Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005
Slouching Toward Athens
By Mark Lilla
From Athens to Auschwitz: The Uses of History
by Christian Meier, translated from the German by Deborah Lucas Schneider
Harvard University Press, 239 pp., $27.95
In 1933 an obscure English scholar named Eliza (E.M.) Butler began writing a book she called 'a warning.' Born in England in 1885, Butler had the unusual good fortune to be educated on the Continent, mainly in Germany, where she spent many years. After her return to Britain she was to devote her entire professional life to German literature, eventually becoming Schröder Professor at Cambridge. Yet despite her devotion to its literary legacy, her experiences in Germany before and after the Great War, as well as her researches into mysticism and myth, had filled her with foreboding about how that legacy had shaped the German political mindset. With Hitler's rise to power she decided to put pen to paper and the result was The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, the first English-language study of German 'Graecolatry.'
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