AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 2153 Auerbach, Erich Literature: Arne Magnusson 1663–1963: Udstilling i Det kgl. Bibliotek November, december 1963 (Copenhagen: Det kongelige Bibliotek, 1963); Arni Magnussons levned og skrifter, ed. Finnur Jónsson(København: Gyldendal, 1930); Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Ole Widding: Arne Magnusson: Den store håndskriftsamler, vol. I: 300-året for hans fødsel (1963), trans. Arne Magnusson. The Manuscript Collector (1972); Ole Widding, “Árni Magnússon and his Collection: An Appreciation on the Tercentenary of his Birth,” Scandinavica 2 (1963): 93–107. In the novel Íslandsklukkan (1946, Iceland’s Bell) by the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness, a key character, Arnas Arnaeus, is modelled upon Á. – [Gu 5 brandur Vigfússon, ed.], Sturlunga saga […], ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878): vol. 1, cxlvii-cli; Gu 5 var 5 ur Már Gunnlaugsson, “Lei6beiningar Árna Magnússonar,” Gripla 12 (2001): 95–124 (with Engl. summary); Jón Helgason, “Athuganir Árna Magnússonar um fornsögur,” Gripla 4 (1980): 33–64; Már Jónsson, Árni Magnússon: Ævisaga. (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1998); Ólafur Halldórsson, “Árni Magnússon (1663–1730),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York, London: Garland, 1998): 33–43; Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, “Árni Magnússon och hans handskriftsamling,” Scripta Islandica 33 (1982): 45–59. Jens Eike Schnall Auerbach, Erich (November 9, 1892, Berlin – October 13, 1957, Wallingford, Conn.), German Philologist. A. is considered, along with Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer, one of the greatest German literary scholars of the 20th century, concentrated on Romance philology. His main contribution to research was to analyze and synthesize the relationship between textual expression (i. e. style) on the one hand, and on perception of reality on the other. He considered both as a time-bound complex. A.’s philological method is indebted directly to historicism, especially to Giambattista Vico. He interprets Vico emphasizing the element of historical relativism and perspectivism, when looking on different literary periods. A. argues that each specific era bears particular qualities in its thought and concepts of reality. These unique traits are reflected in the literary style. In what is usually regarded his masterpiece, Mimesis, A. spans the entire European literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf in case studies. These highlight stylistic specificities in order to reconstruct historical forms of representations of reality. According to the diachronic basis, A. emphasizes stylistic diversity. Nevertheless, he argues for an underlying unity of European literature, signified by a serious representation AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Auerbach, Erich 2154 of the earthly or – in modern, secular times – of everyday life. To describe variation, hybridization, and innovation, he relates to the classical theory of the three style levels. In the history of style, one of the major innovations of writing was owed to Christianization. In its sway, the dominant style of narration was simplified in the sense of “sermo humilis” as proclaimed and exemplified by Augustine and the Church Fathers. This humble, lowly style can also refer to sublime subjects like the mysteries of incarnation, a novel quality with regard to antiquity. Another main topic of A. is the specific of medieval Christian culture. He polarizes abstract-spiritualistic allegoresis and the exegetical “figura”-concept in which he sees the underlying basis for any understanding of medieval literature. A. uses the complex implications of figural interpretation also to re-evaluate Dante’s Commedia, especially to explain why the characters of the Christian other world remain empirical historical individuals. Seen in the light of a figural interpretation, the poetological program of the Commedia connects human existence with eternal divine order. A. was born in Berlin on November 9, 1892, into an assimilated Jewish merchant family. In 1910 he graduated there from the prestigious Französisches Gymnasium. The same year, he began to study law at Berlin and continued his studies at Freiburg, Munich, and Heidelberg, where he earned his Doctor of Laws degree in 1913 with a thesis concerning the problem of guilt by association with regard to the imminent and controversially discussed reform of the German penal code. After participating as combatant in the First World War, he studied Romance philology at Berlin with Heinrich Morf, Erhard Lommatzsch, and Max Leopold Wagner, taking also classes in philosophy with Ernst Troeltsch, to whom he owed the impulse for his livelong reflecting on Giambattista Vico, and in classical philology with Eduard Norden. In 1921 he received his Ph.D. in Romance philology at the University of Greifswald, presenting a study on the Italian and French ‘novella’ of the early Renaissance. Since 1923, A. worked as a librarian at the Prussian State Library in Berlin. During this period he published a German version of Vico’s Scienza Nuova in 1924 and his first own book Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt in 1929, which he submitted, the same year, successfully