History and Legend: The Exile and the Turk

Abstract

“To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.” With this sentence Erich Auerbach concludes a paragraph in the first chapter of Mimesis in which, unusually, he considers his own contemporary moment beyond literature, “the history which we ourselves are witnessing.” Auerbach sees the currents of twentieth-century German history through to Hitler (whom he does not mention) as complex and contradictory, even at the level of the individual, so that “the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification.” 2 This has struck some of Auerbach’s readers as an unexpectedly guarded response to the Nazism that had deprived him, at the least, of academic tenure. It is certainly neither a statement of partisanship nor a request for sympathy; but it is also introspective and self-reflexive, underlining the ambiguities and contradictions of Auerbach’s own project, a study of “the representation of reality in Western literature.” The traj ectory Auerbach traces is still influential— in, for example, Benedict Anderson’s move from the cohesive transcendence of the Middle Ages to modern nationalism. Auerbach traces the overturning of classical rhetoric and its modes, consummately in the work of Dante, by a system of signs and totalizing codes bonded by a doctrine of incarnation that makes possible the radical stylistic movement between high and low, grotesque and sublime. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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