Erich Heller

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Erich Heller (born March 27, 1911 in Komotau , Bohemia ; † November 5, 1990 in Evanston , Illinois ) was an English essayist of German-speaking origin, best known for his literary writings on German philosophy and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries has been. His interpretations of the works of Goethe , Friedrich Nietzsche , Franz Kafka , Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann have become particularly influential .

Life

Erich Heller - son of a Jewish doctor - studied law and received his doctorate on February 11, 1935 in the law faculty at the German University in Prague . In 1939 he emigrated to England and began his academic career in Cambridge and Swansea as a Germanist. In 1960, Heller took on British citizenship. From 1960 he lived in the United States, where he worked at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois), first as a professor of German, then later as the Avalon professor of humanities , until he retired into private life in 1979 after his retirement. Since 1964 he was a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry , in 1971 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Heller, who remained unmarried all his life, was friends with several intellectuals, including the Chicago writer Joseph Epstein and the English poet WH Auden . He was in correspondence with Thomas Mann , EM Forster , TS Eliot , Carl Zuckmayer , Werner Heisenberg , Hannah Arendt and Marcel Reich-Ranicki , among others . When he met Thomas Mann personally, Thomas Mann confessed that he himself destroyed his early diaries because of the homoerotic content they contained and that he had read Xenophon's Sympósion nine times before he himself wrote Death in Venice , his own narrative contribution to the caprice of love.

Heller understood the Germanic discipline as a vocation that served him as a vehicle for the dissemination of far-reaching ideas. Throughout his life he always kept a certain distance from official university operations and was (like Jacob Burckhardt ) of the opinion that academic pedantry, with its constant search for precision, was de facto one of the most cunning enemies of truth and ultimately prevented any true understanding .

Topics and positions

The "disinherited spirit"

According to Plato, the human spirit has lived in the dark since it lost its place in the community of truth, the realm of ideas, and can only perceive those inaccessible, eternal and eternally perfect forms as shadows and imperfect images. Heller's groundbreaking work Disinherited Spirit notes this disappearance of truth from the immediate environment of man and examines the resulting compulsory obligation of art to fill the gap that has emerged. This interference on the part of art means impoverishment, not an enrichment of life, because it leads to the loss of the important outside world .

Heller sees truth as the first victim of the mechanistic view of nature, which began with Darwin and others and, together with the applied sciences, neglected the inner meaning of things and instead illuminated the how of their causal interrelationship. The thing in itself is ignored and with it the meaning of reality as such. Such theories were successful only in so far as they increased the number of superstitious ideas that had sprung up since Francis Bacon's victory over medieval scholasticism .

This development, that reality has been robbed of its essence by the explanations of modern science, is the main point of criticism that Heller counters against the advocates of “ontological invalidity”. Their credo leads to the fact that nothing exists in and of itself: with the scientific explanation of the world, any individuality is superfluous, because it is reduced to a mere connection point within a higher-level chain.

The meaningful reaction of the holistically realized human being to the outside world, however, differs fundamentally from the attitude of the frog-in-the-well scientist . The former creates and shapes (through his theorizing, the highest intellectual achievement) reality itself, instead of just taking it passively into consideration, as the latter does, whose mere contemplation of things is of no use. Thinking is not an object but an action and it is impossible to use a thought without taking action. You can use a table without changing it, but you cannot use a thought or a feeling without thinking or feeling. Of course you can use the results of thinking in a thoughtless way, but then you are not using the thinking itself, but only the words, which are then most likely to miss their meaning.

Nietzsche

Heller claims that Nietzsche's (and Rilke's) fundamental rejection of valid distinctions - especially Nietzsche's relativization of good and evil - is based on an overreaction and is directed against what Nietzsche diagnoses as the barbarism of overly superficial world views , whose dualism of immanence and transcendence of a series of flimsy ones Distinctions have opened the door and gate, including the completely impermissible distinction between thinking and feeling. In their over-eagerness to uncover the deceptive character of such differentiations, however, both thinkers went too far, and Nietzsche in particular exaggerated when he equated good and bad with one another.
At the latest with the publication of his German-language “Three Essays” on Nietzsche in 1964, but finally with his English collection of essays The Importance of Nietzsche from 1988, the German translation of which was provided by Heller himself four years later, Erich Heller worked on both sides of the Atlantic made a name as a recognized connoisseur of Nietzsche.

Thomas Mann

As early as 1940, shortly after his arrival in Cambridge, Heller commented on a collection of Thomas Mann's stories for a British publisher. Mann's work was also the subject of Heller's dissertation, which he submitted to Cambridge University in February 1949 and which relates Thomas Mann to the main directions of 19th century German philosophy. Ten years later, Heller wrote his famous work Thomas Mann. The ironic German who owes its attention to detail not least to the personal acquaintance with the author and which the English writer and literary scholar Gabriel Josipovici described as one of the most important books of his intellectual education in March 2006 .

holocaust

For Heller - he found the term genocide and the Semitic word Shoah more appropriate - the Holocaust has a theological dimension: With the mass destruction of human life, the Holocaust violates the principle of the sacred and spiritual that manifests itself in our world. Because for Heller, the spiritual is not just a fabric of vague abstractions , but always exists in a very concrete and physical way: The spirit needs the body just like transcendence: the spiritual had to be recognized and felt as something real .

In the chapter on Goethe and the Avoidance of Tragedy , Heller quotes the philosopher Karl Jaspers to prove that Goethe's work was outdated after 1945. It is about the inappropriate handling of the problems of theodicy , especially the problem of the existence of evil. The question that arises there is not whether the Holocaust is significant for Heller (as one of the surviving Jews), but whether humanity can even ignore being aware of its importance.

Publications

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961), p. 64.
  2. ↑ Erich Heller, Disinherited Spirit. Essays on modern poetry and thinking . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M., 1986 (1954).
  3. ↑ See Erich Heller, “Goethe and the Idea of ​​Scientific Truth”; in EH, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961); P. 14.
  4. ↑ See on this Heller's famous warning: “Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that. " (“The Disinherited Mind '” ”, p. 23)
  5. ↑ Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961); P. 133.
  6. ↑ Erich Heller, Rilke and Nietzsche, with a Discourse on Thought, Belief, and Poetry . in EH, The Disinherited Mind .
  7. ^ Nietzsche: Three essays . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1964.
  8. ↑ Erich Heller, The Meaning of Friedrich Nietzsche: Ten Essays . Luchterhand, Hamburg 1992.
  9. ↑ Thomas Mann: Stories and Episodes. With an introduction by Erich Heller. JM Dent & Sons, London 1940.
  10. ↑ Erich Heller: Thomas Mann. The ironic German. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1959 (1975).
  11. ↑ See his interview on the Internet: [1] .
  12. ↑ Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind , p. 46.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Heller, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English essayist
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Chomutov , Bohemia
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 1990
Place of death Evanston , Illinois