Intersezioni | 2017 | N. 3

In the last decades there was both a revival of the interest in Erich Auerbach’s method and legacy, as well as a series of editorial initiatives with the aim to edit,among others, unpublished works of the author of Mimesis. The project of this issue takes up impulses from recent studies and publications. The essays collected in the volume focus on Auerbach’s research on European literary and cultural traditions as well as on European scholarly tradition and its role in the development of modern Humanities. Among the subjects examined in the volume are Auerbach’s studies on Dante, the exile and his essays on European culture, written in Turkey, the interactions between Auerbach’s works and those of scholars in Romance Studies as well as in other disciplines – namely Eugen Lerch, Johan Huizinga, and Ernst Robert Curtius.

Erich Auerbach wrote repeatedly on Dante, from the short essay published in 1921, to the essay on Figura (1938), to the chapter in Mimesis (1946). The paper analyzes this trajectory, focusing on a passage of Mimesis in which Auerbach emphasized the role played by personal names in, respectively, the Commedia and the Decameron. Building up an imaginary dialogue (which in reality never took place) between Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, the paper argues that both the frame and the innumerable episodes of Dante’s Commedia – a poem based on the otherworldly jour¬ney of a singular but exemplary individual – may have been inspired by a profound reworking of the exemplum as a genre, in its double version, pagan and Christian.

Auerbach returned, again and again, to the semantic field «passion-Leidenschaft» (in 1926, 1933, 1937, 1941, 1946). He engaged also, to some degree dissenting, in a dialogue with the linguist and historian of ideas Eugen Lerch, responding to his essay «Passion» und «Gefühl» (1938). Lerch stressed the turning point of the eighteenth century (with Lessing, Shaftesbury, Diderot), when passions were seen no more as a negative force, but rather as an affirmative drive. Two meanings, very different but equally remarkable, stay at the focus of Auerbach’s discourse: Christ’s passion – «gloriosa passio» – and the furious, barbaric passions in Racine’s theatre, a motif that dominates in Racine und die Leidenschaften (1926). In Mimesis (1946) the perspective changes and Auerbach discovers in Racine’s tragedies, even though conditioned by elitist constraints, a true expression of human nature.

The first translation of “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” was published in Germany in 1924. Erich Auerbach has been a reader of Johann Huizinga’s Meisterwerk – the German Herbst is a book which could be found in his libraries even during his exile in Turkey. This paper analyzes firstly the productive und mutual interactions between Auerbach’s and Huizinga’s works in the Thirties. Secondly, the focus is placed upon the role which the process of reading and reflecting Huizinga’s “Autumn” played in the genesis of “Mimesis”, specifically of chapter X. The study involves a review of the handwritten notes which Auerbach took during the systematic reading of Huizinga’s work and which were found in his personal copy of the Herbst. Thus, the paper is an important contribution to the study of the genesis of Auerbach’s concept of «creatural realism».

The present article starts out from a re-evaluation of the relationship between Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, concentrating on the years after World War II. The obvious differences in their biographies do not necessarily imply that their philological-political stances are equally «antagonistic» («progressionist» vs. «reactionary»). What they share is an interest in the pre-national medieval and early modern literary system – as described by Curtius in his book “European Literature and Latin Middle Ages” as well as in some of Auerbach’s latest articles – precisely as a potential model for a post-national present. For these reasons, certain aspects of Curtius’ magnum opus inspired Auerbach in a context which seems to be completely different, namely in his programmatic reflections on «Philology of World Literature».

When Hitler and his followers had seized power in 1933, the new government then issued the necessary regulations to purge the public service and to dismiss civil servants, especially those with Jewish, Communist or Socialist backgrounds. The majority of the German university professors belonged to the tenured staff but were nevertheless affected by these measures. A. was then full Professor of Romance Philology at Marburg University and was one of the most prominent representatives of his discipline. However, since A. had served in the German army during World War I, he was therefore initially spared dismissal, but in 1934 he was consequently removed from his position. When Leo Spitzer, A.’s predecessor, had given up his teaching post at Istanbul University in Turkey, where many German refugees had found shelter, A. was then invited by the Turkish authorities to succeed him. He remained in this position until 1947, when he moved to the United States, teaching initially at Pennsylvania State University and later as full Professor at Yale University. The present article describes the political and pseudo-legal background of Nazi racial politics through the example of A.

This paper introduces eleven previously untranslated essays written by Erich Auerbach during his exile in Turkey (1937-47). Originally published in Turkish and surprisingly forgotten until relatively recently, these writings offer a side of Auerbach somewhat different from his more traditional image. They present not so much the philologist (indeed, textual citations are scarce); instead, they reveal a historian of culture and thought, an active intellectual engaging “politically” with European history, who juxtaposes past and presents events, as well as East and West. In these essays, some of the themes taken up by Auerbach are: historical forms of government and their relation to the contemporary political catastrophe of Germany; the historical evolution of the relationship between literature and war; the artistic, civic, and political dimension of figures such as Dante, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

“Der Volksgeistgedanke als Wurzel der modernen Geisteswissenschaften” is one of the papers which was not published during Auerbach’s lifetime and which has been recently recovered. The translation of the text is the first one edited in Italy. As Cordibella argues in the “Note to the Text”, Auerbach submitted the paper to the Sixty-Ninth annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America which was held in New York on 24-29 December 1954. The paper is part of Auerbach’s review of historicist tradition and of the modern disciplinary development of the Geisteswissenschaften. This abstract of the speech, arguably written by Auerbach himself, was published in an issue of the journal «Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America» (1955) together with the program of the Meeting: «Modern research in the humanistic disciplines is based on historical perspectivism. This perspectivism was developed by preromantic and romantic critics; its most characteristic and complete elaboration took place in Germany, under special conditions, in connection with the concept of folk-genius».