Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Erich Auerbach composed Mimesis during World War II (1939-1945). As a German Jew, Auerbach found himself pushed out of jobs in the years leading up to the war, and in the mid-1930s he took a job in Istanbul, Turkey, fleeing Jewish oppression and, as the world later discovered, the Holocaust. Auerbach spent the war years in Istanbul, where he had much more limited access to critical editions of his chosen European texts than he had had at Germany universities. As Edward Said describes in the Introduction, the text is “an exile’s book, written by a German cut off from his roots and his native environment” (xvii). (Some critics have argued that Istanbul was not the cultural backwater that Auerbach seemed to paint it as, with wide literary access, but the fact remains that Auerbach was a displaced person trying to navigate life as an exile.) Auerbach explains:

[T]he book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts (557).

This is why the book reads as it does, with very few critical references other than those Auerbach could recall; instead, his method revolves around close reading and textual analysis and reference to Auerbach’s own knowledge of history and various cultures.