise learned from Vico to call “philology” and from which “arises the consciousness of the historically given (la coscienza del certo).”52 In Vico’s matrix, historical understanding, philosophy, and philology are virtually interchangeable names for a methodical understanding of human existence that is bounded by time and experience, while history is enlarged “to such an extent that it comprehends the whole of social life” (“VC,” p. 260). Enlarged, but also deepened, narrowed, and particularized, for, as Auerbach takes Vico’s argument, the point of historical understanding, which requires a philological act, is to grasp the concrete reality of human events in their “particular character” and in their outwardly radiating “interrelations,” which consist of further particulars (“VC,” p. 262). Concrete is one of Auerbach’s favorite analytical terms. It corresponds, no doubt, to certo above and to the famous Ansatzpha¨nomene or methodological starting points of analysis best known from Auerbach’s “Philology of World Literature” (1952). These latter will in the best of cases provide an example of der konkrete Ansatz, the concrete point of departure, which is both immediately focused and interrelated with its larger context and is therefore an excellent way to get hold of an object of study. Their antithesis, methodologically speaking, consists in bad points of departure, namely, abstract, high-level, and frequently vague concepts that are imposed from above and that grasp hold of nothing in particular.53 Each of the various essays of Mimesis, for example, is formed around a different Ansatzpunkt. Now, a regular synonym for concrete in Auerbach’s critical lexicon is earthly, as in the phrase “the fullness of the events of human life in earthly time [in der irdischen Zeit].”54 Thus, in another lecture on Vico from 1931, Auerbach describes the material of history as “a meaningful whole [ein Sinnganzes], in which each individual event is multiply [mannigfach] 51. Auerbach, “Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism” (1958), Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur romanischen Philologie, p. 260; emphasis added; hereafter abbreviated “VC.” Compare also Auerbach, Zur Technik der Fru¨hrenaissancenovelle, p. 1. 52. Auerbach, “Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie” (1936), Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur romanischen Philologie, p. 241. 53. See Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952), Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur romanischen Philologie, pp. 308, 309. 54. Auerbach, “Vico und Herder” (1931), Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur romanischen Philologie, p. 222.

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rooted and out of which it can find its interpretation,” even if such meaning is the fruit of a speculative act of reason, combined with guesswork, intuition, and trust in the rationality of reason and events and, ultimately, in that of humanity itself. Unsurprisingly, historical thinking for Auerbach, which is grounded in the concrete and the particular, slides imperceptibly into the domain of the practical and the ethical (the praktischethisch).55 Indeed, these domains never exist apart. They never exist apart once “the historical perspective” has been discovered as such. One might say that the whole of Auerbach’s philological oeuvre is devoted to charting this discovery, which takes the form of a progression from the classical to the Judeo-Christian to the modern view of time. Such a trajectory involves two critical ruptures or breakdowns: the transition from the classical era (typified by ahistorical myth) to the Christian era (typified by closed, transcendental, vertical, providential, eternal time),56 and the transition from the Christian to the modern, secular, and enlightened era (history in the proper, critical, and scientific sense). What makes Auerbach’s picture of the rise of historical consciousness in the West so difficult to grasp and, therefore, so endlessly fascinating are the tensions he discovers in it and that never cease to plague and imbalance it. There are at least three factors at work here, and these progress along a chain, from the origins of history to their contemporary reflection back to and upon their origins again. 1. To judge from “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach may well begin by aligning himself with Vico against Hegel in privileging the Jewish Old Testament for the way it documents the most ancient events in Western history (Creation, the Flood, and so on), and to which in any case—like Vico and definitely unlike Hegel (young or old)— he accords a highly positive evaluation. History, from this perspective, has its foundations in the Jewish nation. Christianity represents a tertiary phase (third in line after the classical era).57 2. Wherever, upon closer inspection, the Judeo-Christian heritage presents an unstable hyphenation of two religious traditions, Christianity turns out to be, as it were, inwardly hyphenated, torn by its attachments to the here and the Beyond, to the flesh and the spirit. A tension is thus 55. See ibid. 56. See ibid., p. 223. 57. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton, N.J., 1999), pp. 234 –55, and especially p. 240 for the claim that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, provides the narrative model of The New Science, which in any event begins its history with the Deluge. Compare also Auerbach, “Vico und Herder,” p. 227.

