PLEASE ALLOW ME TO START MY REMARKS on a personal note: I came to America exactly thirty years ago last week, because of one Jewish critic, Heinz Politzer. He was for me the paragon of a Viennese artist-writer in the tradition of Grillparzer, Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Hofmannsthal, Freud, and Friedrich Torberg. Always guided by Hofmannsthal’s somewhat stereotypical juxtaposition of “Preussen und Österreicher,” he would help me — the very recent “Dr. phil.” from Tübingen, which to him was “jenseits des Limes” if not even “in den masurischen Sümpfen,” — distinguish between German “Tüchtigkeit” and Austrian “Menschlichkeit,” between German “Abstraktion” and Austrian “Selbstironie.” I learned from him, as corny as it may sound, the love of literature, i.e. to look at literature not just in terms of sociological and methodological issues of interpretation, as I had been trained to analyze them, but as a lively process involving a wealth of cultural images and existential experience, as only, so he insisted, a Jewish critic from Vienna could authenticate. While I was in love with California, Heinz Politzer, the typical Raunzer in the best Viennese tradition, loved to hate the “verdammte blaue Himmel” because it continued to separate him from his beloved Vienna. The role assigned to me in this uneven friendship, which lasted until his death in 1978, was that of a somewhat suspect German scholar, who eventually advanced to a level of affectionate acceptance because he appeared to adopt some Viennese ways of looking at things, most of all because he started to look at the magic and crisis of language. Thus I learned, metaphorically speaking, Wienerdeutsch als Fremdsprache with all its Jewish idiosyncrasies, long before I tried to give papers in the language of my adopted new country — as I am sure you will find out during the next forty-five minutes.

Seen from the distant viewpoint of Wissenschaftsgeschichte and its emerging concentration on academic emigration, Jewish critics in the field of German literature are a significant historical phenomenon which certainly needs to be explored historically, i.e. as a generation of Germanists who were driven out of German-speaking countries, who slowly and under great difficulties established themselves in the American academy and, once recognized, shaped the entire field long beyond their retirement, until the so-called successor generation, mostly American-trained and with quite different experiences and expectations, began around 1980 to turn Germanistik into German Studies.