as habilitation to the University of Marburg. At Marburg, he succeeded Leo Spitzer, who went to Cologne, as chairman of the Department of Romance philology in 1930. Under the racial laws of the Nazi-regime and the decree depriving Jews of civil service positions, A. was dismissed in October 1935. The following year, in the context of the modernization of the Turkish society initiated by the politics of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, A. was appointed to the Chair of Western European Literature at Istanbul, vacated by Leo AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 2155 Auerbach, Erich Spitzer who had left Germany in 1933. There A. was also charged with organizing the teaching of Western languages. While advancing the subject – e. g., he wrote an Introduction aux études de philologie romane (1943) for Turkish students – A. suffered in his own research from the lack of books and journals. At Istanbul, he wrote his important essay “Figura” (1938) and his most famous book, Mimesis (1946). He emigrated to the United States in 1947, to receive his first appointment as visiting professor at Pennsylvania State University. After a short interlude at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he inaugurated the “Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism” with lectures on Pascal, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, he was called to Yale in 1950, which named him Sterling Professor in 1956. A. taught Romance philology at New Haven until his death in 1957, offering courses devoted to medieval subjects and finishing his last book, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958). A.’s scholarship, monographs and essays (cf. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanischen Philologie, 1967, with a bibliography of A.’s writings), seems to be very consistent in that both the individual character of epochs and styles are analyzed as well as their place in European literature as a whole. Perception of reality and its relation to literary technique, the central issue of A.’s work, is present in his doctoral dissertation Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich (1921). Rather than reflecting on sources and comparing different topics or emanations of the stories, A. discusses the composition of individual and collected novellas in the specific way of formal-critical analysis. Already in this early piece, A. stresses the cohesion of this genre’s narrative with reality. The aim of the novella is to present human existence and secular culture (“die Form der Diesseitigkeit, die wir Kultur nennen”), or even an imaginative correlate of the world (“ein Bild der Welt”). Probably influenced by Jacob Burckhardt, A. suggests that the reference to human experience and norms of civil life were a specific feature of the early Renaissance. Nevertheless, he regards Dante whose Commedia – according to A.’s interpretation – passionately describes earthly life, as the main source of influence for the vivid narratives of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Narrative structure and societal form are closely intertwined for A., a parallel to A.’s interest in Vico’s concept of historical relativism. A. translated Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1924), and then also Croce’s monograph on Vico (1927). The hypothesis that human phenomena reflect their epoch and can only be interpreted according to their historical context, underlies A.’s well received study on Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929). By characterizing Dante’s poetic principle as stylistically differentiated representation of the variety of earthly life, A. conceives a strong current of occidental aesthetics AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Auerbach, Erich 2156 that is parallel to the idealism that Erwin Panofsky studied in Idea (1924). Moreover, A. positions the Commedia in a different way than the theological interpretations the text had found until then. A. differed also from contemporary scholarship: Karl Vossler (Die Göttliche Komödie: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Erklärung, 2 vols., 1907–1910, 21925) had appreciated Dante’s art not because of, but despite the political and historical contents; in contrast to A., Vossler had a separate view of poetical text and history. In his book on Dante, A. was still strongly influenced by Hegel. In his essay “Figura” (Archivum Romanicum 22 [1938]: 436–89) he developed a novel heuristic instrument for what he had found in Dante. The figural scheme is indebted to the thinking of Saint Paul; Paul had first transformed the Old Testament as the law and history of the Jews into prefigurations of Christ and salvation. Historically, the figural interpretation was later refined by the Church Fathers: Persons and events of the Old Testament remain historic entities that are connected to counterparts in the New Testament. Like for example Moses and Christ, the dialectic relationship is that of prophecy and fulfilment, umbra/imago and veritas, mystification and revelation. A. distinguishes figura sharply from the concept of allegory. Classically conceived by Origines, an allegoric sense of the Old Testament would be entirely abstract and only carry an ethical meaning; in consequence, the historical content