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detectable within the Christian perspective itself, as its proponents stand awkwardly with one foot in this world and another in the Beyond—and, eventually, with one foot in Christianity and another in secular modernity. 3. Auerbach’s narrative of “prehistorical” events, which is to say of events prior to the discovery of modern historical consciousness during the Enlightenment, is inevitably infected with his own and others’ modern historical consciousness, with the dual result that no event from the past is ever untouched by its historical narration (retrospectively speaking, “for us”), nor is it ever entirely clear from whose perspective events are being narrated at any given time. There is clearly a sense, too, in which historical consciousness is allowed even to premodern agents— but in what exact sense? Auerbach’s narratives are thus inherently unstable (albeit productively so). The first of these three sources of tension works against the predominantly Christian narrative that fills so many of Auerbach’s published pages. This resistance lies at the kernel of Auerbach’s Jewish philological stance, which is also reflected in the second source of tension above and upon which his writings most often dwell. The third source, while it signals Auerbach’s own modernity (his own historical location on this side of the secular divide), nevertheless bears signs of potential ambivalence. The rise of historical consciousness inevitably has to pass through an initial Jewish moment. Must it also supersede this moment? The question haunts all of Auerbach’s writings. Appearing to be absorbed for the most part with questions of Christian literary meaning, Auerbach’s writings can in fact be shown to document and, indeed, to revel in the gradual unfolding crisis within Christianity. A case in point is his essay “On the Historical Place of Rousseau” (1932). Auerbach depicts Rousseau as a transitional figure on the cusp of modernity, as a Christian in crisis, or better yet as a post-Christian neurotic caught in a double bind between faith and reason on the threshold of modernity and bewildered by competing allegiances to the Church and to the Enlightenment. Rousseau’s “crisis of Christianity” nevertheless does betray something symptomatic about Christians generally in Auerbach’s view, and not only in their “critical epochs” such as the one through which Rousseau exemplarily lived, namely, that “insecurity in the earthly world [in der irdischen Welt] is a Christian motif.”58 If so, then another way of describing Auerbach’s overarching vision of history, as this can be deduced ¨ ber den historischen Ort Rousseaus,” Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur 58. Auerbach, “U romanischen Philologie, p. 293; emphasis added. Later, Auerbach dates “the beginning of the crisis of European Christianity” to a “very early” period—indeed, to the very “flowering” of Christianity itself (p. 295). Christianity, in other words, was constitutionally in crisis. Compare

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from his writings between 1921 and 1958, is that it is precisely about the overcoming of this insecurity and the coming to terms with the earthly, secular world. Earthly (irdisch) is the operative word in the title Dante: Poet of the Earthly World (1929); the book spells out a massive dissonance in the Christian poetics and worldview of the first great vernacular poet of the Italian language, the poet to whom Auerbach kept returning in his later writings as an epochal and symbolic touchstone. But Auerbach has more than a historiographical investment in documenting what today would be called a historical turn. What matters to Auerbach in the end are the this-worldly elements of reality, its human, earthly side, that constitute the source of every value, be it historical or ethical or, as is most often the case, both of these together, indivisibly combined. And so, in tracing the rise of historical consciousness, Auerbach is at the same time tracing something like the historical grounding of autonomous—in Vico’s sense, man-made— ethical consciousness. And yet a certain amount of willful perversity cannot but be involved in such a project for the simple reason that to read Christianity in this way is to read it, so to speak, against the grain and from two directions at once. First, it is to read Christianity with a view to its eventual unseating as a religious force and its secularization in the modern world—its “Entchristung” or de-Christianization—as it gave way to modern historical subjectivity.59 Second, it is to trace the emergence of Christianity out of the Jewish biblical tradition, which no amount of interpretation, exegesis, allegoresis, persecution, or history could ever erase. In a word, Christianity was Jewish before it was ever Christian, and it never becomes un-Jewish even after its transformation into Christianity. In a very real sense, the historicity of Christ—who was as much a Jew as an incarnation of God for Auerbach and as much a historical, earthly figure conflicted with doubt (Spannung) as a spiritual one (Christ was “a concrete event, . . . a central fact of world history”)60—is the guarantor, and scandal, for both claims on Auerbach’s approach. “Figura” is only one of the way stations en route to this philo-

also Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Mannheim (1958; Princeton, N.J., 1993), p. 337. 59. See Auerbach, Das franzo¨sische Publikum des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1933), pp. 46, 47. ¨ ber den historischen Ort Rousseaus,” pp. 292, 294, Auerbach uses “Entchristlichung” and In “U “entchristlichen.” See also Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, pp. 212–18. 60. Auerbach, Dante, p. 14: even “Christ himself lived in continuous conflict [Spannung]” about his calling, thus exemplifying Christian ambivalence (see p. 16). “The history [or story: Geschichte] of Christ,” the source of “tragic realism,” is said by Auerbach to have arisen out of “God’s devotion to earthly reality” (Auerbach, “Romantik und Realismus,” Neue Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 9, no. 2 [1933]: 153; emphasis added).

