Forced to give up his chair at the University of Marburg as a result of the Nazi regime’s racial laws, Erich Auerbach moved to Turkey at the end of the summer of 1936, where he accepted a position at the University of Istanbul. He remained there for no fewer than eleven years, until 1947, before emigrating once again – this time to the United States, where he would conclude his career at Yale University. In Istanbul Auerbach worked on major projects: he wrote the seminal essay Figura (1938), the handbook Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature (first published in Turkish in 1944) and his masterpiece, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946).
Until a few years ago, very little was known about this crucial period of Turkish exile. Recent studies, and in particular the valuable reconstruction offered by Kader Konuk (East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010), have brought to light a wealth of documentary material on the historical and biographical context. Still missing, however, were the essays and articles on which Auerbach worked during the very years in which he conceived and wrote Mimesis.
Eleven texts, essays and articles, were written by Auerbach between 1938 and 1947. Almost all of them originally published in Turkish, these texts long remained forgotten and entirely unknown in the West. Their rediscovery, which began in 2006 (as I will explain in more detail below), led in 2014 to the German edition of the complete collection: E. Auerbach, Kultur als Politik. Aufsätze aus dem Exil zur Geschichte und Zukunft Europas (1938-1947), hg. von Christian Rivoletti, aus dem Türkischen von Christoph K. Neumann, Konstanz/Göttingen, Konstanz University Press/Wallstein, 2014. The edition has since been translated into several languages (Spanish translation: La cultura como política. Escritos del exilio sobre la historia y el futuro de Europa (1938-1947), edición de Christian Rivoletti, trad. de Griselda Mársico, Buenos Aires, El cuenco de plata, 2017; Japanese translation: 文学と戦争ーヨーロッパの歴史と文化に関する亡命者の思索 (1938-1947) [Literature and War: Reflections in Exile on the History and Culture of Europe (1938-1947)], edited by Christian Rivoletti, translated by Yasunari Takada and Yoshikazu Takemine, Tokyo, Hosei University Press, 2025; a Chinese edition with The Commercial Press in Beijing and an English edition with Princeton University Press are currently in preparation).
The Italian edition of the collection will be in bookshops on 18 November under the title: E. Auerbach, Letteratura, guerra e storia dell’Europa. Saggi dall’esilio (1938-1947), edited and with an introductory essay by Christian Rivoletti, Venice, Marsilio, 2026. Rosita D’Amora, Marco Menicacci and Massimo Panza also contributed to the translations of Auerbach’s eleven texts. As will be explained in more detail below, this edition is further distinguished by the discovery of the original French typescript of the essay Literature and War, which has made it possible to reconstruct the genesis and transmission of the text with greater precision. The volume includes a Note on the Text, an Appendix containing three letters written by Auerbach in exile, and an extensive introductory essay (Auerbach in esilio: i saggi turchi tra storia dell’Occidente e realtà contemporanea [Auerbach in Exile: The Turkish Essays between the History of the West and Contemporary Reality]), which reconstructs the biographical, political and social context in which the texts arose and at the same time offers some interpretive keys to Auerbach’s method and thought.
The eleven texts by Auerbach now presented to Italian readers for the first time are of exceptional interest. Not only were they never included in any of his later collections, but they address themes (to name just a few: the representation of war and its evolution in the history of Western literature from the Bible to the present day; the historical and political causes of the “recent German catastrophe”; the formation of the European national languages) and figures (including Machiavelli, Montesquieu and Croce) on which Auerbach never commented in any of his earlier or later writings. What emerges from these essays, then, is a largely “unknown” and essentially “unpublished” Auerbach. A first impression can be gained from a glance at the volume’s table of contents, which is divided into two parts: the first contains essays devoted to general and comparative themes or problems, often extending across several authors and national traditions; the second brings together contributions focused on individual protagonists of European literary and cultural history.
Part One: Themes
Literature and War (1941)
The Formation of the National Languages in Sixteenth-Century Europe (1939)
Realism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1942)
The Effect of the Monarchies on Democracy in France and the Recent German Catastrophe (1946)
The Study of Romance Philology in Istanbul (1947)
Part Two: Protagonists
Dante (1939)
On Machiavelli (1944)
Montesquieu and the Idea of Freedom (1945)
Voltaire and the Bourgeois Mentality (1947)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1939)
Benedetto Croce (1943)
These texts, published in Istanbul and long unknown, shed particularly direct light on the significance that the relationship between present and history, and between East and West, took on at a decisive stage in Auerbach’s thought.
Like Spitzer before him, and like many other European intellectuals in those years (in all, 139 academics who had fled Germany after 1933 found refuge at the Turkish universities of Istanbul and Ankara), Auerbach worked in Turkey during a period of profound political and cultural transformation. After the founding of the Republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s government had launched a process of state reform aimed at severing ties with the Ottoman imperial tradition and adopting Western and European models, above all in education, law and institutional organization. The recruitment of German émigrés was therefore part of a broader strategy of modernization and Europeanization of the new Turkish state.
Auerbach found himself working in a context that was in many respects paradoxical. On the one hand, the civil and cultural tradition of Europe – held up by Turkey as a model, and on which Western intellectuals were expressly called upon to report – was going through the deepest crisis of its modern history. On the other hand, certain attitudes of the autocratic Kemalist regime reminded the émigrés of similar features of the European dictatorships from which they had fled. Through repeated references to the contemporary Western and Eastern context, Auerbach’s eleven essays from his Turkish exile also tell us about these contradictions, and show us how the broad and profound historical reflection from which Mimesis arose is ultimately rooted in the urgent demands of the present. In these essays, in fact, the inquiry into the history of Europe, conducted with the customary rigour that characterizes Auerbach’s method, constitutes in more than one case an attempt to respond to the great problems of contemporary history. In this regard, it should also be borne in mind that six of the eleven texts are written versions of lectures given by Auerbach to colleagues and students at the University of Istanbul, as well as to the city’s Turkish public, which during this extraordinary season of reforms and political change was eager to learn more about the history of European culture and civilization.
