Background
Erich Auerbach was born on November 9, 1892 in Berlin, Germany. His family was of the highest middle class.
Erich Auerbach was born on November 9, 1892 in Berlin, Germany. His family was of the highest middle class.
Before attending several universities, Auerbach was educated at the prestigious Franzoesisches Gymnasium. In 1913, he received a doctoral degree in law from the University of Heidelberg, but, after serving in the German Army during World War I, decided to abandon law in pursuit of a doctorate in Romance philology. He obtained this from the University of Greifswald in 1921.
After gaining a doctorate in philology at the University of Greifswald, Germany, in 1921, Auerbach served as librarian for the Prussian State Library. From 1929 until his dismissal by the Nazi Party in 1936, he was ordinarius university professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg. From 1936 to 1947 Auerbach taught at the Turkish State University in Istanbul, where he wrote his magisterial survey of the linguistic means of depicting reality in European literature, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature).
He moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was appointed a professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut.
He is remembered for his theory of historicism - the idea that literary studies are essential in order to fully understand history.
Although Auerbach wrote a number of important scholarly studies, including Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929; Dante, Poet of the Secular World) and Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958; Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages), his foremost work of literary criticism was Mimesis. This book not only offered philological and historical examinations of individual literary works, from the Hebrew Bible and Homer to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, but also established an influential critical method, offering a history of culture through the close analyses of literary styles.
In 1949–50 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J.
Quotes from others about the person
Wolfgang Bernard Fleischman in MLN hailed the volume as “perhaps [Auerbach’s] greatest book,” and asserted that “early and late,” the critic’s “work is permeated by a genial ... set of ideas on literary process which serve to illuminate and explain a kaleidoscopic variety of literary phenomena.”