Panelists’ Commentary

Summary

HASKELL BLOCK: I too came away from Walter Sokel’s challenging and interesting paper with the question how far can we generalize from his experience. These are after all pages of an autobiography and all of us would have individual stories perforce that would shape our own situation. I discussed the program of the meeting before coming up with my good friend in New York, Ludwig W. Kahn, who is a retired professor of German at Columbia University. Ludwig pressed on me the fact that one must make a distinction between refugee scholars who came over with their studies completed — people like Erich Heller or Oskar Seidlin and Ludwig himself — who had their Ph.D. by the time they came to this country as refugees, and those like Walter Sokel who represent another level in the generative process. These situations are essentially different, and it is important to keep these differences in mind. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about that.

I think, too, one could make a further distinction among Jewish refugee scholars who came over before completing their studies and with the development of Comparative Literature, from about the mid- 1940s, somewhat after you began your studies, but programs did develop notably at Harvard under Harry Levin (1912–1994), and then Renato Poggioli (1907–1963), and at Yale under René Wellek (1903– 1995), there were a few other programs in place. In the late 1940s and in the 1950s the field expanded very considerably and quite a number of the young graduate students who entered comparative studies were in fact from German-speaking lands. I think of people like Ralph Freedman, or Ulrich Weisstein, or Wolfgang Holdheim, or Geoffrey Hartman. The list could go on and on, and it seems to me in an earlier situation these young men might very well have become students in German departments but for reasons not unlike those you indicate and also for the fact that does after all offer a way of bringing the study of literature into closer accord with the way in which we actually apprehend literature and live with it. One can understand the very rapid development in the 1950s and 1960s of Comparative Literature in both private and public universities. I would say morestrongly in the public sector, in the large state universities where a number of the people I mentioned had their initiation into the field.