The Literary Criticism of Friedrich Gundolf

Abstract

In June 1923, when I was not yet twenty, I attended, at Heidelberg, a single lecture by Friedrich Gundolf. A tall, darkly handsome man, standing in the light of the window, turned his profile with a strong nose self-consciously to the large audience filling the hall and recited, in a level monotone, a lecture that could have been printed, word for word, in any of his books. I now remember little except the aura of a solemn ceremony, and the worshipful attitude of the listeners. Later, in the afternoon, a visit to his house-on the strength of an introduction from Marianne Weber, the widow of Max Weber-revealed a more humane human being: a brilliant talker accustomed to the deference of his youngers. (He was then not quite 43 years of age.) Gundolf's occupancy of what, after Berlin, was the most prestigious chair of German literature-to which he was appointed in spite of his ostentatious contempt for footnotes, acknowledgments, polemics, and bibliographies-and the wide sale of his books: Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911) and Goethe (1916), made him the representative figure of the victory of the new literary scholarship over that of the nineteenth century: its factualism, its dependence on external biography, its accumulation of filiations, parallels, sources and analogues, in short, the antiquarianism dominating the German (and not only the German) universities. The year before I had entered the Czech, University of Prague in order to study Germanic philology. I had soon been disillusioned by the training; I did not care for Gothic vocalism and consonantism, nor for the (anyhow largely fictional) biographies of dozens of Minnesangers nor for the sources of Grillparzer's Libussa nor even for the precise itinerary of the Nibelungen down the Danube to their doom.