Kanadische Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur – serie

Hans Eichner belongs to that group of Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany or Austria in the 1930s and who subsequently exerted a formative influence on German Studies in the English-speaking world. Eichner made a new home in Canada, where he taught first at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and then for many years at the University of Toronto. He was known mainly for his work on Thomas Mann, on German Romanticism, and as a co-editor of the historical-critical edition of Friedrich Schlegel’s collected works. The essays in this volume by Hans Eichner’s colleagues, friends, and students deal with Romanticism, Humanism and Judaism, subjects which occupied Eichner throughout his long scholarly career. Contributors also pay homage to his importance as scholar, as teacher, and as the author of an autobiographical novel about the fate of Hungarian-Austrian Jews, written late in his life. The essays illuminate the work of a Jewish scholar who was always conscious of the paradox of dedicating his life to German literature, after and despite the Holocaust.Hans Eichner gehört zu den jüdischen Intellektuellen, die in den dreißiger Jahren aus dem Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland oder aus Österreich flohen und in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts eine prägende Rolle in der Auslandsgermanistik spielten. Eichner fand in Kanada seine neue Heimat, wo er zuerst an der Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, und dann viele Jahre an der Universität Toronto lehrte. Er wurde vor allem bekannt durch seine Arbeiten über Thomas Mann, die deutsche Romantik und als Mitherausgeber der historisch-kritischen Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Die Aufsätze in diesem Band, verfasst von Kollegen, Freunden und Schülern Hans Eichners, nehmen die Themen Romantik, Humanismus und Judentum auf, mit denen sich Hans Eichner während seiner langen wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn auseinandersetzte. Andere Beiträge würdigen seine Bedeutung als Wissenschaftler, Lehrer und als Autor eines autobiographischen Romans über das Schicksal derungarisch-österreichischen Juden, den er spät in seinem Leben schrieb. Die Aufsätze zeichnen das Bild eines jüdischen Wissenschaftlers, der sich immer des Paradoxons bewusst war, trotz des Holocausts seine Lebensarbeit der deutschen Literatur zu widmen.

This is the first book-length study to consider Ricarda Huch’s historical-political thought and assess Huch’s place within the lively historiographical discourses of the 1920s. One of the most famous writers of her day, Huch (1864-1947) was known for her poetry, fiction, and histories of German Romanticism and the Thirty Years’ War. Like many of her generation Huch was shaken by Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and this shock motivated her to use her historiography to address Germany’s post-war situation. Convinced that the German nation possessed an identity best expressed by the ideals of Romanticism, Huch attributed Germany’s decline to the westernization of German political culture; absolutism and centralization had replaced the theoretical perfection of the decentralized early Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Her Weimar histories of medieval and nineteenth-century Germany urged a defeated and traumatized nation to return to a path that had been abandoned during the Wilhelmine Empire. Topics explored include Huch’s use of Nietzschean monumentalism, a comparison with popular historians of the period (e.g. E. Kantorowicz), the echoes of her political thought in her poetry and fiction, and her complex relationship to German nationalism.