It is a great pleasure to contribute to this collection in honour of Dávidházi Péter. As Eckermann said of Goethe, Péter is a diamond that casts a different color in every direc-tion—from his comparative studies on Shakespeare and on European Romanticism, to his work in translation studies and literary uses of the Bible, to his essays on Matthew Arnold and on T. S. Eliot, to his major studies of Hungarian literature and criticism. (I once amused Péter by describing his prize-winning thousand-page study of Toldy Ferenc, Egy nemzeti tudomány születése, as “the greatest story ever toldy.”) Throughout his career, Péter has been engaged in interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies, whether in his anthropologically informed The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare ( ) or more recently his characteristically forward-looking edited collection New Publication Cultures in the Humanities ( ), with its emphasis on the possibilities offered by the digital humanities. The diamantine Dávidházi has many illuminating facets, all reflect-ing a deep ethical as well as intellectual core.
Over the years we have shared conversations, from Brooklyn to Lake Balaton, in which a recurrent topic has been comparative literary history and criticism. Péter has always taken an active interest in the movement of people and ideas both into and out from Cen-tral Europe. Nearly forty years ago, he wrote an illuminating article on the Czech émigré René Wellek, and in he published an interview with Wellek, prompting the octoge-narian comparatist to look back on his life and his work on the history of criticism.1 In the following pages, I would like to offer in return a pair of comparable life stories, of the important comparatists Lilian Furst and Leo Spitzer. Both scholars were born in Vienna to Jewish parents and emigrated from the Continent following the rise of the Nazis, Furst with her family to England, Spitzer to Istanbul; both eventually settled in America, and they wrote fascinating autobiographical accounts reflecting on their histories of exile and emigration, experiences that profoundly informed their scholarly work as well. Their lives and work have much to tell us about the possibilities, and the ambiguities, of scholarly engagement across cultures in troubled times.
The discipline of Comparative Literature was reshaped in America by the impact of midcentury émigrés such as Wellek, Spitzer, Furst, Erich Auerbach, and Paul de Man.2
1. Dávidházi Péter, “René Wellek and the Originality of American Criticism,” New Hungari-an Quarterly ( ): , pp. ff.; Dávidházi Péter, “Interview with René Wellek,” New Hungarian Quarterly ( ): , pp. ff.
2. A parallel version of this essay, discussing Erich Auerbach as well as Spitzer and Furst, is forthcoming under the title “Home Is Somewhere Else: Comparative Literature as a Migrant
Even though it was forced, this wave of emigration has often been described in positive terms, as a translatio studii enabling a great scholar to build a new life and to revive the discipline from a new perspective, as in Emily Apter’s discussion of Leo Spitzer in
“Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, ,” or the essays collected in Stauth and Birtek’s “Istanbul”: Geistige Wanderungen aus der “Welt in Scherben.”3 The academics who escaped pogroms and death camps were very much aware of their good fortune, and the most fortunate among them did indeed pursue thriving careers in the postwar years. Yet even the fortunate few were marked by the traumas of their often multiple dislocations, and their struggles to reconstruct their lives are worth our attention today, as we seek to resituate comparative studies in a world of radically unequal global flows of people, capital, and ideas.
The discussion of émigré comparatists has usually focused on “great men” such as Auerbach, Spitzer, and Wellek, but Lilian Furst was a prominent and prolific scholar.
She was the author of dozens of essays and fifteen books, including late in life a study of novels of forced emigration, Random Destinations ( ).4 Her title is deliberately ironic, as “destination” implies destiny or at least some settled intent, rather than the random-ness and dislocation that she explores in a range of wartime and postwar fictions, in-cluding works by Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and W. G. Sebald. A decade earli-er, she had written a moving memoir, Home Is Somewhere Else ( ).5 There she gives a very personal expression to the experience of dislocation, which began when she was a child and never really ended.
