THE IMPORTANCE OF NIETZSCHE
Ten Essays
Erich Heller
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
199 pp., $29.95
Erich Heller has had a long and distinguished career meditating modern German literature and mediating it to the English-speaking world. Born in Bohemia in 1911, he took doctorates at Prague and Cambridge, immigrating to England in that momentous year 1939. In England he taught at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and the University of Wales, then immigrated in 1960 to the United States, where he has had a distinguished career teaching at Northwestern University.
To the nonacademic, the vocation and status of the literary critic must often seem - even more than that of other academics - faintly ludicrous or supererogatory, the pampered house pet of the groves of academe. Literary critics as self-styled agonistic heroes - lector agonists (heroic readers and interpreters of texts) are particularly vulnerable to this reaction, especially in a time when so many critics move themselves to center stage and displace classic books and writers, practicing what one of our finest literary critics, Christopher Ricks, calls "the envious usurpation" of attention and interest from the writers and books of the literary canon itself. Thus, for instance, while Milton's poetry clearly wishes to celebrate God and truth, his modern commentator often wishes to talk about self and sex. (Perhaps sexuality was, a century ago, the great repressed; but now, as the French philosopher Maurice Clavel has said, the great repressed idea in modern culture is God.)
Erich Heller's distinguished body of writing is guilty of no such usurpation or displacement of writer, text, or tradition. Nor is he merely an industrious footnoter, a fact evident in his disapproving description of "the laws of a highly industrialized academe, a producer society, the wheels of which are relentlessly kept in motion, more often than not without any regard to true intellectual demands" (preface to Kafka, 1974). The eloquence, importance, and sustained seriousness of his writing go far toward vindicating the vocations of literary criticism and the teaching of literature, in a time of widespread confusion and conflict as to their proper aims and methods. Two among Heller's books have an authority and importance far surpassing those of most academic writing - his often reprinted The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (1952) and The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (1966). He has also written on Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (1958) and on Kafka (Modern Masters Series, 1974) and edited a volume of his works (The Basic Kafka, 1979).
As the major architects of modern thought, sensibility, and life wrote in German - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (whom Paul Ricoeur has revealingly called "the masters of suspicion"), those skeptical critics of the inherited authority of the classical - Christian moral tradition - the confrontation and analysis of their thought, writing, and effects is a matter of great importance to contemporary education, culture, and life. No one writing English has mediated and mediated this legacy more profoundly that Erich Heller, though two other émigrés, J.P. Stern and Walter Kaufmann, have also had a large influence, the former mainly in England at Cambridge and London, and the latter at
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