In a Turkey that is preparing to shed the centuries-old political order that had characterized the Ottoman Empire and to become a nation, Auerbach repeatedly reflects on central aspects of the historical process through which the European nations, and their political, social, cultural, linguistic and literary identities, were formed. In the essays Literature and War, The Formation of the National Languages and Realism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, the idea of a broad and active participation of the people in the construction of national identity plays a decisive role. In the article that inquires into the causes of the “recent German catastrophe”, in the short piece On Machiavelli and in the three essays devoted to protagonists of the French eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau), moments of European history and principles of Western philosophical thought are re-examined in the light of the distortions and outcomes that have marked contemporary history.
For several reasons, then, the essays of the Turkish exile represent a valuable resource for a deeper understanding of Auerbach’s thought and method. As mentioned above, their rediscovery began in 2006, prompted by some bibliographical references in the standard edition of the Gesammelte Aufsätze (E. Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie, hg. von G. Konrad und F. Schalk, Bern/München, Francke, 1967). Through a series of searches, first in the University Library of Tübingen and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and then in the National Library in Ankara, it was possible to locate the eleven texts listed above, all of them originally published in Turkish (except one, the article on Benedetto Croce, which was published in French). Subsequently, in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, I was able to rediscover what is, to date, the only surviving original typescript by Auerbach known to us. It is the text of the essay Literature and War: written in French, with handwritten corrections, it very probably served as the basis for the Turkish translation, which was produced by Auerbach’s colleagues for publication. In the Marsilio volume, for philological reasons set out in the Note on the Text, the Italian translation of the essay is made directly from this typescript; the original French text, accompanied by an English translation and an extensive introduction, was published last year in the special dossier Literature, War, and Exile: A Rediscovered Typescript by Erich Auerbach (Istanbul, 1940-41) in the American journal MLN, 140 (2025), 5 (available open access: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2025.a981035).
In the course of this research, I was also able to discover a cycle of three essays by Leo Spitzer, published in Turkish in 1936 and devoted to three great European authors: Boccaccio, Rabelais and Cervantes. In this case too, as described above for Auerbach, they are written versions of three public lectures given by Spitzer at the University of Istanbul in February 1936. As is well known, Spitzer preceded Auerbach on the journey from Germany to Turkey, and then to the United States. Dismissed from his professorship in Cologne on racial grounds, Spitzer emigrated to Istanbul in October 1933, where he remained for just under three years before accepting, in 1936, a position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, thereby leaving his post at the University of Istanbul to Auerbach, who succeeded him in the chair of European philology and as director of the Institute of Languages.
In all likelihood, in the case of Spitzer’s three essays too, the Austrian Romance philologist originally wrote the texts in French, and they were then translated into Turkish. As with Auerbach, these texts have until now remained unknown to Western readers. Besides the fact that the essay on Boccaccio is the only contribution of such scope and length that Spitzer devoted to the author of the Decameron, the three texts are of interest because they form a unified and self-contained cycle, aimed at illuminating the historical transformations of a literature that becomes secular, thereby marking the transition from a religious conception of the world to the celebration of “an exuberant earthly life”.
Two volumes are currently in preparation: an edition with the English translation of the three essays, to be produced in collaboration with Jonathan Schiesaro, and a collection of Spitzer’s essays in Italian translation, which will also include the three newly rediscovered essays.
The rediscovery of Spitzer’s three essays thus opens a new chapter in this research: alongside Auerbach’s writings, those of his predecessor and colleague in Istanbul also offer valuable testimony to the presence of European philologists in 1930s Turkey and to their reflections on Western history and culture.
L'autore
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Christian Rivoletti è professore ordinario di Filologia romanza all’Università di Erlangen-Norimberga, dove insegna Letteratura francese e italiana. È stato membro di gruppi di ricerca presso la Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, ospite del Collège de France, fellow della Fondazione Alexander von Humboldt e Heisenberg Professor nell’ambito di un programma di eccellenza del Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca tedesco (DFG).
È autore, fra l'altro, di Le metamorfosi dell’utopia (Pacini Fazzi, Lucca 2003) e di Ariosto e l’ironia della finzione. La ricezione letteraria e figurativa dell’Orlando furioso in Francia, Germania e Italia (Marsilio, Venezia 2014), di studi sulla storia della letteratura e della cultura europea, sul rapporto tra testi e immagini, su temi di teoria e di critica letteraria.
Ha curato tre raccolte di scritti di Erich Auerbach, tradotte in diverse lingue: Romanticismo e realismo (Edizioni della Normale, Pisa 2010), Kultur als Politik (KUP/Wallenstein, Konstanz/Göttingen 2014; trad. spagnola: Buenos Aires 2017; trad. giapponese: Tokyo 2025) e Letteratura, guerra e storia dell’Europa. Saggi dall’esilio (Marsilio, Venezia 2026). Ha inoltre curato l’edizione del dattiloscritto francese di Auerbach, recentemente ritrovato, nel dossier speciale Literature, War, and Exile: A Rediscovered Typescript by Erich Auerbach (Istanbul, 1940–41), «MLN», CXL (2025), n. 5 (disponibile in accesso aperto: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2025.a981035)
https://uni-erlangen.academia.edu/ChristianRivoletti
