Panelists’ Commentary

Summary

REGINA WEBER (STUTTGART): The general view that the exiled Germanists held up against the Nazi horrors — the canonized memory of classical German culture in the name of Lessing, Goethe, Heine, and Thomas Mann — should be modified in the light of research on Jewish concerns today. Jewish scholars such as Michael Brenner and Shulamit Volkov try to define Jewish identity no longer only by the experiences of the Holocaust, but in a larger, more positive context in the past. Against Goldhagen they show that there was a German- Jewish symbiosis in Germany prior to 1933, before Hitler.

In Germanics Geistesgeschichte was responsible to a certain degree for the development from “Luther to Hitler.” In 1945 Karl Viëtor, a famous refugee from the University of Giessen who was Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard since 1937, wrote the often quoted essay “Deutsche Literaturgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: Ein Rückblick” (PMLA 60 [1945]), a judgment on Geistesgeschichte which passed for the necrology of the German “geistesgeschichtliche Bewegung.” But there is a correspondence between Karl Viëtor and Richard Alewyn, professor at Queens College New York since 1939, which dates from 1946, dealing just with this problem. Actually both refugees wanted to rescue to some extent the German Geistesgeschichte that had shaped their identities as German scholars. But they followed different paths.

Viëtor’s refusal of “Literaturgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte” in the PMLA article does not include the German philosopher Hegel, as he himself emphasizes; on the contrary, he wants to rescue Hegel, which means the Protestant development of the Geistesgeschichte without the aberrations into Darwinism and relativism of values. He wants to understand German literature “sub quaedam aeternitatis specie.” Alewyn, on the other hand, stresses in his letter [written in New York, 29 May 1946] the importance of a boundary in the German-speaking countries, pointing to the contrast between the northern and the southern sphere of culture, —between “Protestantismus und Bürgerlichkeit auf der einen” und “Katholizismus und höfische (sowie volkstümliche) Kultur auf der anderen Seite.” He characterizes the northern tradition by the domination of the “Wort,” while the southern sphere of culture is attached to the “Bild,” to the pictorial way of artistic expression.