ICH MÖCHTE MICH HERZLICH dafür bedanken, dass Ihr einen Preis für deutsch-jüdische Studien gestiftet habt. Er ist sicher eine groβe Seltenheit, wenn nicht, der erste überhaupt in der Welt. Damit habt Ihr auch dieses Studienfeld legitimiert und geehrt.

Eine besondere Ehre für mich persönlich ist, dass Ihr diesem Preis meinen Namen gegeben habt. Für mich ist das eine groβe Anerkennung dessen, was ich zu diesem Fach beigetragen habe. Ich akzeptiere diese Ehrung im Namen vieler Anderer, die sie mindestens genauso verdient hätten. Ich habe höchstens ein wenig früher damit angefangen als andere. Ich war in den früher 1960er Jahren Gastprofessor in Hamburg und mir missfiel damals die mangelnde Aufrichtigkeit vieler Akademiker im Umgang mit der neuesten Geschichte Deutschlands. Eine Anfrage des Hamburger Senats, warum nicht mehr Exilforschung betrieben werde, wurde von manchen Kollegen mit Hohn aufgenommen. Ich wandte mich also an meinen Verleger, Christian Wegner, mit dem ich schon ein Buch über Deutschland gemacht hatte und wir gaben zusammen eine Sammlung von Texten über die Flüchtlinge vor Hitler heraus, wo auch die Alltagskümmernisse der Exilanten zur Sprache kamen. So entstand das BuchVerbannung: Aufzeichnungen deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil(1964), in der Tat eines der ersten der Exilforschung. Meiner Meinung nach ist die Exilforschung und ihr Zwillingsgeschwister Deutsch-Jüdischer Studien ein weites Feld, in dem noch manche unerkannte Pflänz chen sprieβen.

Nicht zuletzt möchte ich der ersten Preisträgerin Abigail Gilman gratulieren. Ich habe ihren Aufsatz über Martin Buber gelesen, bzw. man hat ihn mir vorgelesen, und ich habe manches daraus gelernt. Es ist vielleicht nicht meine Aufgabe, das zu sagen, aber, wäre ich einer der Preisrichter gewesen, so hätte ich bestimmt mein Votum für diese Arbeit abgegeben.

Unter Deutsch versteht man in diesem Zusammenhang natürlich alle deutschsprachigen Gebiete in der Welt. Es ist der Härte desNationalsozialismus zu verdanken, dass deutsche Juden tatsächlich in die ganze Welt verstreut wurden und an vielen Orten die Grundlage für solche Studien bereitet haben. So kommt es, dass die Gegenstände deutschjüdischer Studien über den ganzen Globus verteilt sind. Ich möchte an dieser Stelle betonen, dass aus leicht einzusehenden Gründen, deutschjüdische Studien und deutsche Exilforschung Zwillingsbemühungen geworden sind.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK YOU for having founded a prize for German Jewish Studies. A prize such as this is surely a great rarity, if not the first ever in the world. With this you have legitimized and honored this field of study.

A special honor for me personally is that you have established this prize my name. For me this serves as great recognition of the contributions I have made to this field. I accept this tribute in the name of many others who would have equally well deserved it. I started in this field at most a little earlier than others. In the early 1960s I was a visiting Professor in Hamburg and it displeased me back then to see the lack of sincerity of many academics in dealing with the “newest,” history of Germany—its recent Nazi past. A challenge from the Hamburg Senate as to why exile research was not being conducted, was received by some colleagues with derision. I therefore turned to my publisher, Christian Wegner, with whom I had already written a book about Germany, and together we published a collection of texts about the refugees who fled Hitler in which everyday concerns of expatriates come up for discussion. This is how the bookVerbannung: Aufzeichnungen deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil(1964, Banishment: Reflections of German Authors in Exile) came into being, in fact one of the first of its kind on exile research. In my opinion, exile research and its twin sister German and Jewish studies is a vast open field in which a number of undiscovered plantlets are still sprouting.

Last but not least, I would like to congratulate the first award recipient, Abigail Gilman. I have read her essay about Martin Buber, or rather, someone read it to me aloud, and I learned a lot from it. It is probably not my job to say this, but, if I would have been one of the judges, I would have without a doubt cast my vote for this work.

In the context of German Jewish Studies, the term German, of course, refers to all German-speaking areas in the world.

The Unfolding of the Novel

The history of the workBekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull: Der Memoiren Erster Teil (Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, 1955) extends from its conception in 1905 to the final publication in 1954, a year before the author's death. It has often been compared with Goethe's Faust (1790–1832) — which also parallels and reflects the poet's development from youthful beginnings to old-age maturity — particularly since Krull's confessions emit other Faustian signals as well. But in its pompous tones it also parodies the venerable German educational autobiography such as Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811–14). This genre typically records the development of the central character toward an all-around maturity. It is one of Mann's ironies that despite his constantly switching identities Felix never really changes.