would vanish. A. emphasizes that figural interpretation had a realistic layer of meaning. Several re-evaluations in the tradition of hermeneutical thought were necessary: Tertullian’s concept of prophecy and fulfilment had also a significant time-bound dimension that highlighted historical realism. Augustine extends the two poles (figure, fulfilment) by a scheme in three stages: “the Law or history of the Jews as prophetic figura for the appearance of Christ; the incarnation as fulfilment of this figura and […] as a new promise of the end of the world;” the Last Judgement as the “ultimate fulfilment.” Figura is the key instrument to understand the providential world order in the Christian concept of history. It explains also the hybrid character of medieval art that combined realistic and spiritual elements: Life in the earthly world can now be seen as a prefiguration of the spiritual fulfilment in the future that is – while invisible to humans – already present in divine providence. For A., Dante’s Commedia is exemplary in that it presents less the allegorical or symbolic forms that empty the narrated object from its individual sensual qualities. On the contrary, visionary truth is genuinely linked to concrete earthly proceedings and individual fates. On the one hand, the aim of A.’s essay “Figura” is an exegetic scheme for medieval literature or even the entire European understanding of history and reality; on the other hand, the essay shows signs of a time-bound politi- AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 2157 Auerbach, Erich cal subtext. In 1938, A. was also writing against the current anti-Judaism when he identified the Old Testament, law and history of the Jews, as an essential prerequisite of Christian religion and its historical imagination. A. avoids any superficial polemics or dogmatism; nevertheless, an awareness of the political situation is present in subtle, highly reflected remarks such as at the beginning of his most famous book Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946). Written during his exile at Istanbul, it starts with a quote from Andrew Marvell (“Had we but world enough and time …”) while on the verso of the title page A. records the dates of composition: May 1942 – April 1945. The first chapter is then a stylistic comparison of the recognition scene in Homer’s Odyssey (Eurykleia recognizes Ulysses’s scar) and the sacrification of Isaac. In 19 chapters, A. analyzes European literature according to the rhetorical scheme of three style levels, also in medieval texts like Gregory’s of Tours Historia Francorum, the twelfth century’s Jeu d’Adam, Chrétien’s de Troyes Yvain, and Dante’s Commedia, which is, also in the overall composition of Mimesis, a climax. A. argues that Dante is exemplary for the fact that his interest in the earthly world results from eschatological considerations, while modernity erases the Christian substrate, leaving a sober view of human everyday life. In Mimesis as a whole, fascinating particular insights are intertwined with larger cultural and sociological connections; this chef-d’œuvre forms a coherent picture of European civilization. A.’s last, posthumously published book Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958) was intended as a supplement to Mimesis. It fills a gap concerning the early Middle Ages. In the introduction, A. highlights Vico’s historicism and goes on to make his own method – as followed in his former studies – more explicit. A. prefers an inductive procedure over the adaption of fixed and absolute categories in understanding a text, a scheme that would falsify and destroy the particular phenomena. His starting point are characteristic particulars of each text that make “key problems” apparent, which “open up a knowledge of a broader context and cast light on entire historical landscapes.” Inductive style analysis is connected with philological synthesis. The general object of such a philology is not abstract theory, but the unity of the cultural entity Europe, and – even broader – “a certain pattern of human destiny.” The book spans from late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages and is concerned with literary style and reading culture. The latter is also dealt with in the book Das französische Publikum des 17. Jahrhunderts (1933), where the sociological aspect of the reading audience is given emphasis. In the 1958 book, a systematic overview of the development of style is given, starting with the “sermo humilis” tradition. Regarded in pejorative ways by classical antiquity, writing lowly or humbly AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Auerbach, Erich 2158 would usually have been used for lower subject matter. The new Christian appreciation is caused by the simplicity of Biblical text in the Vetus latina tradition; another reason is that the life and the passion of Christ are adequately expressed. In the incarnation, the splendor of divinity approaches human perception; the “humilitas Christi” refers to a deeper, hidden sublimity. The humble style becomes therefore the medium of sublime mysteries. These specific values of medieval Latin prose must be valorized, as A. emphasizes, independent of humanistic criteria of taste. The Carolingian reform is therefore not a rebirth of the classical Latinity but a loss of lively