Comrades

Erwin Panofsky

On one level, we had a bond based on the fact that we were both German-Jewish, émigré-scholars who had fled the Nazis. But then we also made beautiful scholarship together, founding the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton in the process.

Though far from our homeland, we were still interested in German literature and culture, and we were both humanists (that is, classical scholars interested in the contributions and roles of human beings—"the course of human life"—throughout time). Together, we pooh-poohed systems and embraced the man on the street—sometimes literally.

René Wellek

When we weren't talking about the great achievements of European philology in some of New Haven's diviest dive bars (we were colleagues at Yale), René and I were spending a lot of time reading passages of Mimesis. Now, it was not all love between René and Mimesis (he thought it didn't age well), but he did manage to acknowledge that it "display[ed …] erudition, insight, and wisdom [and] was hailed as the most important and brilliant book in the field of aesthetics and literary history that had been published in the last fifty years" (source).

Walter Benjamin

Who doesn't want to be friends with that other brilliant Berliner, Benjamin? We enjoyed a long correspondence through which we discussed being oppressed, exchanged books of mutual interest, kvetched about the evils of dictatorship, and so forth.

After I fled to Turkey, I tried to help him escape the Nazis, too—but he never made it out. He loved my book on Dante, and I couldn't put his book Arcades down—which at four pounds is a heavy burden to bear, so that's saying something. We had what I like to call a mutual influence on one another—a meeting of the megaminds.

Rivals

Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst was as intellectual equal, not rival as in a "foe I'd like to smack down." We were both enthusiastic literary scholars facing a puzzling situation; that is, we asked ourselves what we could realistically expect of readers today. (Our "today" was right after World War II.) What was our obligation, as scholars, to these readers?

Readers just don't seem to care anymore about gaining fluency in Latin and Greek or in unlocking the theological and cultural secrets of the Bible. Curtius's answer to the dumbing down of readers was to go wide: he wanted to make sure they would understand literature's big picture. I said close readings were the way to go, and only after did you that could you pull back the lens. We agreed to disagree.

Leo Spitzer

When this chap left the University of Marburg, I had a tough act to follow. You'd think the guy could have gone easy on me, what with me being a young prodigy and him being a celebrity Romance philologist. Not so. He got pretty critical about Mimesis, accusing me of denying that moral values could exist in our modern world. He also accused me of being a sociologist and not a literary critic. Huh?