An Appreciation of the Work of J. P. Stern, Siegbert Prawer, and George Steiner

Summary

SOME YEARS AGO Jeffrey Sammons published his considerations on the invisibility of German scholars in the United States, maintaining that for all the impact they had on the reading public at large, their conferences might as well be held in Klagenfurt. I assume that in a civilized society there is interest in and discussion of literature, carried on through university courses, literary journals, newspaper book reviews, and that the major literatures of the world should feature in this discussion. In offering an unavoidably sketchy appreciation of the work of three critics, J. P. Stern, Siegbert Prawer, and George Steiner, I want to stress their contributions to stimulating among the wider reading public an interest in German literature and in the wider cultural and historical questions which the study of German literature, especially that of the twentieth century, inevitably raises. For I also assume that German studies in universities cannot in the long run retain their vitality if they are detached from the interests of intelligent people outside universities.

The Jewishness of my three chosen critics is relevant in varying degrees. For Prawer, the author of Heine’s Jewish Comedy, and for Steiner, with his many reflections on Jewish identity and indeed the status of Western culture after the Shoah, it is an unignorable aspect of their work: in Steiner’s case, clearly central. It is a major topic in his most recent collection of essays, in his autobiography, and in the collection of tributes to him compiled a few years ago by his admirers. The late Peter Stern is not so easily classified. A biographical tribute by his pupil Michael Beddow begins: “Joseph Peter Maria Stern was born in Prague on Christmas Day 1920 into a Czech-speaking family of Jewish descent and Roman Catholic beliefs.” He would not have been defined as a Jew but for the catch-all character of the Nuremberg Laws. In this he resembled two of his own intellectual heroes and exemplars, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Erich Auerbach; another comparison might be with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. To these writers, however, their Jewish descent was not something to be wholly expunged and forgotten.