the making of Mimesis itself, and the ways in which that history has
been transformed -- by Auerbach, by later readers, and by the institu-
tions of professional literary study -- into a legend of the writer in exile,
remembering the texts and contexts of a past. What interrupts the
reading of Odysseus's scar, and what interrupts Auerbach's own career,
is "the history which we ourselves are witnessing": "Anyone who, for
example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men
at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the be-
havior of individual people and states before and during the last war,
will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and
how unfit they are for legend." ² With the complexity of motives, the
bluntness of propaganda, and the ambiguities of political discourse, a
simple understanding of these public events becomes nearly unimagin-
able. No "careful historical and philological training" can distinguish
true from false, das Wahre vom Gefälschten, in these matters. "To write
history," he concludes, "is so difficult that most historians are forced to
make concessions to the technique of legend."

It is such moments in Mimesis that contribute to our understand-
ing of the legacy of Erich Auerbach and help construct his place in
histories of criticism. ³ They separate him poignantly from his contem-
poraries, Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius. All three are often
grouped together as the great exponents of a German philological tra-
dition; yet, Spitzer is today largely remembered for his impassioned
if idiosyncratic teaching at Johns Hopkins and his acute application
of techniques of explication de texte to medieval and Renaissance works,
while Curtius remains, except to specialists in Romanistik, the distant
compilator of the topoi that fill European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages. ⁴ It is the personal, the self-reflective, in Auerbach that late
twentieth-century readers treasure, as if what marked the magisterium
of his work was the very suffering that brought him from Marburg, to
Istanbul, to Pennsylvania State, and finally to Yale where he died as
Sterling Professor of Romance Languages in 1957. ⁵

The second epigraph is probably less well known to us. As the
opening sentences to an introductory handbook of Romance phi-
lology, a handbook written originally for the Turkish students of Auer bach
's exile, they seem, at first glance, to articulate the verities of a
tradition rather than the idioms of an individual. ⁶ Their definition of
philology, the importance that they place on textual criticism, and

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