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When I retired in 1966,1 had been teaching for forty-two years, and I thought that this was quite a long time. Now, in 1 9 8 3 ,1 have been living in retirement for almost twenty years, and the time of my professional activities no longer appears so exceptional. It is shrinking with each subsequent month and is gradually acquiring its lasting historical significance, a small significance indeed. Colleagues whom I knew in their inspiring prime have gone. The M.A. and Ph.D. theses which I directed have been put into dead storage, and the books I produced are gathering dust or are being remaindered. When I peruse the profes sional journals to which I am still subscribing, I discover too many articles on subjects with which I am but vaguely familiar or which are completely beyond my vision.'Yet the distance from my former haunts also has its compensations. I find myself in a situation where I no longer have to consider personal sensitivities among my presumable audiences and where the lasting outlines of my former problems and solutions come through more clearly. I have been reading fewer special monographs and far more general philosophies and surveys on related and on not related subjects. The scientific treatises of Sagan, Bronowski, Attenborough, the political surveys of Giselher Wirsing, Klaus Mehnert, Edward Mortimer, the philosophical discourses of Nicolai Hartmann, Karl Jaspers, Helmut Thielicke, Hans Kiing, all have added to my general understanding and have taught me more than another article on Brecht, or Benn, or Frisch, or Musil.On February 20, 1960, about 140 professors and teachers of German gathered at the College of the City of New York to look for new directions in a field which even at that time was becoming questionable. Lienhard Bergel of Queens College spoke on the problems of literary history. Victor Lange of Princeton explored the meaning and puipose of poetry. Erich Berger of New York City's Lycee Fran(;aise pointed at Friedrich Gundolf as the protagonist of a new synthesis of detailed fact finding and inspired intuition, and Andre von Gronicka of Columbia 7