Volume 38, Issue 2

In 1982, while waiting at Schiphol, the Dutch national airport, John Neubauer, then Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh, read an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement for a professorship at the University of Amsterdam. He decided to give it a try – to return to Europe which he left some decades ago. Selection committees had a rich choice of candidates in those days of major funding cuts (a period from which the University still has not recovered). Nevertheless, the committee's decision was not too difficult and, since 1983, John has occupied the chair of Comparative Literature ( Algemene in het bijzonder Vergelijkende literatuurwetenschap ) at the University of Amsterdam.

Some scientifically oriented people may protest against the notion that the primary link between science and literature is the imagination. Yet scientific discoveries of major importance have often been explained, with hindsight, through a leap of the imagination that bridges the gap between existing and unheard-of – and as yet impossible – states of the world. This role of the imagination, much easier to accept when it comes to the fanciful creations of literature, underlies much of the work of humanists who straddle the border between science and literature. John Neubauer is one such humanist. His article on Bachelard's concept of the imagination in science (1994) testifies to this.

Errol Morris (U.S.) is a Platonic film-maker; he mistrusts the seductive ambiguity of images and applies much ingenuity to its staging. Like The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time (1992) is a filmic portrayal of concepts, based on Stephen Hawking's book with the same title. One is reminded of Robert Musil's attempts, in his essayistic novel The Man without Qualities , at superimposing the abstract on the concrete, the concrete on the abstract. Morris, too, is concerned with what Musil called “the second dimension of thought,” the sensual and emotional grounding of ideas. A Brief History of Time is a reflection, in images and sounds, on the meanings of the vita contemplativa . It is not, as many reviewers have said, an adoring portrait of a super-intellectual hero. Clearly, Morris has been awed by the conceptual scope and imagination of Hawking's work. But his showing the man's power of thought also raises many questions about the nature of such power.

Is it coincidence that in 1778 Buffon published his Les Époques de la Nature , Friedrich Schiller started writing his Die Räuber and Johann Heinrich Füssli started working on his drawing titled Der Künstler, verzweifelnd vor der Grösse der antiken Trümmer (The despairing artist, viewing the giant debris of antiquity)? What do these three very different works have in common? In a more or less nostalgic mood, they all evoke the energy and great size of a time past. For Buffon, the natural historian, it is gigantism of animal species, for Füssli the monumentalism of ancient works of art and for Schiller's Karl von Moor, the great feats of ancient heroes.

Job's challenge, according to the verse grafted onto the title-page of the Hefte zur Morphologie (1817), is a fugitive divinity: “Siehe, er geht vor mir über ehe ich's gewahr werde, und verwandelt sich, ehe ich's merke.” [Behold, he passes in front of me before I perceive it and transforms himself before I note it.] ( FA 24, 399). The godhead, which “eternally reproduces itself ” ( WA I 27, 218), cannot be seen. Job remains witness to its passage only through the trail of destruction that it spreads in the wake of its self-generative drive. If God's unfathomable self-transformations outpace conscious perception, however, it is not because “he” resides – with Kant's noumena – beyond all human understanding. Nor does “his” law imply limits – like Kant's categories – that control how we understand creation. With its rhythmically reproduced “before,” in fact, the Biblical fragment projects the pronomial godhead (“he”) as prior to perception, but also belatedly available to understanding as memory. The mind can “capture” the driving principle of a world in flight only from behind, by registering the prescriptive origin through its traumatic after-effects. The “antecedents” of the divinity's pronoun are the constitutive parts of a narrated totality that survive by returning the past of beginnings to a future in death and regeneration.

In the 1970s at the University of Pittsburgh, I was lucky enough to be part of a faculty discussion group on nineteenth-century studies. Over wine, eight or ten of us from the departments of French, Spanish, German, Art History, Physics, Philosophy, and History and Philosophy of Science discovered, with varying degrees of amazement and shock, the very different ways in which our colleagues tackled the history of a rather extended nineteenth century. One of the group's most regular and valued members was John Neubauer whose wide-ranging interests made it easy for him to cross those disciplinary boundaries and mediate our diverse approaches to the poems, paintings and scientific prose that we studied.

Hans Castorp's initial reaction is pained confusion: instead of returning to the Magic Mountain alone, Clawdia Chauchat has come back to the sanatorium in the company of Pieter Peeperkorn, an elderly colonial Dutchman who traded coffee on Java. Hofrat Behrens gives Hans what is initially the somewhat welcome news that his rival “hasn't come up here for fun” (549). On the contrary, Peeperkorn suffers from a serious disease which the doctor diagnoses as “tropical fever, malignant, intermittent, you know; protracted, obstinate” [Tropenfieber … Wechselfieber, verstehen Sie, verschleppt, hartnäckig] (ibid.).