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logical apprehension of a historical reality; figural readings reinforce the historical reality of the Jewish past they would undo. And Mimesis brings home the same point in another, no less striking fashion: As a result of this claim to absolute authority [of the Old Testament], the [Jewish] method of interpretation spread to traditions other than the Jewish. . . . The need for interpretation reaches out beyond the original Jewish-Israelite realm of reality—for example to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a determined sense becomes a general method of comprehending reality [Wirklichkeitsauffassung]. . . . The most striking piece of interpretation of this sort occurred in the first century of the Christian era, in consequence of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles: Paul and the Church Fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ. . . . Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a claim to sole authority [Alleinherrschaft], on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretative change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe. [Mi, p. 16; M, pp. 18 –19; trans. mod; emphasis added] In other words, the Jewish tradition persists even as it adapts and changes, dynamically; and what it diffuses is an entire vision—a Jewish vision— of reality (Wirklichkeitsauffassung). All of Auerbach’s writings leading up to Mimesis trace this pattern— with one significant difference. In his earlier work (Das franzo¨sische Publikum, “Rousseau,” Dante, “Figura”), Auerbach’s discussions of the Old Testament were driven by a concern for its subordination to Christian doctrine and for the unfolding of the Judeo-Christian literary heritage as a hyphenated totality, so much so that one might never suspect a Jewish parti pris by its author. Not so in Mimesis, where for the first (and last) time in his life Auerbach’s attention to the Old Testament and its Jewish character is undivided, even unremitting. “Odysseus’ Scar” thus stands out as a radical departure in Auerbach’s oeuvre. A radical departure, but it is also a clue to unraveling what was always available to see in his writings. For, in hindsight, it is possible to recognize how Auerbach, from the very first, was always practicing a Jewish philology. History and circumstances merely caught up with him. Rousseau’s crisis lay just around the corner. And then the Nazi seizure of power, the expulsion of the Jews, and Turkish exile. The result is that history and historical consciousness, wherever they subsequently appear in the sequel in Mimesis, do so under the sign of the

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Old Testament and its Jewishness. And the philology that sets out to capture this historicity, which Auerbach variously calls mimesis and the representation of reality in Western literature even in his earliest writings, is a Jewish philology. It matters little if modern historical consciousness, historically speaking, derived from a secularization of biblical thinking, as we saw earlier. For the other half of the story is the twofold nature of this evolution, its double determination; historical consciousness unfolded in the course of its religious evolution, starting with its Judaic traditions, on the way to its secularization. Indeed, what the religious stage of this development brought to historical consciousness were two of its most essential features, each linked to the other: its sense of mutability over time and its practicalethical awareness, without which it would collapse into shallow positivism. Both of these, fully palpable in the analysis of the Old Testament in “Odysseus’ Scar,” are “the fruit of [man’s] history on earth.”61 By way of comparison, we might consider the final lines of “Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie,” which are exemplary in setting Auerbach’s vision of history apart from the grasp of mere historical facts, but also from some harmless and pretty form of secular humanism: It will be useful to recall that Vico understood the commonality of humankind [das Gemeinsam-Menschliche] not in a cultivated, enlightened, and progressive sense, but rather in the whole, huge, and terrifying [schrecklichen] reality of history. He saw historical man as a whole, and he saw that he was himself a man in order to understand this [larger entity, historical] man. He did not form an image of historical man after his own image; he did not discover himself in the other; rather, he discovered the other in himself; he discovered himself, the man, in history, and [in this way] the long buried powers of our nature were laid bare before him. That is his humanity: something deeper and more dangerous than that which one usually understands by the word. But in spite of this, or rather precisely because of this, he discovered the commonality of man, and he held on to it firmly.62 Auerbach’s view of historical reality, with its plunging verticalities (a` la the Old Testament in “Odysseus’ Scar”), is full of terror and of beautiful potential as well. It might well be called Abrahamic. For the same reasons, Auerbach regards To the Lighthouse as a work that is filled with a rich, contradictory (one is tempted to say, biblical) historical consciousness informed by “the time of the first World War and after,” 61. Auerbach, Dante, p. 142. 62. Auerbach, “Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie,” p. 241; emphasis added.

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including “fascism” (Mi, pp. 551, 550; M, pp. 512, 511). Consequently, the work is not so much suffused with dark cultural pessimism (which also happens to be the conventional reading of Auerbach’s postwar posture) as it is brimming with more complex emotions (see Mi, p. 549; M, p. 511). While “it breathes an air of vague and hopeless sadness[,] . . . [it is] filled with good and genuine love” (Mi, pp. 551–52; M, p. 513). Whatever doubt it may harbor towards life is counterbalanced by the concrete realism of discrete objects—such as the stocking that Mrs. Ramsay is knitting—and individual occurrences, which, though random, trigger a chain of reflections that take on a life of their own. “And in the process something new and elemental appear[s]: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice” (Mi, p. 552; M, p. 513). Thus, out of the horror and wreckage of world war, whether the first or the second, Auerbach nonetheless finds something positive to lay claim to and grasp hold of—indeed, nothing less than the very condition of historical consciousness itself, namely, life: Isaac restored.

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