As always, Professor Sokel has provided us with a text that is both rich and thought-provoking, a text in which he elegantly and forthrightly employs the insights of cultural psychoanalysis — with which we all associate his groundbreaking work on Kafka and Expressionism — in a candid discussion of the trajectory of his own life and career. As someone who is two intellectual generations removed from Professor Sokel, I feel indebted to him and honored to have been asked to discuss some of the issues and questions that his reflections have engendered. In what follows, I wish to make some observations that I feel might serve to illuminate: (1) the degree to which Professor Sokel’s experience is representative of his generation; (2) some of the methodological issues and assumptions underlying his reflections on his career; and, above all (3) the ideological implications, whether intended or unacknowledged, of his approach to the material he has chosen to discuss.

The first observation I wish to make is perhaps the most obvious and concerns the belief, harbored in Professor Sokel’s youth, that the Germany represented in its literature and other arts may act as a model of a cultural, and perhaps communal, essence that is superior to the realm of politics, and indeed even a counter to it. Of course, such a belief has a longstanding tradition in the bourgeoisie of which Professor Sokel writes and is perhaps most emphatically and encyclopedically articulated in Stefan Zweig’s classic Die Welt von Gestern (1944), in which time and again the author, like most of the writers Zweig cites of his generation, valorizes aesthetic production as the vessel in which the cultural essence of a nation might be preserved from the barbarous and more base political reality surrounding it. From this notion it is but a small step to the émigrés’ investment in their identity as the “true” representatives of German-speaking culture, as “das andere, bessere Deutschland.”