Another border John has always straddled is the one between music and language. It is this area of interest, the cultural agency of music, that is the subject of this second, short section. Three papers take up the question raised in The Emancipation of Music from Language , of how music can make meaning if it isn't language's stepchild. In an age of intermediality and semiotic analysis, this question has lost none of its enigma and urgency.

The Battle of the Nile in 1798 may have dashed France's hopes of taking India, but it set the stage, so to speak, for a form of aesthetic and mimetic colonization of it through the theatrical and musical discourses of opera. In nineteenth-century France, opera was one of a series of discursive practices that helped the nation restore its prestige by appropriating culturally what it failed to conquer militarily. Curiously, however, in doing so it engaged the Parisian public's (well documented) contradictory responses to the entire idea of empire: desire mixed with anxiety.

Illustrated music albums for children can bring together three, or even four, arts: image, text, music, and performance of a game. The Golden Age of children's books produced a few unusually fine examples of visual layout and of counterpoint among the arts. In this period, outstanding artists produced music albums, especially in collections of folksongs and nursery rhymes that consolidated an image of the national past. But far from embodying, as Steven Scher suggests, the “symbiotic construct” of vocal music (1982: 226), these examples tend to confirm John Neubauer's thesis that music by the nineteenth century, understood increasingly as a nonrepresentational art, “emancipated” itself from language (1986: 2). Curiously, the “Pythagorean” trend toward abstraction in music finds a happy conceptual marriage with the abstract nonsense of nursery rhymes and with the “round” form of children's circle games.

In his sound poem Ursonate Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), visual artist, architect, typographer and stage designer, writer, poet, thinker and reciter experimented in multimedial art. Being aware of John Neubauer's interest in this very subject, I want to discuss why I do not consider his experiment to achieve a literary sonata a success. In order to understand Schwitters' motivation, the discussion first requires a look at his ideas of art in general.

“The sister arts”: this time-worn notion tends to refer to literature and visual art, or, more narrowly, poetry and painting. It is predicated upon a firm distinction between the two. But Lessing happened some time ago. Mitchell's famous critique of the ideologies involved in maintaining the hierarchies between visual art and language notwithstanding, much energy in meetings and debates on “word and image studies” still goes into defending an essential distinction. Not so in John's work.

A historical document, such as Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople , that deals with the ever complicated encounter between the West and the Orient begs for a critical perspective on the truth claims that it contains. History, I contend, is a thing of the present in that we approach it with concerns, questions and theories of today in order to make sense of past worlds. History, literary theory and art historical approaches intersect in my analysis of narrative structure and perspective in a collection that encompasses texts and topographical prints.

In 1996, John Neubauer published the article “Clair-Obscur, An Imagined Dialogue between Diderot and Goethe”. In the first part of his paper he organized the dialogue – about the issue of the theory of colours – between the two heavyweights; in the second part Neubauer hazarded a hypothesis why Goethe would have left the original project of his translation of Diderot's Essais sur la peinture incomplete. It is common knowledge that Goethe disagreed with Newton about the issue of chromatics and that he considered Diderot as a follower – like most of the French – of Newton and his ideas. In this essay I will focus on the twilight zone of the polemic character of the “Clair-Obscur”-dialogue. Unfortunately, like Neubauer, I have not been able to find any translations, so the passages written by Diderot are in French, and Goethe's commentary is in German. I would like to start with a squib from the article “Clair-Obscur”.

Vissuto ( Lived experience ), a sculpture by the contemporary Milanese artist Bruno Freddi, constructs an allegory of lived experience through two complementary moments. The first is suffering: the rough wooden post into which nails have been driven suggests a – or the – crucifixion. The progressive degree to which the nails have been driven into the wood conveys a sense of destructive process. The second moment is joy, erotic joy, because this earthly body with a faun's foot suggests a satyr – indeed, a female satyr, such friends as Picasso had. Along with its spatial character, this sculpture has an intellectual, temporal character. It refers to older knowledge, a mythic or literary knowledge of gods and humans and animals who mingle their natures – half-divine beings and demonic animals – or, as Hölderlin puts it in his Rhein hymn – “Halbgötter denke ich jetzt,” as he begins to sing of Dionysus, the god of the satyrs, and also of Rousseau, the divine man, whom Hölderlin includes in the sequence Socrates-Jesus-Rousseau.

