Fritz Strich and the Dilemmas of World Literature Today

Fritz Strich (1882–1963) occupies an odd position in world literature scholarship. One invariably encounters his name in surveys, where the status of his 1946 study Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Goethe and World Literature) is always invoked. John Pizer has written, for instance, that it is "still the most important monograph on the subject," while Theo D'haen finds Strich to be "one of the most perceptive and thorough commentators on Goethe and world literature."¹ Yet if one examines recent historical overviews of world literature, for instance, The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012), one finds chapters on Hugo Meltzl, Georg Brandes, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Guérard, Erich Auerbach, Claudio Guillén, Edward Said, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti—but none on Strich. It might seem that Strich's special contribution to the field was simply to have compiled the scattered Goethean uses of the term "world literature," twenty in total, which appear before the endnotes of Goethe und die Weltliteratur. These have been the starting point for many works that demonstrate no extensive knowledge of Goethe's utterances or thinking. This is a strange fate for Strich, whom Anne Bohnenkamp has described as "der Verfasser der bis heute grundlegenden Monographie zum Thema [Weltliteratur]" (the author of the still foundational monograph on the subject of world literature).²

Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared in 1946, the same year as Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklicheit in der abendländischen Literatur by Erich Auerbach, and two years before Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter by Ernst Robert Curtius. These studies arrived at a moment when Europe seemed irrevocably sundered by perennial animosities, but, like Goethe und die Weltliteratur, each insisted on the historical continuity and unity of European culture. The works by Auerbach and Curtius have found much resonance, Strich's not at all.

Despite the spread of the term "world literature" by the end of the nineteenth century, it might surprise Germanists to discover how little philology existed concerning the background or the sources of Goethe's thinking before the appearance of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, even as seemingly every other aspect of his oeuvre was being subjected to examination. Peter Goßens's study has described the way in which the term gradually departed from the Goethean context and assumed an independent existence in other transnationally oriented contexts.³ By the early twentieth century "world literature" had certainly become a buzzword,⁴ but it was increasingly identified with the new discipline of comparative literature, when it did not indicate a canon of great books or simply represented the great books of "the world." Hans Pyritz's edition of the Goethe-Bibliographie, published in 1965, does not even devote a section to world literature.

As an indication of the foundational status of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, and of the effect of historical conditions on scholarship, the only other significant early contribution to theorizing about world literature must be acknowledged. This is a long 1930 essay by Victor Klemperer entitled "Weltliteratur und europäische Literatur" (World literature and European literature). It is a detailed and historically informed account of transnational literature, before and after Goethe, concerning the kinds of literary products that transcend national boundaries and that reveal mankind's spiritual commonality (geistige Gemeinsamkeit).⁵ The essay contains observations that are found in articles that Strich wrote before 1946. Klemperer, who was removed by 1934 from his teaching position in Dresden and denied access to libraries throughout the National Socialist era, did not return to the subject after World War II.⁶ By 1930, Strich had relocated to Switzerland, to Bern, and had the field to himself.⁷ Before 1946, he had published three essays with titles referring specifically to world literature (in 1928, 1930, and 1932), along with a number of other essays circling around the same concerns: namely, the historical literary commerce among European nations, the vexed position of Germany among the nations, and the hopeful prospect of universal amity that world literature seemed to promise. With the publication of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, the field of world literature might be said to have come into...