Based on his correspondence with Merkur editor Hans Paeschke, this article portrays Germanist and writer Peter Demetz (1922-2024) as a key transatlantic mediator. Demetz’s manifold pursuits show his professional and personal broad-mindedness which has allowed him to successfully master the transatlantic transition from Europe to the US. Sketching Demetz’s manifold pursuits, I argue that his professional flexibility and openness allowed him to successfully master the transatlantic transition from Europe to the US. Given rising geopolitical tensions, Demetz’s creative and constructive approach to academic and literary work beyond rigid institutional conventions may inspire transatlantic careers and communication today.
By Cosima Mattner
The vivid relationship between US and German Literary Studies has been shaping the academic discipline on both sides of the Atlantic since its institutionalization in the 19th century. As Jan Behrs pointed out in his contribution to this blog in 2021, the transatlantic US-German exchange has received substantial public and private support from institutions like the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service), the Fulbright Program, and the Alexander von Humboldt and Volkswagen Foundations. Such governmental and non-governmental support speaks to the disciplinary and diplomatic benefits of cultivating academic relationships beyond national borders.
In contrast to 2021, however, we are living in a massively destabilized geopolitical moment. What appeared a »stable« funding structure to Behrs is not at all a given anymore. President Trump’s financial cuts to the research and education apparatus and his administration’s ideological infringements on scholarship have significantly impacted the US science system and its global networks in an unprecedented way – and even in Germany, budgetary constraints have harmed the academic world. (For instance, the DAAD and the German Research Foundation recently had to cut some of their programs for lack of sufficient funding.) Maintaining a lively exchange between US and German literary studies will require enormous personal effort and courageous institutional commitments.
One way to gain agency in the contemporary moment is by turning to precedents in the past. Where political developments threaten to destroy much of what has been laboriously built over the past few decades, historical models might help to re-imagine how the transatlantic relationship can be nourished, cultivated, and recreated despite rising geopolitical tensions. One such historical model is the protagonist of this article: The Germanist Peter Demetz, who was a passionate and successful transatlanticist. His estate, which is partly archived at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, provides detailed and entertaining insights into the struggles of a genuinely transnational scholar finding an academic and personal home in the US. Demetz (1922–2024) survived the National Socialist regime in Prague, where he lost his Jewish mother in a concentration camp, later did his Ph.D. at Prague University and worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich before immigrating to the US in 1953, where he became a professor of German at Yale in 1962. Drawing on a selection of Demetz’s correspondence with the Merkur editor Hans Paeschke, I argue that professional broad-mindedness helped him to master the challenges of the transatlantic transition while maintaining its inspirational impulses.
Roughly 70 years ago, Peter Demetz sent a legendary letter to Hans Paeschke. They had been corresponding irregularly since 1950, when Paeschke got interested in Demetz’s poetry, some of which he had published in the Merkur. After a polite exchange of a few letters, their contact slowed down for a while before Paeschke reached out again on March 26, 1954, potentially motivated by the positive resonance that Demetz’ Rilke book had afforded in the literary world in 1953: »Wie mag es Ihnen inzwischen drüben ergangen sein?« (How might you have been doing over there in the meanwhile?) Demetz’s response to Paeschke’s advance is a truly entertaining and deeply insightful read: Sometime before September of 1954 (the letter is undated), Demetz sent Paeschke a full-fledged »American Dream« narrative about his arrival in the United States and, more specifically, in New York. Portraying his difficult starting conditions – having to work as a »Liftboy« (and he uses the English word) in the overwhelming »Wirbel« (chaos, literally: whirl, turbulence) of New York City before being able to resume his studies again – Demetz clearly stages himself as an ideal candidate for the kind of limitless success and endless opportunities associated with the American Dream. He even explicitly embraces the stereotype – »wie es mir erging: […] typisch.« (How I have been doing: the typical.) Concomitantly, he was not just any Liftboy but the one that »fuhr zunächst mit Expräsident Hoover und McCloy im Lift auf und ab« (operated the elevator going up and down with ex-president Hoover and McCloy) – and of course this happens »im feudalsten Herrenklub der Staaten.« (in the poshest gentlemen’s club of the United States.) The warm irony coloring Demetz’s narrative of superlatives does not diminish the urgency underlying his argument that he has arrived in the most established academic circles of the country. After all, his story demonstrates that in order to survive as an immigrant, the academic had to take on what in German is called »niedere Arbeit.«
Demetz’s flexibility paid off: After reviving his studies at Columbia University, where he – evidence of his intellectual capabilities – he immediately started teaching, he soon received two prestigious fellowships from Columbia and Yale University. Escaping the big city noise, he chose Yale where he would spend two years »studierend und schreibend, ganz ohne andere Verpflichtungen.« Few things are more luxurious for scholars than working on an American Fellowship at an Ivy-League institution – Demetz clearly enjoyed it. The desire to only study and write returns throughout his correspondence with Paeschke, who likewise complained about his managerial tasks as an editor. For example on May 15, 1962, when he reports that his journal was threatened with discontinuation because the publisher Deutsche Verlagsanstalt canceled its contract in the early 1960s.