Crossing a boundary has been decisive for John Neubauer's life when he escaped from communist Hungary in 1956. Crossing boundaries has been a characteristic of his scholarly research when he switched from science to literature and back, when he explored the territory between literature and music, and between literature and history. In his most recent project, ‘The Literary Cultures of East Central Europe’, he has engaged a band of scholars to join him in a historical travelogue across the boundaries (geographical, historical etc.) of the fifteen-odd countries involved. Therefore, when I started thinking about a contribution for this collection of papers in his honour, I looked around for a theme in Greek literature which might – at least metaphorically – be viewed as an instance of boundary-crossing. I found one, which I shall describe with a few select examples. Fortunately a recent discovery has brought new evidence to light which provides definitive proof for what I want to argue here.

Image and Metaphor : these terms seem inseparable in traditional theories of metaphor. Indeed, and are closely linked in as early a document as Aristotle's Rhetoric (1406b20, 1407a14f, 1410b16–20). And the same is true for essential German contributions to a tradition that has eventually emancipated itself from the confines of rhetoric: A. W. Schlegel's Kunstlehre , Jean Paul's Vorschule der Aesthetik , Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik and Nietzsche's Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne . In spite of the fundamental differences that separate these oeuvres, they all treat our two terms as two connected notions: “Image” is regarded as a part of the metaphor – and renamed a “vehicle” in modern theory (Richards 1971: 93, 96, 116–118) – whilst metaphor as a whole is filed under the category of “imagery” or “visuality”.

If John's professional identity could be summed up in one term – which it cannot – the most plausible option would be “cultural historian”. John's historical work, like that of the best of the trade, has never been without historiographic reflection on how to write cultural history. His in-depth interest in the legacy of Foucault already testifies to this commitment. The title of this section is an attempt to voice the paradox of the historiography of culture: how to think past or beyond the way the past thought itself, without losing touch with that same past mode of thinking? The volume John edited in 1999, Cultural History After Foucault , amply demonstrates the seriousness with which he and his co-authors take the task inscribed in this paradox: to write about the thinking – after all, another word for culture – of the past after we stop thinking up the past in the sense of imposing coherence on it from the unavowed perspective of the present.

In 1938 a young German civil servant flees to England in order to be able to marry a Jewish wife. He takes on a pseudonym, Sebastian Haffner, and writes a brief but trenchant introduction to his country, called Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (published in 1940; translated into German in 1996). Its purpose is to provide his new compatriots with accurate information about the enemy, to be used for propagandistic purposes, or, as he himself writes, in the graphic style which would become his hallmark: This book attempts to do for British and French propaganda what the aerial photographs of the Siegfried line and its ‘Hinterland’, brought back by reconnaissance aircraft, achieve for British and French artillery. Propaganda hitherto has shot far less accurately than artillery. It obviously lacks a clear view of its target. (1940: 10) In other words, impelled by the course of history to become a historian, Haffner undertakes historiography not for academic but for practical reasons. Indeed, he would never become a professional historian but worked his whole life (1907–1999) as a journalist and publicist.

In her preface to Between Past and Future (Arendt 1969), Hannah Arendt illustrates her idea of the relationship between history and theory with an interpretation and a variation of one of Kafka's enigmatic parables. She finds in Kafka's short text “He” a dramatization of René Char's aphorism that “our inheritance was left to us by no testament.” For Arendt, Char gives voice to the predicament of modern man who no longer knows how to live with the legacies of the past – specifically, in Char's case, with what Arendt calls the “treasure” of moments in which “freedom could appear.” (1969: 4) Kafka's parable describes a scene in which a man is caught between two antagonists: “The first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both.” Each of these forces, the one pushing him forwards, the other “driving him back”, should support the man in his struggle against the other, but, Kafka writes, this is “only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions?” In practice thus, in the realm where he has to live, decide and act, the man seems to lose the battle, because no one, not even he himself, knows what he wants. What remains, however, is the man's dream that “some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.” (1969: 7)

One of the most important functions of literature and art lies in their capacities to transform ways in which cultural issues are conceived. In that respect, literature and art can be seen as a kind of laboratory where experiments are conducted that shape thought into visual and imaginative ways of framing the pain points of a culture. This is by no means a novel conception of literature and art. Although the dominant commonsense notions of literature and art are still the expressive and conceptual ones, the importance of art is also quite often seen in terms that assign a much more active function, that is, a performative one. Literature and art are then conceived as the realm where ideas and values, the building stones of culture, are actively created, constituted and mobilized.

