Poking through our forthcoming translation of Maurice Olender's Race and Erudition (translated by Jane Marie Todd and published originally in French under the somewhat longer title La Chasse aux evidences: sur quelques formes de racisme entre mythe et histoire, 1978-2005, and recently released in an updated version from Seuil under the title Race sans histoire), I came across a fascinating interview Olender conducted with H. R. Jauss, the influential German literary scholar who pioneered reception theory and went on to form an integral part of the Constance School during the 1960s and beyond. Before embarking upon a career in academia, Jauss, who died soon after the interview was published in Le Monde in 1996, served in the Waffen-SS on the eastern front, commanding a company of 100 men and winning the Gold Cross for his actions during the Estonian retreat. Tried by an Allied tribunal at Nuremberg, Jauss was judged "not [to have] participated in criminal actions," was released, and eventually took up a position at the University of Heidelberg.
The interview touches on Jauss's orientation to this personal history and to history defined more broadly as an object upon which we consider and reflect, as well as the process by which Nazi barbarism "erupts into culture," and, significantly, the reasons behind the "silence of a generation" of German academics with regard not only to their participation in the German war effort, but to the wider failure of universities to oppose Nazi ideology as it wormed its way through the culture at large. Students entering the university system in, say, 1960, complained, as Karlheinz Stierle did, about the decision of their professors to maintain "a complete silence about their role in a world of disaster":
What was this disaster within the twelve-year catastrophe of the Third Reich? It was that the university, a place of enlightenment, of humanities — of culture and science, in short — had not opposed the barbarism that was becoming stronger every day. That disaster was no longer open for discussion. As if the chasm had closed up in devouring the monster, there was nothing to remind us of what might have been only a bad dream.
The theme of catastrophe looms large in the minds of the scholars who populate the final chapters of Olender's book; when Jauss is asked to describe a world view that has marked his thinking, he cites Walter Benjamin's dictum "Das es so weiter geht, das ist die Katastrophe" ("That it goes on, that is the catastrophe"), meaning that a catastrophe like the one that occurred in Germany under the Nazi regime is not like a natural disaster, some cataclysmic event that befalls us out of the sky. Nor is it inevitable. It takes action, or the lack of it, and catastrophe on that large a scale is the result of decisions made or not made by multitudes of people. Guilt and responsibility, and the failure of a generation to address its own contribution to the catastrophe, lie at the crux of this interview. It got me thinking about the value of translation as well. The relative dearth of translated material in the American publishing scene has been a topic of some discussion lately, and I suppose this is an example of non English-language material that can really inform our perspective, whatever your opinion of this particular text (and it will likely provoke a range of opinions). Interview follows.
