Erich Auerbach: Life, Times, and Works

Abstract

Erich Auerbach was born in Berlin. Trained in the German philological tradition, he became one of its best-known scholars. He participated as a combatant in World War I. After the war, he earned a doctorate at University of Greifswald in 1921. He worked as a librarian at the Prussian State Library in Berlin for some years. In 1929, he became a member of the philology faculty at the University of Marburg after publishing the well-received study Dante: Poet of the Secular World. With the rise of National Socialism, he was forced to vacate his position in 1935 and moved to Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), generally considered his masterwork. He moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He was appointed Professor of Romance Philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957.