The debate about the validity of Western cultural canons, their vitality, importance and/or the need to deconstruct if not abolish them altogether because of their past (and present?) political functions, is certainly an issue where cultural (and/or literary) history and theory meet. So is the related discussion of literature and other cultural artifacts as components of national identities and cultural memories. And consequently, so is the related issue of the ethical problem involved in the production of cultural/literary histories that necessarily contribute to canon formation.

That we should speak of “histories” in the plural rather than of “History” in the upper-case singular has become something of a commonplace. One of the central themes of postmodernism in historical theory has been the idea that there are so many different points of view possible on any given event or period of time, that the idea of an objectively existing singular grand narrative of History has outworn its usefulness. The writ is out that it is neither possible nor desirable to reduce the complexity of world history to a single story and that rather than speak of “History” in the singular we can better refer to lower-case histories in the plural. This theoretical position has been matched and reinforced by a historiographical practice dominated by the ongoing invention of new subjects about which histories can be written. The proliferation of new histories makes synthesis both in practice and in theory difficult to contemplate. For recent decades have seen new histories of all sorts of experiences and, my particular concern here, of all sorts of new social groups.

History, however, is not always pliable enough to allow us to approach it. There are moments in history so intolerable that the people living through them are not equipped to experience them in any meaningful way. We described earlier what the term “trauma” embraces. Collective trauma, like individual trauma, poses the problem of representation. The Holocaust is the most obvious example of this profound historiographical dilemma; the Yugoslav war is another, more recent example. On the one hand, history must remain present to keep us alert to the dangers of repetition. On the other, no representation can be adequate and the historian easily slips into a mitigating discourse. Where there are reasons to question the possibility of writing history, a slash between the past and its writing is called for, a slash that cuts and severs but also keeps the two terms close together.

Of the three “uses of history” handed down to us by Nietzsche – not as inheritance, for nothing is more foreign to his untimely meditations, “for the sake of life and action,” than to indebt the future to a past – which use should be our model to fashion our relation to the future (Nietzsche 1983)? The heroic example of a “monumental history” that inspires weaker times by holding up before them the promise of the possibility of greatness once again? It is doubtful that our exhausted “desert time” could resuscitate the faith, mobilize the will to turn to some real or imaginary past as inspiration in order to fashion for itself, even if only as a copy, another future. Besides, it is precisely the will to fashion/fiction history that is censured by the negative object lesson of recent history – the histories of fascism, communism, of revolutions, nationalisms, dictatorships, totalitarian and totalizing projects of every kind. Their miserable failures prohibit our political imaginary all the more to dream of Nietzsche's other, “critical” path of actively forgetting the past and endowin g ourselves with another history – in order to invent a future, not yet seen in history.

“Consciousness is always late for the rendezvous with the neighbor”, stated Emmanuel Levinas (1987: 119) pointing to the obliging “proximity” of the past that resists all attempts at objectifying historical reflection. Therefore, instead of trying to encapsulate it into unifying cognitive terms, the historian should strive to discern its voice disseminated out of an equivocal space irreducible to the firm site of her consciousness. Destitute of a proper foothold, territory or context, of a recognizable psychic, physical or cultural anchorage, the one who is proximate, in the way Levinas imagines it, is encountered neither visually nor conceptually, but as someone who approaches us (“makes an entry”) in the form of an interpellation, summons or command.

When Wolfgang Koeppen's holocaust survivor novel Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (“Jakob Littner's Notes from a Hole in the Ground”) was published in 1992, it received broad attention. Wolfgang Koeppen was of considerable interest to a reading public who knew his novels Pidgeons on the Grass ( Tauben im Gras , 1951), The Hothouse ( Das Treibhaus , 1953), and Death in Rome ( Der Tod in Rom , 1954). Personally, when I read Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen I found it so captivating that I decided to explore the possibility of its being published in the United States. The publication rights from Suhrkamp, Koeppen's German publisher, were easy to obtain since German books are underrepresented in the United States and academics often serve as facilitators for German books. Holocaust books are usually well received in the United States, so I had hoped for a successful publication; however, when Suhrkamp refused to give permission for an explanatory foreword about Littner's and Koeppen's lives, the project could go no further.

