Typology and the Holocaust: Erich Auerbach and Judeo-Christian Europe

Malachi Haim Hacohen

doi:10.3390/rel3030600

Abstract

In response to Nazi exclusion of the Jews from German society on racial grounds, Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), a secular Jewish intellectual inspired by cultural Protestantism and Catholicism, formed a vision of a cosmopolitan Judeo-Christian civilization that reintegrated the Jews as biblical founders and cultural mediators. But the integration expunged any mark of traditional Jewishness. Focusing on Christian figurative thinking (typology), Auerbach viewed the binding of Isaac through the crucifixion, and contemporary Jews as civilization’s (unwilling and undeserving) martyrs. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, his cosmopolitanism reached a crisis, reflected in his postwar vision of Western decline. The progressive mandarin who had begun his intellectual life elevating Dante’s care for everyday life and sympathizing with French realist social critique ended endorsing Hugh of St. Victor’s alienation from reality and Pascal’s acquiescence in totalitarian rule.

Highlights

Among the Jewish émigrés who sought sanctuary in World War II on the outskirts of the old continent, in Istanbul University, was literary historian and philologist Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), author of the monumental Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) [1,2].In 1947 he immigrated to the U.S and sent Mimesis to an admired German author, Thomas Mann, who was commuting between his U.S war refuge in Palisades Heights and his postwar European one in Ascona, Switzerland
Just as French realism responded to democracy, Auerbach‘s modernism responded to European turmoil and globalization
On the Jewish Question, Auerbach remained consistent from ―Figura‖ to Mimesis: The Jews were to be integrated as cultural Christians

Summary

Introduction

Among the Jewish émigrés who sought sanctuary in World War II on the outskirts of the old continent, in Istanbul University, was literary historian and philologist Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), author of the monumental Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) [1,2]. In 1947 he immigrated to the U.S and sent Mimesis to an admired German author, Thomas Mann, who was commuting between his U.S war refuge in Palisades Heights and his postwar European one in Religions 2012, 3. Mann resurrected biblical myth to respond to Nazi racial one, whereas Auerbach saw Mann‘s realism, and biblical insistence on truth as opposed to classical myth, as the only proper response. Both questioned the German humanist focus on the classical and the claim to ownership over it, and both resurrected the Hebrew Bible to challenge the hegemony of the classical heritage in German culture. Secular German and Jewish intellectuals responded to National Socialism by reaffirming a Judeo-Christian Western tradition [4,5]

Vico and Dante: A Jewish Cultural Protestant in Weimar Germany

Mimesis and the Holocaust

A German Jewish Cosmopolitan in Despair

German Jewish Cosmopolitanism Triumphant

Conclusions