Scholarship in Times of Extremes: Letters of Erich Auerbach (1933–46), on the Fiftieth Anniversary of His Death

Erich Auerbach e a apologia das ações modestas

“…Isso está claro no pequeno artigo do jubileu, em sua tese de habilitação, em "Figura" e em todos os trabalhos nos quais Auerbach eventualmente tematizou a D.C. Com essa afirmação não pretendo reduzir a importância do "mundo terreno" em sua leitura; meu propósito, fundamentalmente, é acentuar a participação do homem enquanto personagem relevante na lógica dessa mundanidade. Porque, em última instância, entre o terreno e o humano haveria uma relação de correspondência interna: "[e]is o segredo do vínculo interior de Dante: em sua concepção da particularidade humana como algo atrelado ao destino" 22 (AUERBACH, [ ] 2007, frisou o filólogo. Em Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt [Dante como poeta do mundo terreno] (AUERBACH, [1929] 2001), a construção teórica dessa conexão recorreu à filosofia de São Tomás de Aquino, em particular, ao conceito de habitus.…”

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

“…Dante's characters in The Divine Comedy, though they inhabited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, forever retained their earthly nature. Auerbach celebrated Dante as a German poet, an Italian who joined, as Shakespeare did, a German-European pantheon [9][10][11]. Dante spoke to Germany's spiritual crisis because he conveyed confidence in the viability of a Christian community and a providentially guided universe, where rewards and punishments were justly meted, and the protagonists' character was their destiny.…”

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

“…To seek for them in myself, to track them down in the world, completely absorbs me. The old forces of resistance-churches, democracies, education, economic laws-are useful and effective only if they are renewed and activated through a new force not yet visible to me [72].…”

“…He was unable to describe the emergent -unity‖ but he was not looking forward to it. Already in the 1930s, he found behind fascism and nationalism-German, Italian and Turkish--a ruse of providence, designed to lead us along a bloody and tortuous path to an International of triviality and a culture of Esperanto‖ [187,188]. Technologies of modernization and nationalization undermined European pluralism.…”