Vol. 19 · No. 2 · Issue 59 · Summer 2001 · pp. 62-91 (30)

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoah

Earl Jeffrey Richards

Download full article (146 KB) [subscribers only]

Abstract

Within the enormous body of critical writings dedicated to literary works devoted to the Shoah, the possibility of its very representation and the problems arising in the potential deformation of memory are frequent topics. In light of these issues, it might be helpful to examine a well-known work of literary scholarship, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written between May 1942 and April 1945, as a potentially overlooked example of a highly sublimated allegorical meditation on the contemporary murder of Europe's Jews. Auerbach's classic work, which explicitly takes literary representation as its central theme, seems to use carefully and subtly selected examples from western literature as figures for current events.