My grandmother was born in Antwerp in 1902. Her father, an over-enthusiastic amateur painter, died of chrome poisoning when she was eleven. During the First World War she and her mother, brother, and two sisters became war refugees. They fled to neutral Holland and eventually settled in Rotterdam, where my grandmother was lucky enough to find a job at a stylish department store. Here, in the course of the 1920s, she also met a commercial traveller from Germany named Hermann Kasten. Hermann decided to put a stop to his wanderings and set up his own business in raw cotton. The couple married and had two children, my father Carl/Kelly (1931) and Gisela (1936).

In 1993 the architect, essayist and former mayor of Belgrade Bogdan Bogdanović published a collection of essays entitled The City and Death which contained reflections on the origins of urbicide . By this the author meant the wilful destruction of urban infrastructure and urban culture and the partial extermination, partial expulsion of the city's inhabitants, a fate that befell, among others, the cities of Vukovar, Mostar and Sarajevo during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

Between the professional and the personal, a traditionally fiercely guarded border remains. It is a border that a scholar of John's stature and nature can be expected to disrespect. In his introduction to the Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence , he briefly but significantly evokes the meaning his two beloved daughters had for him, when, in their adolescence, they confronted him with his own memories, with the adolescent in himself. The experience of being a father enriched Fin-de-Siècle in ways impossible to trace yet surely significantly. Without ever indulging in an overly personal tone, John's authorial voice is unmistakable in everything he writes: his culturedness, his genuine affection and admiration for his subjects, his profound kindness even in the most polemical of debates. In this section several people whose professional lives as humanistic scholars have been deeply enriched by their personal relationship with John address some of the issues he has raised that cannot be captured in any combination of two words.

Kritische Literaturkritik, das ist derzeit kein Pleonasmus, denn ideologienkritische Literaturkritik tut Not und ist notwendiger denn je. Ein ideologienkritischer Ansatz, das beinhaltet für mich weder hardlinerartige linke Betonköpfigkeit noch nostalgisches Herumgemaule mit einem angerosteten Messer zwischen den Zähnen. IdeologienKritik ist das Herstellen von Transparenz mit Blick auf die Mechanismen der Fremdbestimmung unseres Denkens und Empfindens. IdeologienKritik beinhaltet auch den konsequenten Versuch, ungeschminkt Befund und Rechenschaft über die inneren Verhältnisse des Funktionierens von Individuen in Gesellschaftskontexten abzulegen. Dem Bereich der Kunst kommt hierbei eine erhebliche Rolle zu. Jedenfalls eine wichtigere als man auf Anhieb anzunehmen bereit ist. Ich denke dabei nicht oder nicht nur an Manipulation und Zensur in Diktaturen, sondern auch an die alltäglichen Rituale der institutionellen Verblendung und medialen Verkleisterung, die unser Leben kontinuierlich begleiten: von der Feierstunde bis zur Weihestunde, vom Feuilleton bis zur Fernsehdiskussion.

Discussing his methodology in the introductory chapter of The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (1992), John Neubauer writes: “In contrast to this method [of New Historicism reading a whole age through certain paradigmatic texts, G.V.] I start with the study of literary structures and narrative modes, not as an exercise in formalist criticism but rather because I believe that they encode social and historical issues […] Distrusting the notion that single texts can reveal central attitudes of an entire age, I try to achieve reasonable comprehensiveness by discussing a large number of literary and nonliterary, canonized and noncanonized texts. I end up with a large but inhomogeneous corpus that, spanning a variety of ideologies, discourses, and national cultures, is interlinked primarily by the common theme [of adolescence, G.V.]” (1992: 10–11). Neubauer recognizes that reading late-19th-century history through the prism of adolescence inevitably yields an imaginary reduction of the age (in its double sense), whereby a whole historical period threatens to be condensed to a theoretical phase in the Bildungs narrative of “the” individual, while the personal complexities of adolescence are flattened out as the dominant episteme of that time. In order to avoid this double epistemological pitfall of reading (personal) history as theory or theory as history, Neubauer focuses on the historical workings of the third term, literature, and more precisely on the heterogeneous intertextual web connecting “a large number of literary and nonliterary, canonized and noncanonized texts” and paintings from various periods and “national cultures.” Joyce, Mann, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kipling, Gide, Kirchner, Munch, Freud, the sociologist G.S. Hall, Mead, and a host of other famous and lesser known writers, artists, and scientists … All of them are read under the sign or image of adolescence, which by the end of the book has become as particular as universal, as richly diverse as the singular subject of modern literature.

