PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Hellenic Studies Colloquium
THE LIMITS OF GERMAN HELLENISM
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Joseph Henry House
The theme of this one-day colloquium is the margins of German Hellenism, in its geographical, temporal and disciplinary sense. German Hellenism is here broadly understood as the active interest taken in aspects of the Greek world, motivated by a belief that there was a benefit in the engagement with a Greek mentality and its cultural and artistic products, to which Germany felt itself bound by a relation of both privilege and duty. The long nineteenth century (stretching from the late eighteenth century to the turn of the next century) sees the institutional development of the study of Classical antiquity, it sees the differentiation of a shared Western debate with antiquity into national approaches and it sees the inclusion of a political Philhellenism within the concerns of cultural Hellenism. To ask about the margins of Hellenism means to investigate the extent to which German Hellenists presented and conceived of themselves as a special case on the European scene, as well as a special section of German society. It looks to present the variety of fields in which Hellenism was very clearly productive: Classical scholarship, philosophical and historical study, literature and architecture, but it also wants to highlight the disciplines that constituted its permeable borders, such as Oriental Studies. Lastly, the question arises whether and, if so, how the momentum which Hellenism gathered took account of the new material appearance of contemporary Greece on the political map of Europe.
Morning Session - 9:30 a.m.
Welcome: Dimitri H. Gondicas (Hellenic Studies)
Anthony Grafton (History and Humanities Council): "Homer in Tübingen: Martin Crusius Teaches Greek" (abstract)
Constanze Güthenke (Hellenic Studies): "Wilhelm Müller's Homerische
Vorschule to the Greek War of Independence" (abstract)
Discussant: Christian Wildberg (Classics)
Lunch - 12:00 noon
Afternoon Session - 2:00 p.m.
Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College): "Was Christianity Born of a Virgin God? The Battle over the Jewish-Greek Genealogy of Christianity in Nineteenth-Century Jewish and Protestant Historiography" (abstract)
Suzanne Marchand (Louisiana State University): "Philhellenism and the Furor Orientalis" (abstract)
Discussant: Carl Schorske (History)
Reception - 5:00 p.m.
Organizing Committee:
Peter Brown (History and Hellenic Studies)
Dimitri H. Gondicas (Classics and Hellenic Studies)
Constanze Güthenke (Hellenic Studies)
Cosponsored by:
Department of History
Program in the Ancient World
Department of Classics
Program in European Cultural Studies
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Homer in Tübingen: Martin Crusius Teaches Greek
Anthony Grafton
Martin Crusius, who taught Greek, rhetoric and other subjects for many years at Tübingen, documented everything that he did with a fanatical precision that some might think worthy of a better cause. His heavily annotated copy of Homer, now in Firestone Library, accompanied him through many years of teaching, scholarship, and academic life. Its flyleaves and margins--especially when read through the lens of his equally detailed diary--offer a surprisingly vivid picture of the works and days of a humanist in late Renaissance Germany. They shed light on the mores and ceremonies of a distant academic life. Most important, they enable us to see how Homer was taught in one of Germany's preeminent forcing-houses of academic talent.
Wilhelm Müller's Homerische Vorschule
to the Greek War of Independence
Constanze Güthenke
Wilhelm Müller, today chiefly known as the author of the song-cycles set
to music by Schubert, achieved prominence in his own time mainly for his several
volumes of Griechenlieder in support of the Greek War of Independence.
Yet according to Müller himself, his dearest project was a work of Classical
scholarship, Homerische Vorschule (1824), which set out to complement
and make more publicly available the method of Müller's teacher F.A. Wolf.
Müller's self-stated interest is in the (pre-)history of epic song rather
than the history of epic textual criticism and I claim in this paper that his
dominant choice of nature imagery to narrate and analyse the Homeric period
bears a strong resemblance to the notion of cultural production he applies to
the case of Modern Greece in his Griechenlieder. Here Müller combined
the practice of Romantic nature imagery with attention to the revolutionary
potential of Greece that was challenging literary production at home in a time
of political conservatism. Rather than simply confirming that Modern Greece
was in the German imagination largely treated as an extension of Classical antiquity,
I wish to ask questions about the often conflicting notions of progress and
timelessness applied to Greece, about the popularity of Classical scholarship
and about the extent to which scholarship, shaped by contemporary aesthetics,
was able to include political and artistic developments that brought contemporary
Greece onto the map.
Was Christianity Born of a Virgin God? The Battle
over the Jewish-Greek Genealogy of Christianity in Nineteenth-Century Jewish
and Protestant Historiography
Susannah Heschel
The fascination with Greece that E. M. Butler called a “tyranny of Greece over Germany” was received with greater ambivalence by nineteenth-century German Jews. For Jews urging assimilation into modern Europe, the ancient Jewish encounter with Hellenism was presented with admiration, while for others that encounter was an example of the loss of Jewish religious and national identity. My paper will argue that philhellenism was replaced in German-Jewish historiography by a philislamism, and that Hellenism’s impact on Judaism became a contested issue between Jewish and Christian historians, in their respective efforts to construct the origins of Judaism and Christianity. Just as Jewish Hellenism came to represent the question of Jewish assimilation, it played a role for Christian theologians in defining the past - Jewish or Greek - out of which the novelty of Christianity emerged.
Philhellenism and the Furor Orientalis
Suzanne Marchand
This paper addresses ‘the limits of German hellenism’ by discussing the ways in which the normative position of the Greeks in nineteenth-century German academe shaped the study of other cultures, and most especially, the study of the ‘Orient.’ It will describe the ways in which, for better and worse, the long shadow of philhellenism was cast across the study of the East, and the reaction to this period of subordination which reached its peak in the 1910s and 20s. I have, experimentally, termed this reaction the ‘furor orientalis,’ and will try to offer justification for this terminology as well as examples of its practice. By and large, the paper treats obscure German scholars, but an occasional big name will be dropped in a perhaps vain attempt to avoid being both obscure and soporific. Although much of the subject matter, here, may fall outside of the usual purview of Hellenic Studies, I hope, here, to demonstrate the ways in philhellenism, and the collapse of it, has shaped both who those who live inside and those who remain outside its ‘limits.’