Odysseus’ Scar

Literary critic and philologist Erich Auerbach was born into an affluent family in Berlin and studied law at the University of Heidelberg. After completing army service in World War I, he earned a doctorate in Romance languages and then taught at the University of Marburg. As a Jew, Auerbach lost his teaching credentials in 1935; he spent the war years in Istanbul, writing his monumental work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). In 1947, Auerbach came to the United States and became professor of philology at Yale University.