2023-12-21 18:41:19
He was a special case and a stroke of luck for German studies. He came to it in a roundabout way, namely through philosophy, linked the two together and spent practically his entire scholarly life practicing a discipline that was his fixed star, Nietzsche, about whom he wrote in 1962 with Klostermann, in addition to his dissertation on “Philosophy and Rilke “, has published a profound book, celebrates as “that venerable art that demands above all one thing from its admirer: to step aside, take your time, become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which nothing will be achieved if she does not achieve it lento. But it is precisely for this reason that it is more necessary today than ever, and it is precisely for this reason that it attracts and enchants us most strongly, in the middle of an age of haste, of indecent and sweating haste, which wants to ‘finish’ with everything at once, including everything old and new Beech.”
Well, if Eckhard Heftrich didn’t finish everything right away, it was because, as Friedrich Schlegel demanded, he drilled the board where it was thickest, paying attention to consideration, precision and the detection of what is known as “intertextuality “ could be tagged – which he never did -, placed the greatest value on it and, for example, it was unacceptable if someone ignored the broader intellectual influences on a work or even only quoted from it in abbreviated form.
He didn’t keep up with the economy
He was, if you will, long-living proof that even a century after Nietzsche’s paean to philology, one could and, in his personal opinion, should be untimely. Standing somewhat between disciplines, he was anything but arbitrary in choosing his topics and stayed away from (fashionable) theories because he feared that he would lose sight of the texts themselves. He was also not interested in whether his authors were currently “popular” or particularly prestige, which, for example, was not the case with Stefan George in 1968 and with Thomas Mann in 1975 (“Zauberbergmusik”). He only used the anniversaries as an opportunity to share something that had not yet been read elsewhere or had not been so plausibly proven, such as the tricky Wagner and “Faust II” allusions in “Zauberberg”. Out of respect, he publicly preferred to stay away from some equally thick books, for example Büchner and Kafka. When he wrote books or, for decades also for this feature section, articles, he did so in an essay-like, catchy manner, free of jargon. His ideal of criticism was, in the most romantic way, its poeticization.
Today it is hard to imagine that Heftrich, who was born in Stockach on Lake Constance, studied in Freiburg and, ending a fruitful existence as a freelance author that also produced children’s books, completed his habilitation with Walter Hinck in Cologne in 1970, receiving the “Doctor Faustus and read the “Chosen One” as new releases. About the latter, the 25-year-old opened his review with a self-confident bang, which, to be understood positively, revealed a thoroughly elitist, at least not easily satisfied, understanding of literature, from which he never deviated again: “Flatheads who are overwhelmed by the vacuum of their undeveloped consciousness Permanent modernization is allowed, Thomas Mann is often described as a late birth of the nineteenth century.” One could almost think that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were talking here at once.
Even subtleties need structure
Of course, Thomas Mann was and remained his very big area until the end, and not just because of the three books about him. Research, which has long been a chapter in itself, owes him not only groundbreaking philological impulses, but also scientific organization and cultural policy. He knew that even subtleties depend on structures if they are to unfold and find listeners and readers. Without him, the Buddenbrookhaus and with it what Jochen Hieber once called the Lübeck museum miracle as such would not exist, just as the Thomas Mann Yearbook and the Great Annotated Frankfurt Edition, for which he acted as one of the main editors and provided the “Buddenbrooks”, would not exist . During his presidency from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, he raised the Thomas Mann Society, previously a somewhat sedate association of notables, to a new level that was not only scientifically satisfactory but also quickly set standards. He was probably the most important Thomas Mann researcher; Nobody has interpreted the four main works with such patience and depth of focus as he has, nobody has provided such early and comprehensive proof of how much the entire work, which is rooted in the decadence from beginning to end, should be understood as a literary competition to Richard Wagner’s compositions, with up to ultimate ambivalence.
Eckhard Heftrich Published/Updated: Recommendations: 2
Once again the old Fontane, this time the real one: At the end of the large letter edition by Eckhard Heftrich
Published/Updated: Edo Reents Published/Updated: Recommendations: 7
A personal word at the end. The person paying his tribute here studied with him, admired him and owes him a lot. Heftrich, a German studies professor at the University of Münster from 1974 to 1993, was also a stroke of luck as an academic teacher, whose events, characterized by liberality and unprejudicedness, and not just about Thomas Mann, were inspiring and even eye-opening. He was already incorruptible in his demands. So it could happen in the senior seminar that he asked about Proust and no one really knew what to say. Smiling ironically, he just shook his head: “And these Germanists haven’t read the greatest. . .” From now on you will have to read without his instructions. Eckhard Heftrich died on Wednesday at the age of 95 in Friedeburg, East Frisia.
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