Discussion

Summary

WALTER SOKEL: I would like to join Mr. Widdig about the question of “I” and the public sphere. We must realize that the Enlightenment and “die vorurteilsfreie Wissenschaft” of the nineteenth century which was based on the Enlightenment was an enormous step forward, but it had to be paid for. It was, to put it in terms of Kafka’s “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” an “Ausweg,” but it was not “Freiheit nach allen Seiten.” Now what we have to realize is that our identity politics of today is a reaction. Of course it is a justified reaction to a universalism that was not universal. And of course Hitlerism showed where universialism would eventually lead, so we need now this phase, but we mustn’t stop here. We have to get back to the nineteenth century in many ways and to the Enlightenment and to a real public sphere, where identity politics will no longer be necessary.

BERND WIDDIG: I was very much reminded when I read this little piece by Geiger and I heard the talk, of course of Victor Klemperer’s Tagebücher and again, if you want to describe these Tagebücher it was the “Ausweglosigkeit und Verzweiflung.” Someone again, fifty years later, tried to deal with this notion of Kulturnation in a quite similar way as Geiger, but very self-consciously actually describes the “Ausweglosigkeit.” When you read his dictum of 1934: Die Nazis sind undeutsch. I am the one who is German. They are undeutsch. Over the years he slowly had to acknowledge his marginality in this culture.

HASKELL BLOCK (SUNY BINGHAMTON): While going through Max Koch’s Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte und Renaissance Litteratur and also his Studien, which he edited about the same time, I came across Ludwig Geiger. Geiger was for a time associated with this project. Max Koch was also Jewish, but a very ardent nationalist. He underwent some of the same tensions that have been discussed here. The battle between nationalism and cosmopolitanism was fought out to some extent in turn-of-the-century Germany over the field of Comparative Literature, which never really got very far in spite of these early efforts of Max Koch, which were somewhat misguided. I think the classic text here is the review by Benedetto Croce in La Critica early in the twentieth century, in which he pointed out the methodological consequences of the journal that Koch and Geiger were editing.