In Memoriam: Henry H. H. Remak (1916–2009)

Henry H. H. Remak, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Germanic and West European Studies, passed away on February 12, 2009, at the age of 92, in Bloomington, Indiana, where he spent most of his professional life at Indiana University. Remak was one of the most visible and influential proponents of an American Germanistik that overcame its often narrow fixation on German Germanistik by creating a more cosmopolitan approach through cultural comparison, mainly by establishing, after World War II, Comparative Literature as a comprehensive field of study. It is hardly surprising that the obituaries for Henry Remak tend to mention his work for Comparative Literature first, his allegiance to German second. He was indeed a mover and shaker in the new discipline, traveling the world as an urbane, witty, and highly stimulating speaker, giving profile to the International Comparative Literature Association, contributing to a solid foundation of the field through methodological reflections and model interpretations, and being honored at his 70th birthday by a truly impressive Festschrift with contributions by international luminaries (Sensus Communis, 1986). It is my goal, writing in The German Quarterly, of which Henry was a book editor in the early 1 960s, to make sure that his substantial contributions to the transformation of American Germanistik axe equally well remembered. With other, mostly Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, Henry Remak became instrumental in changing German from a rather self-contained, intellectually mostly conservative, philology-driven field. Marginalized by the two wars, American Germanistik was mainly interested in survival within the American academy. As a Jewish Berliner who had received a great bi-cultural education at the renowned Franzosisches Gymnasium (Abitur 1934), Henry studied in Bordeaux and Montpellier and in 1936 left for the U.S. (where his family was able to follow). After taking his Ph.D. in German in 1947 at the University of Chicago with a dissertation on Stendhal's German reception, he returned to the German Department at Indiana University, which remained, together with the Comparative Literature Department, his academic home for decades. Henry never left any doubt that German language and literature were also his intellectual home, confirming the belief that comparison needs grounding in one culture in order to prepare for the intricacies of other cultures and - as he always reminded his readers - to enable the process of analyzing different languages and textual structures itself. This was reflected in his unforgettably lively teaching of literature, where he made FrenchGerman literary relations a crucial ingrethent yet always concentrated on close readings of individual authors, elucidating the total import of a text as against using the text as an illustration of a particular theory or historical context. …