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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2023
JEFFREY SAMMONS: I wrote out a few sentences in order to repress my loquaciousness to under five minutes. The first of these refers to a part of the presentation that is no longer in the version just presented, but I do hope that it will be in the printed version, because it goes into some of the darker moments of British Germanistik — which first of all makes us feel better and also diverts our gaze from its relentless focus on the Germans a little bit. Professor Robertson did mention here Jethro Bithell’s 1932 survey of German literature in which he says he found a curious “Jew-sniffing” and gives some examples, and this caused me to look again at Bithell’s poetry anthologies, on my shelf since my undergraduate days. Of Heine we are told that in the 1830s he is “no longer the romantic dreamer, he is the modern aggressive Jew,” and the Wintermärchen “is narrated with corrosive wit marred by incredible coarseness,” and while critic after critic identified “Jewish imitativeness” in Buch der Lieder, in Romanzero there is a “new and better Heine,” “the laureate of his own race.”
In the other volume, from which Bithell in 1950 removed Nazi poets as no longer representative, he ascribes to Hofmannsthal “oriental smoothness.” Yet, I imagine all this is meant without malice since he attacks the “Jew-baiter,” as he puts it, Adolf Bartels, as well as the Nazis. Now obviously I look on these matters from the perspective of the Heine topic, and I won’t have much to say about Steiner or Stern. Steiner seems to me the most enduringly Central European of them. I admire his cultural range, but I have suspected him from time to time of a language-usage fanaticism in descent from Karl Kraus, which always makes me uneasy when I encounter it. As for Stern, I value his studies of realism and found his book on the popular reception of Hitler interesting. But his Heine essay in Idylls and Realities in 1971 is so error-ridden and off-center as to suggest a distant acquaintance and a basic lack of real interest.
With Prawer I have been most engaged, not without some, shall we say, dialectic.
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