Exile and Literature: Erich Auerbach and World Philology


Sunar H. Ş.

ZEITSCHRIFT FUR INTERKULTURELLE GERMANISTIK, sa.2, ss.79-86, 2023 (ESCI) identifier

Özet

The German philosophy of history, in particular Hegel's world history, which proceeds from the East across the Mediterranean to the West and thus finds its realization in the European cultural area, has an impact on philological concepts, among other things. For example, the literary scholar Erich Auerbach established a philology of world literature whose conceptual background was the Hegelian tradition. Auerbach examines the possibility of philology extending beyond the national sphere. Auerbach, who fled from the National Socialists to a Mediterranean country in 1936, to the then newly founded, west-oriented Kemalist Turkey, addresses the loss of old European knowledge traditions that have lost priority over the increasing self-confidence of national literatures. His main work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which he wrote between 1942 and 1945 in his Istanbul exile, is based on the historicity of European literature. Auerbach, who taught at Istanbul University from 1936 to 1947, seems to anticipate a trend that turned to interculturally oriented comparative studies in philological and literary studies. The present study was intended to clarify whether this tendency can originally be confirmed in its core question and method.