Furst was born in Vienna in , daughter of a Hungarian father and a Polish mother. Themselves immigrants to Vienna, her parents had worked their way up from impoverished circumstances to build a successful dental practice, a few blocks away from the Freud family in Berggasse. In an essay on “Freud and Vienna,” Furst has writ-ten about the writ-tenuously assimilated status of Sigmund Freud’s parents, who like her own parents gave their children non-Biblical names so as not to sound too Jewish. She observes that even though Freud was only four years old when his family moved to Vienna, where he lived for the next seventy-seven years, “paradoxically, however, at some level he remained an outsider, a ‘Zugeraster’ in Viennese dialect; the word, a cor-ruption of ‘zugereist’ (traveled there) was the common denotation for immigrants, Discipline,” in Sandro Moraldo, ed., Komparatistik gestern und heute: Perspektiven auf eine Disziplin im Übergang (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ).
3. Emily Apter, “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, .” Critical Inquiry : ( ), – . Repr. in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), – ; Georg Stauth and Faruk Birtek, eds. “Istanbul”: Geistige Wanderungen aus der “Welt in Scherben” (Bielefeld: Transcript, ).
4. Lilian R. Furst, Random Destinations: Escaping the Holocaust and Starting Life Anew (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ).
5. Desider Furst and Lilian R. Furst, Home Is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices (Albany: SUNY Press, ). All citations are to this edition.
ticularly the East European Jews who flocked to the city in the late th and early th centuries.”6 The same term could be applied to Furst herself, except that immigration and relocation were repeated experiences for her, almost a way of life.
Home Is Somewhere Else: An Autobiography in Two Voices is a dual memoir, based on a manuscript that her Hungarian father, Desider Furst, had written in retirement in the early s, into which Furst inserted alternating chapters giving her own sometimes quite different memories of the events her father recounts.7 In the opening words of her first chapter, she describes a primal scene of life thrown out of joint:
My first distinct independent memory is of the day the Nazis marched into Vienna in March . March in Vienna is usually rather cold, gray, and in-hospitable, but on that day the sun was shining and the sky was of the deep blue I now associate with North Carolina or California. I remember so well leaning out of the window of our apartment on the Marie-Theresienstrasse trying to see what was going on. […] Both the maids had gone out to join the crowds, while my parents huddled in their office, conferring in whispers.
( ) She recalls that “the public jubilation outside was in stark contrast with the silence within. The daily round of life had ceased in the face of this event that I was witnessing.
The pervasive atmosphere of mourning in our home was eerie and ominous” ( ).
Soon her parents determined to flee—“forced to become flotsam,” as her father puts it ( )—and after an agonizing series of nearly fatal attempts to find refuge, they man-aged to reach England, where Furst grew up. She won a scholarship to Cambridge, and secured teaching positions in Belfast and then Manchester before moving to the United States in , accompanied by her now widowed father. She had become almost in-curably restless, however, and after teaching at Dartmouth she taught for varying peri-ods at the Universities of Oregon and of Texas, at Case Western Reserve, at Stanford, and at Harvard. Her father always accompanied her, and Furst remarks that “through our multiple moves, in addition to our status as strangers in the land, we formed an island of otherness wherever we went” ( ). He never objected to pulling up stakes yet again, though he once ruefully remarked, “It’s a pity God put down our bread in so many little piles in so many different places” ( ). After his death in , she finally settled down at the University of North Carolina for the remaining quarter century of her life.
Furst’s work is particularly relevant in the context of this collection in honor of Dávidházi Péter, as her first book was a pioneering comparative study of Romanticism
6. Lilian R. Furst, “Freud and Vienna.” The Virginia Quarterly Review : ( ), – , p. . 7. Interestingly, in the German translation, the “two voices” become a singular “Jewish fate”:
Lilian R. Furst and Desider Furst, Daheim ist anderswo: Ein jüdisches Schicksal erinnert von Vater und Tochter, trans. Erika Casey (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, ).
( ),8 and in her later years she moved into interdisciplinary studies, becoming a founder of the field of narrative medicine, in a series of books and collections on such subjects as Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy ( ), Medical Progress and Social Reality ( ), and Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature ( )—works that bring her literary skills to bear upon the medical profession that her parents had hoped she would pursue. Despite all her success, in Home Is Some-where Else she says that “Even now, an American citizen, tenured in a major university, holder of an endowed chair, with savings, investments […] a car, a long list of publica-tions; still I am liable to agonies of anxiety and insomnia because, alone, at some level, I still feel so terribly vulnerable to the contingencies of an untrustworthy world” ( – ).
