German Studies in English 1945–1965

REVIEWS GERMAN STUDIES IN ENGLISH 1945-1965 Writing in the Germanic Review, in 1948, on "Germanic Stumes in Great Britain Since 1939," the English Germanist Alexander Gillies was able to report with pleasure that there had been no decline of interest in German literature during the war; he described recent stumes on Holderlin, Rilke, or Herder, and looked to the future with an optimism which has, on the whole, proved justified. Both in the British Isles and in North America departments of German have grown, and with the help of their members and of a few interested men of letters understanmng of German literature has deepened and widened. The growth of the universities themselves has, of course, been a factor in this; but more important is the vital role that Gennany continues to play in European alfairs, and, perhaps, most important of all, the fact that the great German writers are relatively modern figures-it was only the day before yesterday, as we see history now, that Goethe, the greatest of them, was a young student in Leipzig-and strong inmvidualists as well, not heirs of a tradition. but creators, who have much to say to an age in transition. Indeed, so much has been accomplished in the last twenty years that it is not possible, in a brief report, to discuss work done in journals, in translating, or in the publishing of new erutions. Major journals, such as German Lite and Letters and The Publications of the English Goethe Society in England, and The Germanic Review, The German Quarterly, and the Monatshefte in the United States contain such a wealth of studies, both specialized and general, that they would need a survey all to themselves; and Canaman Germarusts, with the cooperation of colleagues in Australia, have recently established their own, Seminar, with Professor Robert Farquharson of Victoria College in Toronto as editor. Particularly in the last four or five years new emtions have appeared rapidly, and almost more rapidly new translations or ''bilingual'' emtions. Many of the latter, especially where older writers are concerned, are being done by American Gennanists, and are intended to meet the needs of courses in general or comparative literature- competent works, as a rule, with few signs of the howlers that once graced the attempts of enthusiastic amateurs to cope with the profundities of German thought and sentence structure. But many of them are intended also for a wide public, and some of these, particularly translations of poetry or of verse plays-Louis MacNeice's translation of Faust (London, 1951) or Stephen Spender's of Schiller's Maria Stuart (London, 1959), for example, J. B. Leishman's translations of RiJke, Michael Hamburger's of Holderlin, Hofmannsthal, or Brecht, or Leonard Forster's precise and sensitive prose renderings of the poems in the Penguin Book of German Verse-are astonishingly successful, and have proved deeply satisfying to English-speaking readers. Vol""", xxxv, N"mber I, October, 1965. But even if one, regretfully, excludes all this in order to concentrate on book-length studies, difficult problems remain, and most difficult of all that of knowing what (or who) an "American" or "English" Germanist is. In Great Britain the situation is still relatively simple. The majority of those writing on German literature there are native to the British Isles; they have grown up with English literature and its English critics, and they consider it an important part of their work to interpret German literature to English readers. The Germans, Austrians, or Czechs who have joined their ranks, whether it is a question of older scholars like August Closs, or of younger like Hugh Garten, S. S. Prawer, L. S. Salzberger, Michael Hamburger, and J. P. Stem-many of them refugees, some of them partly educated in England - have adopted the traditions of their fellow-workers: they write mainly in English, and in the first instance for English·speaking readers. There were refugees in Canada and in the United States too, and some have become Germanists. But in North America, since well before the war, German studies have been increasingly placed in the hands of men trained in Europe, sought out and appointed for that reason, and not...