Thomas Mann's first inspiration came from a more mundane source, the confessions of George Manolescu, a Romanian confidence man whose memoirs made the rounds of all Europe at the time of their publication in 1905. Mann's first notations for his novel date from 1906, a period when he was interested in the complexities of the alienated artist's existence in modern society. The actual writing began in 1910. By 1911 he had finished Book 1, which ended with the death of Felix's father. In 1912 he had progressed to the chapter about Krull's Hungarian lover, the prostitute Rozsa. Again and again he had put aside the novel for the sake of other projects. But now ensued a gaping hiatus. It was not until 1951, after the tumultuous decade of National Socialism, the author's exile in Switzerland and the United States, and his return to Europe, that he took up his pen to continue writing on the same manuscript page where he had left off almost forty years before. This seamless resumption has been much admired. But Mann and his views of art had changed considerably. What had remained the same was a narcissistic curiosity about himself and the role of the artist in the world. The second half of Krull reflects these transformations, but it too has remained above all a novel about the artist, be he Krull or Thomas Mann.

TheCompanion to the Works of Thomas Mann is meant for readers of Thomas Mann's works who want to become familiar with the present state of scholarly discussion of his texts. We mean to address scholars, teachers, students of German or comparative literature, but we also want to include the many readers of Mann's writings in the English-speaking world who do not read German. For this reason quotations of Mann's texts were paraphrased or translated whenever it was possible without loss of meaning. Often, the German original was provided as well when the flavor of the original text made a quotation in German imperative.

We have chosen the original German texts, not the various English translations, as the basis for our discussion. Thus references are always to the German edition (the thirteen-volume edition of 1960–1974, since the new Frankfurt edition is just beginning to appear). For this reason, the titles of Mann's works are given in their original form and only translated the first time they occur in each essay. Most English renderings of Mann's texts are by the individual contributors. Some contributors have used existing translations if they were close enough to Mann's meaning.

Although we attribute equal importance to Mann's shorter narratives, we wanted to distinguish those clearly from the long novels. Publication records are often confusing. “Der Tod in Venedig,” for example, was designated a “Novelle” in its first printings. First published in the journal Neue Rundschau in 1911, it appeared in 1912 as a privately printed book (to add to the confusion: the text is a slightly older version than the one in the first printing) and in 1913 as a publicly available book with the revised text of the first printing. In 1922 it was included in a volume called “Novellen” with Mann's approval. Even though the title of this work is often quoted in italics, we decided to treat the work as a novella and place its title in quotation marks. We did the same with all the other shorter narratives, including “Herr und Hund” and “Die vertauschten Köpfe.” The latter works appeared first in book form but were subsequently included in collected volumes of stories.

MY CONTRIBUTION WILL CONSIST OF two parts: my response to Professor Seeba of whose paper I have been shown only a small fraction prior to this session; and, invited to do so by Meike Werner, I shall try to give an account of how I deal with the anti-Semitism in my chosen field of learning.

Professor Seeba, whom I have known for a long time and for whose work I have the highest respect, has sketched the role refugee scholars from Nazi Europe played in our field of learning. One could and should expand this focus to include many other disciplines, for example psychoanalysis, art history, empirical sociology, and many others. It would not be difficult to argue that the atomic bomb that helped establish American hegemony in the world and ushered in a whole new phase in human history was the work of scientists driven out of Europe by the fascists. It is unthinkable what the world would be like had they done this for Germany as many would have without the insane racial phantasies of the Nazis.

With regard to the narrower field of German, Hinrich Seeba is right to say that many of the refugees were uncomfortable with theory. Some of the more prominent ones had been successful or at least frustrated writers of poetry, drama, and fiction in Europe. As such, their guiding principles had been Bildlichkeit and Anschaulichkeit, the expression of ideas in the form of images and a rhetoric of persuasion. Thus, publications of Bernhard Blume, Oskar Seidlin, Heinz Politzer, and Erich Heller, to name only a few, were jargon-free masterpieces of elegance in addition to their indisputable scholarly merits. It wouldn’t harm our profession if their academic great-grandchildren emulated this achievement. Perhaps our much-lamented isolation wouldn’t be so complete. Oskar Seidlin and Erich Heller had already made a start breaking down the barriers that separated the field of German from the general intellectual life of America.

I especially endorse Professor Seeba’s call for individual biographies. I have my own difficulties with abstract universals. While they are helpful in bringing some order into the chaos of the phenomenal world, they only seem correct in areas we know little about. Where one has a pretty good grasp of what is the case, generalizations seem to pale.