Fritz Strich on world literature

My essay on the above subject has just appeared in vol. 26 of Goethe Yearbook and is probably available at JStor for those who are interested. I have worked for a long time on this subject. Among the issues that interested me were the omission of Fritz Strich from the scholarship concerning world literature and the prevalence of an interpretation of world literature that has little to do with what Goethe had in mind when he began speaking on the subject in the 1820s. That said, it must be admitted that Goethe was breaking new ground. Strich also was breaking new ground when he began to write on world literature in the 1920s, and it may surprise Germanists in particular that Goethe und die Weltliteratur (1946) was the first comprehensive treatment of world literature to be written. Within a decade of that publication, the world literature "industry" began, although even the 1965 edition of Pyritz's Goethe bibliography still had no separate section on world literature.

It can't be said, of course, that Strich faithfully reproduces what Goethe may or may not have had in mind. Strick began his writing on world literature in the 1920s, when Germany was at a low point internationally, to put it mildly, and his writings were an attempt, I believe, to write Germany back into the historical continuity of European nations that was also to be seen in two almost contemporaneous studies: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature and Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. In Strich's treatment, world literature was a process leading to tolerance, amity among the nations, a felt humanity, and so on, and was grounded on the verifiable cross-fertilization of the European literary vernaculars since the Renaissance, with the various "national" literary idioms borrowing or passing on the distinctive features of their literary production. Thus, sonnets, for instance, originated in one country, but were passed on to others, with each becoming nationally inflected: compare the difference between those of Petrarch and Shakespeare, not to forget the vast production in the Baroque period in Germany.

It was the peaceful nature of this cultural contact, unlike the often warlike, cross-borders political relations, that suggested to Strich a "universal" spirit (Geist) absorbing all the individual national spirits and uniting the nations into a shared universal destiny. No doubt, it is this "spiritual" approach -- that of Geistesgeschichte -- that was already out of date when Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared and that has led to undervaluation of Strich's role in scholarship. The orthodox view today of world literature seems to be "literature of the world," a marketplace..

While Strich was certainly correct about the literary cross-fertilization, there were other processes, of a material nature, that also began in the period of the Renaissance and that have indeed produced a common European -- or, better put, Western -- "spirit." I am speaking of trade and commerce, which, within a decade of the discovery of the New World, jump-started the material transformation of the various European countries. Locally produced inventions and technology crossed borders as well, spreading the findings, despite existing historical animosities, despite the attempts of governments to control the flow and making knowledge "proprietary." The result has been the spread of common institutions and a shared ethos concerning civil liberties, which, for those who share them, are universal values.

Picture credit: University of Bern