experience, because literary language and contemporary life diverge. A style that is comparable to the sublime style of antiquity is only found in the vernacular Italian poetry of the 13th century, the Dolce stil nuovo. While the objects and forms of this style are still rather limited (love; canzone/sonnet), Dante’s Commedia creates poetry in sublime style according to an innovative world view. The development of style is accompanied by a change of the learned audience; the well-off elites with classical erudition were gone at the end of the 5th century, only in the 12th century a new reading audience develops, followed by the learned laic public of 13th and 14th century patriciates. A. here combines the aesthetics of production and reception of literary texts. A.’s life and work was and is the subject of continued concern. There is an obvious interest in the significance of his experience as a German-Jewish emigrant in Turkish exile and implications for his research. More persistently, there were methodological interests although under changing perspectives. A. is thought to be a pivotal literary historian, an ingenious interpreter, and a brilliant literary critic, as scholars from Europe, USA, and Latin America agree. Discussions have often been directed to his Mimesis that had been – from the moment of its publication – immediately successful and was often reviewed. Critics were in praise of his exemplary readings, in which, e. g., the New Critics sensed a strong sensibility of observation; the lack of an explicit and clear theoretical framework is sometimes criticized, as well as the lack of explicit criteria for the selection of texts. Leo Spitzer felt that A. had overestimated the historical and not given enough attention to the esthetical. In “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (RF 65 [1953]: 1–18) A. defended his views, in particular against Ernst Robert Curtius. While Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), also written during war years, utilizes topoi and stresses their fixed and timeless nature in an effort to establish the continuity of European culture, A. emphasizes once again a historical relativism which denotes the particularities and variability of literature. During the 1950s Mimesis was received in the USA as a unique introduction into European literature, but was also valorized in innovative com- AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 2159 Auerbach, Erich parative contexts. Since the 1970s, A.’s texts are continually discussed with regard to one of the main problems of New Historicism, whether and how historical reality can be (re-)constructed and what the relationship between fiction and reality is (see, e. g., Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography After Hegel, 1992; Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, 1999). The 1980s saw an intensified reception of A. (Green), also in the new field of cultural studies. Edward Saïd refers to Mimesis and A.’s article “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (in: Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich, 1952, 39–50) to give room to a postcolonial inspired criticism of nationalism in order to define a new perspective for comparative studies (see, e. g., Newman and Lindenberger in Barth and Treml). In the 1990s, A.’s life and work was seen “from the angle of a ‘mutual clarification’”, in front of the background of the hazardous academic situation in Nazi-Germany (Gumbrecht in Lerer), to which the history of the discipline has also paid differentiated attention (Hausmann). Conferences attributed A.’s epistemological premises, his methodology, place of history and politics in philological practice a new relevance (Lerer); there were also new evaluations and re-readings of Mimesis (Busch and Pickerodt; Scholz), some of them severely criticized (Schulz-Buschhaus). A.’s European perspective is of the highest relevance to contemporary critical thinking, in medieval Romance Studies, but also in other disciplines such as philosophy, history, religious and – currently – cultural studies (Barck and Treml). Select Bibliography Literature: Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Paul A. Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Erich Auerbach. 5o Colóquio Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, ed. João Ceza de Castro Rocha (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1994); Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Wahrnehmen Lesen Deuten: Erich Auerbachs Lektüre der Moderne, ed. Walter Busch and Gerhart Pickerodt (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1998); Mimesis: Studien zur literarischen Repräsentation, ed. Bernhard F. Scholz (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 1998); Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, “Erich Auerbach und die Literaturwissenschaft der neunziger Jahre,” Sprachkunst 30 (1999): 97–119; Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Vom Strudel der Ereignisse verschlungen”: Deutsche Romanistik im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2000); Erich Auerbach: Geschichte und Aktualität eines europäischen Philologen, ed. Karlheinz Barck and Martin Treml (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007). Bettina Full AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR