Volume 6, Number 11 · June 23, 1966
The Literature of Nihilism
By Paul de Man
The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays
by Erich Heller
Random House, 240 pp., $4.95
The German Tradition in Literature 1871-1945
by Ronald Gray
Cambridge, 384 pp., $11.50
These two recent books on the German literary tradition serve to show that highly competent treatment of detail can be warped by a misleading general view. Both works deal with the same topic: the development in the history of German thought and literature that took place during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. Erich Heller, who now teaches in the U.S. after having spent several years in England, is particularly known for his collection of essays, The Disinherited Mind. The book under review has a similar subject: It contains studies of Faust and Schiller, of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, as well as the title essay, an interpretation of the 'romantic mind.' It interprets the period from Goethe to Wittgenstein as the developing expression of a unified central experience vast enough to contain aspects of Weimar classicism, of romanticism, and of the post-symbolist poetry and philosophy of such writers as Nietzsche and Rilke. References to other national literatures widen the book's scope still further, suggesting Heller's comprehensive understanding of contemporary literature and its background in the nineteenth century. The book is not historical in the academic sense, but essayistic, as lively and polemical in thought as it is felicitous in expression. It seems to be Heller's aim to cast light upon the present human predicament by means of a critical examination of its intellectual antecedents. The Artist's Journey into the Interior is 'committed' criticism in the best sense of the phrase.
Review, 4479 words
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