She returns to this theme at the end of her memoir, describing her life in Chapel Hill:
My neighbors play golf and bridge, and walk their dogs, and talk with pas-sion about “the game.” I don’t understand what matters to them any more than they understand what matters to me. […] In the great melting pot that this country is said to be, I have somehow not melted; on the contrary, I have become more myself, and thereby more other. I am not in exile from any-where; the worlds I knew have gone, and I mourn their disappearance as I do that of the family I would have had. A student with bright red curly hair and glasses had a curious fascination for me, and it was some weeks before I real-ized that she reminded me of the cousin I last saw when I was six and she
eight; she vanished in Treblinka. ( )
Now she ends the book, in her final words recalling the large red J stamped on her family’s exit visa next to the Nazi swastika: “Home is where my things are. Home is nowhere. Maybe home is beyond the grave. […] I float on the periphery, at home yet not truly so in Europe, Great Britain, or the United States. My geographical roots are shal-low; only those created by the brand mark of the red ‘J’ run deep into my being” ( ).
* * *
Born in , Leo Spitzer developed a passion for language, learning some twenty lan-guages in all. He completed a PhD under the great philologist Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, with a dissertation on neologisms in Rabelais ( ). From his early years, he was at-tuned to the politics of language. He served during World War I in an office assigned to censor letters written home by Italian prisoners of war, and in he published Ital-ienische Kriegsgefangenbriefe, an account of the linguistic strategies these prisoners used to evade censorship and communicate with their loved ones.9 Even before then, in
8. Lilian R. Furst, Romanticism (London: Macmillan, , nd ed. ).
9. Leo Spitzer, Italienische Kriegsgefangenbriefe: Materialien zu einer Charakteristik der volks-tümlichen italienischen Korrespondence (Bonn: Hanstein, ).
he published a polemical defense of linguistic hybridity, attacking what he characterized as nationalistic “linguistic cleansing.”10
He went on to professorships in Marburg and then Cologne, then emigrated to Istan-bul in , soon after Hitler’s ascension to power. After several years in Istanbul, he secured a chair at Johns Hopkins, the American university founded most directly on German principles half a century earlier, and unlike the peripatetic Furst, he remained there for the rest of his life. Yet he experienced his departure from Istanbul more as the loss of Europe than a gain of the New World. On boarding ship in he was deeply torn, only partly because he was leaving behind his lover Rosemarie Burkart, for whom he had been unable to secure American residency papers. In a letter to Kurt Vossler several months later, he speaks in melancholy terms of the parting, not just from her but from his German milieu, almost as if he had still been living in Germany itself while in Istanbul:
The departure from Istanbul was a most melancholy experience. I sensed that I was taking leave of almost everything that I value, apart from family and scholarship: German milieu, ancient culture, one beloved and loving person, many young colleagues, perceptive students—including indeed the Turks themselves, who bade me farewell as a true German professor would be (a parting lecture from me, a dinner at the Rectorate and an evening of danc-ing). The moment when the ship got under way, and the friends and stu-dents who had gathered on the dock—with one exception, the one most lad-en with grief—faded in the distance, while behind them in the darkness rose the Genoa Tower, landmark of Romania, was one of the most difficult of my life.11
At Hopkins, Spitzer continued, “Everything here is neat, polite, peaceful, accommo-dating—and yet cold and icy at heart.” He was unimpressed by his new surroundings:
“The city of Baltimore is a Bonn the size of Cologne […] with long, bare, boring rows of streets, with hardly any sidewalks, as everyone has his automobile.” As for his stu-dents, he found them “industrious by nature, but with little originality, and above all with little sense of intellectual history and little feel for beauty.”12 Clearly, Spitzer had his work cut out for him if he was going to inculcate the historical and aesthetic values that meant everything to him.
