Peter Paret on War and Intellect

Tell me about your first choice, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach.

For many of us Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. In the book he explores how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality and by doing so he has taught generations how to read Western literature.

I mention the book here because it has had a broad impact on my work in general. In 1946, when I was discharged from the US army, and after three years returned as an undergraduate to the University of California at Berkeley, a copy of Auerbach’s just published German text came into my hands. I was moved by his searching and yet empathetic discussion of very diverse texts, his daring comparisons, which generated new questions and insights – for example, his confrontation of Petronius and Tacitus with the account of Peter’s denial in the Gospel according to Mark – and also by the unobtrusive but powerful manner in which the work was shaped by Auerbach’s personal situation, writing as a refugee in Turkey during the Second World War.

Together with others at the time, I welcomed his book as a confirmation of high culture emerging from years of barbarism. I disregarded signs of subjectivity in Auerbach’s discussion, and if I noticed the inconsistencies and even contradictions in his approach that have since been pointed out, they did not bother me. Above all, I was impressed by his ability to understand the varieties of realism in works of the imagination, while distinguishing the intent and execution of depictions of reality from their conventional or ideological accompaniment or context.

From there it was only a further step for me to learn to pay attention to the documentary potential – its strengths and limitations – of fictional works of all kinds, as I do in The Cognitive Challenge of War, in which I use works of literature as well as works of art to trace changes in attitude that directly effected change in military institutions and doctrine.

Your next book is Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape by Joseph Leo Koerner.

Of the German painters at the end of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, the best known outside Germany is probably Caspar David Friedrich. His landscape paintings – craggy mountains, beaches along endless seas, ancient forests, often with one or two figures of men and women who observe this world, are part of it, but also threatened by it – are metaphors not only for the human condition in general, but often also for life in Central Europe after the French Revolution, torn by war and conquest, the destruction of old loyalties, and the emergence of a new nationalism. In 1813 Friedrich began a prophetic painting of a French cuirassier, his horse run off or dead, slowly walking into a deep forest, a symbol of Germany since the time of the Roman Empire, from which he will not emerge. In 1813 German opposition to Napoleon was expanding from the relatively limited wars of the ancien régime into something more encompassing.

In The Cognitive Challenge of War I analyse this painting as an indication of one of the decisive military changes of the time, a new participation of broad segments of the population in wars that in the preceding centuries had been fought mainly by professionals. In his monograph on Friedrich, Joseph Leo Koerner does not discuss the painting of the cuirassier at length, but he gives a comprehensive, thoughtful analysis of Friedrich’s life and work, and places him in Western art of the early 19th century, in which gradually Friedrich’s work, its uniqueness notwithstanding, comes to blend more closely with that of the British and French Romantic painters.

Tell me about your next choice, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt by Felix Gilbert.

In this brief work, written at the end of a very distinguished scholarly career, Gilbert considers decisive phases in the developments of two kinds of history, and behind their differences points to similarities and forces that bring them together. He begins with the new awareness among historians, originating in the late Enlightenment and brought to the fore by the French Revolution and reactions to it, of the uniqueness of particular societies and their cultures, and of a new sense of the interaction of ideas, social forces, policy, and the personality of individual leaders. The systematic study of documents and other primary sources, such as architecture and works of art and literature, gains new importance – as does the manner of their interpretation. Even as Ranke, by applying the critical method of philology to the study of the past, turns history into an autonomous discipline, removed from philosophy, theology, and law, he insists that history is also an art. He seeks to ‘tell a story that is full of tension’. Aesthetic considerations affect not only his narrative, but also the structure of his works. His History of the Popes, for example, is not strictly chronological, but shaped around one great theme: the relationship between state and church in Europe. His conception of history makes it inevitable that Ranke includes discussions of art, literature and culture in his political interpretations.

This interaction is also basic to Burckhardt’s work. His Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy opens with political history: the waning power of the empire and the achievement of control by the absolute monarchies of France and Spain.