AUERBACH AND GERMAN HISTORICISM

The essay considers the relationship between Erich Auerbach and the German culture of the time. In particular, it attempts to reconstruct the dense web of relationships, even on a personal level. Auerbach indeed in Berlin had studied not only with the romance philologists Erhard Lommatzsch and Max Leopold Wagner, but also with the philosopher Ernst Troeltsch and historian Friedrich Meinecke. In the vast bibliography on the Romanist now no shortage of work, since that pioneering Dante Della Terza, on this aspect of his scholarly training. But they are mostly confined to the early period (translation of the Vico's Scienza nuova and of Croce's monograph on Vico), leaving on one side the legacy of German historicism. In the latter, both from the point of view of terminology and from a conceptual, turns its attention this essay that seeks to regularly document the influence of Dilthey, generically known and supported by most scholars, but no detailed comments. It goes far beyond the Twenties and one can also find in the most famous work of the maturity of Auerbach, Mimesis. As well as no less essential seems the relationship with Meinecke's The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, which is configured, however, as a reciprocal exchange of influences. More problematic is to determine the strictly documentary floor of the relationship with Cassirer, probably mediated by Panofsky. The contextualization of the cultural background of Mimesis is complemented by a survey of the first reviews the work and, as far as Italy, also on an examination of the documents preserved in the Archives Einaudi.