Auerbach's Scars: Judaism and the Question of Literature

Abstract

This essay explores Erich Auerbach's work and discusses its origins and implications as a German-Jewish project which reflects the dialectic of modernism and tradition, literature and theology, Judaism and Christianity. According to this essay Auerbach's book Mimesis, his concept of literature and his understanding of realistic representation should not be separated from his views on Jewish monotheism and from his modernist negotiation with its heritage. Mimesis thus attests to the ambiguous structure of identity and it shows the differences and similarities, the gaps and the belonging-together of the Jewish, the Christian, and the Greek. It is the structure of a cut and a stitch, the structure of a scar, which reflects the dialectics of representation in Auerbach's project. The scar is the sign of German-Jewish writing that was charged with an experience of pain, crisis, and exile—Europe 1942.

Erich Auerbach and His "Figura": An Apology for the Old Testament in an Age of Aryan Philology

“…His was then a grand mission of great proportions in -Figura:‖ to provide the meaning of figura and its humanist ramifications for the course of European civilization as it was used after the fashion of Saint Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and Dante. In the hands of Auerbach, then, figura, which was born -in the nexus of Judaism and Christianity,‖ embodies -one of the conditions of the literary project of the West [26]." Philology, in other words, became in Auerbach's hands an ideological tool and figural interpretation was transformed into a formidable weapon against Aryan philology.…”