If we are to believe David Lurie, the main character of J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) his students are an ignorant lot. “Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well been hatched from eggs yesterday.” (Coetzee, Disgrace : 32). Lurie, formerly professor of modern literature, is now adjunct professor of communications at Cape Technical University, though he is still allowed to teach one course on his former subject, literature. Introducing his students into the poetry of Byron and asking them about “fallen angels,” all he expects “is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark.” And when, at his home, he talks to the girl student Melanie, whom he tries to seduce, he excuses himself about his musical taste.

The remarks below draw on my experience of working with John Neubauer on a massive History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century . This four-volume work, sponsored by ICLA and slated to be published by John Benjamins, has occupied much of our thinking and writing for the past six years. And were it not for John Neubauer's proverbial patience and unflagging energy, we would have long ago abandoned this project that has regularly overwhelmed us with a plethora of conceptual and editorial problems. It is not difficult to imagine why a work that proposes to cover two eventful centuries in the evolution of a score of literatures from several different language areas, and which has required over 100 contributors to map some of the exchanges between them, has often given pause to its coeditors. Both of us have from the start been aware not only of the enormity of this undertaking, but also of the controversial nature of its conception, challenging traditional literary histories based on national(istic) and text-oriented premises. Moving beyond the conventional boundaries of national literatures, historical trends, and generic divisions, seeking instead those “junctures” or “nodes” that allow for a cross-cultural reinterpretation, this history could easily upset both national sensitivities and narrow aesthetic or text-oriented concerns.

In 1996 John Neubauer joined me and a small group of colleagues in Toronto to discuss the possibility of a Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe over the last two hundred years. It was clear to all of us that this had to be a large-scale collaborative project that would take the full five years of the Literary History Project at the University of Toronto co-directed by Linda Hutcheon and myself. The Literary History Project had received generous funding from the Canada Council and the University of Toronto which made possible three general meetings held during the course of the project's development. What was not clear yet was how we would develop an open history rather than another totalizing nationalist history or collection of nationalist glorifications. John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope emerged from these meetings as the editors of the East Central Europe History. This paper outlines the general direction of this dialogue, the many debates we had and, finally, the collective will to depart from linear totalizing history into the still uncharted seas of comparative literary cultures in one of the most diversified and diversifying areas of the world.

When John Neubauer became my teacher at the University of Pittsburgh in 1979, lessons for life abounded everywhere – “everything was a seedling,” (HKA II: 563) as Novalis had once noted. Recalling some of these lessons 25 years later brings back fond memories of a period of challenge and growth.

I met János almost half a century ago at Amherst College Massachusetts, my memory now being that I was the more frightened of two young men at the tail-end of the great American wave of Macarthyism. The Sixties (we didn't yet know they would be blazing) thrust us into an Anglo-Saxon collegiate environment flourishing in the then pristine Connecticut Valley. János now approaches seventy, a distinguished literary historian whose work is known on both sides of the big pond and, more recently, further east to the Balkans. It is difficult for me to think of him apart from the thread of our lives and – more specifically – outside the friendship we have enjoyed over five decades. The point is also central to his notion of literary history as something occurring within specific cultural geographies or set of transcultural migrations.

I have to admit I do not care for jogging. But I have always had an admiration for runners. “Nurmi Nurmi” were the first words I remember ever hearing on the radio. I had to ask what they meant, because – at that age – I had understood “nur mich, nur mich”. My first sporting hero was Emil Zatopek, maybe because I suspected him to be an outsider, on account of the ‘Z’ of his surname, the last letter of the alphabet. My father once tried to comfort me, by saying, after I told him that in the line-up in gym class I was always last, because of my height: “Mach dir nichts draus, die Letzten werden die Ersten sein”. Experience told me there was no reason to believe him, but Zatopek seemed to prove him right, and I still recall the Czech national anthem, played at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. In November 2000, I chanced to read about Zatopek's death, and I suddenly had this image of a man running and running all these years, somewhere in the Moravian mountains, past Communists and Russian tanks, past the Velvet Revolution, past his country's partition and Vaclav Havel's presidency.

Borders and their crossings play an immensely important part in our lives, in every aspect – as they do in literature. The main character in Tchicaya U Tam'si's novel Ces fruits si doux de l'arbre à pain (1987) is a judge, that is, a professional guard of boundaries of a specific kind: those between good and evil. As a judge, he stands for the need to uphold boundaries and for the survival of the community, indeed, of the species. But, as Judge Raymond Poaty soon finds out, it is impossible to maintain the clarity of the domain he serves. This confusion is an allegory for the state of the contemporary world.

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