Like Lilian Furst, Spitzer was determined to make himself at home “somewhere else”
as best he could, and he threw himself into the task. He shifted to writing primarily in
10. Leo Spitzer, Fremdwörterhatz und Fremdvölkerhaß: Eine Streitschrift gegen die Spra-chreinigung (Vienna: Manzsche Hof-, Verlags- und Universitäts-Buchhandlung, ).
11. In Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Vom Strudel der Ereignisse verschlungen: Deutsche Romanistik im “Dritten Reich” (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, nd ed. ), pp. – (my translation).
12. In Hausmann, Vom Strudel der Ereignisse verschlungen, pp. – (my translation).
English, and unlike most émigré comparatists he took an active interest in American literature and culture. His collection Essays on English and American Literature even included a boldly speculative essay on “American Advertising Explained as Popular Art,” in which he analyzed a Sunkist orange juice ad in terms of Renaissance iconogra-phy. This was no mere jeu d’esprit; in a footnote, he says that analyzing the Sunkist ad in the early s gave him “the first avenue (a ‘philological’ avenue) leading toward the understanding of the unwritten text of the American way of life.”13
Even as he strove to build a new life in America, he made exceptional efforts to con-nect his past and present. Thus in he published a collection of six Essays in Histori-cal Semantics, three of them written in English, and three that he had written before the war in German. Remarkably, he decided to leave the German essays untranslated; in a foreword, he says that “such a presentation seemed fitting in view of my desire to attract scholars in German and English toward that common stock of European semantics that informs their own vocabulary: in this volume all nations will appear as citizens of ‘quella Roma onde Cristo è Romano.’ ”14 It is appropriate that he closes this justification with an (untranslated) line from his exilic forebear Dante, whose Christianity the Jewish émigré translates into the Rome of Romance Philology.
Particularly striking is the autobiographical title essay of Spitzer’s other book from , Linguistics and Literary History. He begins by asserting that a life story can erase the difference of decades and of continents, even as he proposes that individual experi-ences profoundly shape a scholar’s identity:
I have chosen the autobiographical way because my personal situation in Eu-rope forty years ago was not, I believe, essentially different from the one with which I see the young scholar of today (and in this country) generally faced. I chose to relate to you my own experiences also because the basic approach of the individual scholar, conditioned as it is by his first experiences, by his Erlebnis, as the Germans say, determines his method: Methode ist Erlebnis, Gundolf has said.15
So far, so good, but he then makes a startling analogy: “In fact, I would advise every older scholar to tell his public the basic experiences underlying his methods, his Mein Kampf, as it were—without dictatorial connotations, of course.”16
What could Spitzer possibly have intended by this comparison? In an extended es-say on Spitzer, “Methode ist Erlebnis”—a title drawn from this passage—Hans
Ul-13. Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .
14. Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S. F. Vanni, ), pp. – . 15. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, ), p. .
16. Ibid.
rich Gumbrecht is frankly astonished. “The play on Hitler’s book,” he says, “makes it clear that in Spitzer had still not begun to reflect seriously on the horrors of the Third Reich.”17 Something else must be going on, though, as Spitzer’s letters of the s show that he was intensely aware of the depredations of the Nazis who had forced him from his homeland, and when the war ended he was unsparing in con-demning those scholars who had accommodated themselves to the regime. Like Vla-dimir Nabokov, whom he resembles in many ways—he even celebrates “butterfly-words” in his essay—Spitzer asserts a sovereign command of language and the free-dom of a world of words. And yet as with Nabokov, just beneath the Olympian sur-face are deep memories of trauma, and a firm political stance. His statement can be compared to his friend Victor Klemperer’s dissection of the Lingua Tertii Imperii:
Spitzer is not going to let Hitler gain control over a single word of German —not even the title of Hitler’s infamous apologia, whose meaning is reduced to “dictatorial connotations,” nothing more, ready to be relegated to the ash heap of history.
Thus Spitzer responds to the German crisis of language and culture, but there is another dimension to this passage as well. He is writing for his new American audi-ence, and here we have to unravel the complexities of that relation. Amid the essay’s
Thus Spitzer responds to the German crisis of language and culture, but there is another dimension to this passage as well. He is writing for his new American audi-ence, and here we have to unravel the complexities of that relation. Amid the essay’s