From the beginning of their exchange, Demetz made clear to Paeschke (and maybe to himself) that he was not only an ambitious academic but also – and even more importantly maybe – a prolific essayist, witty journalist, and creative writer. His repeated embrace of a non-academic identity became all the more important when he assumed the position of a full German Studies professor in 1962, which turned him into an administrative manager – a task he was not fond of at all: Ironically, he remarks on April 23, 1968: »So sieht ein ‘Forscher’-Leben aus.« (This is what a ›scholar’s‹ life looks like.) Repeatedly, he complains to Paeschke how busy he is with administration, for example on April 1, 1968: „Meine akademische Existenz ist nicht einfacher geworden; im Gegenteil; zu all meinen Verpflichtungen kommen jetzt noch dauernde Berufsverhandlungen hinzu (uns fehlt ein Ordinarius), […] Zeitverluste […] unendlich lange Ausschuss-, Verpflichtungs- und Finanzverhandlungen) […] noch ein Jahr durchhalten.« (My academic existence has not become easier; on the contrary, in addition to all my obligations, there are constant professional negotiations [we need another full professor], […] delays […] never-ending committee obligations, and financial negotiations […] only one more year.) While Demetz enjoyed teaching as an opportunity for his own continued education (»um mich zu bilden« [in order to educate myself]), he was at points overwhelmed by the high number of students in his classes (letter from 23, 1972). Increasingly, Demetz suffered from what he calls »Zersplitterung« or »Zerstückelung« (fragmentation) between his different roles (as a teacher, scholar, writer, and manager) as he writes in his letters from February 23, 1972 and June 6, 1972. Moreover, increasing concerns about the future of the academic discipline of German studies in the US caused »Frühlings-Depressionen über die Zukunft der Philologie in diesem Lande« (Springtime depression about the state of philology in this country) on May 6, 1971. Against the backdrop of the financial pressure on German Studies departments based on reduced funding, Demetz sarcastically observed that the student body was comfortably apolitical: „sehr ruhig, ungewaschen, und nur an der eigenen Innerlichkeit interessiert.« (ibid; very quiet, unwashed, and only interested in one’s own inwardness.)
Ironically, Demetz himself desired to attend to his own emotional world more than his professional position allowed. While the primary purpose of Demetz’s and Paeschke’s exchange is producing articles for the Merkur, they approach this goal from a wide dialogic angle: Ideas for articles are not generated merely based on clear-cut proposals on intellectual matters but based on real-life experience and context. On November 24, 1961, Paeschke explicitly invited Demetz to write on personal matters – in a mode of »sich […] etwas von der Seele sprechen.« (getting something off one’s chest) Demetz’s creative talent is of specific interest to Paeschke whose agenda was to turn the Merkur away from the »historischen und weitgehend akademischen Einstellung« (historic and largely academic orientation) and invite »den mehr schriftstellernden und künstlerischen Menschen« (rather the writing and the artistic human) in Demetz, as he states in his letter from September 9, 1954. And Demetz hoped for the same: Repeatedly, he emphasized how he suffered from the suppression of personal experiences in the institution and how he wanted to avoid burying all his work in solely academic publications. Demetz’s and Paeschke’s transatlantic relationship thrived because they shared a broad-mindedness; an interest in aesthetic and socio-cultural experience beyond the academic sphere.
The apex of Demetz’ creative work is a project called »Karibische Notizen« (Notes of the Caribbean) which reappears throughout the decade of 1961–1971.[1] In its first notation on January 10, 1961, the Haiti project was called »Das Paradies der schwindenden Erde: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen aus Haiti.« (Paradise of the vanishing earth: diary entries from Haiti) The »paradise« archived in this fragment of a creative report evokes the utopian attitude from which Demetz’s creative work springs. Haiti – with the revolution of 1804 the first independent state of the Caribbean – is invested with the dream of independence and freedom from institutional and political pressures. As his correspondence with Paeschke demonstrates, Demetz worked hard to maintain such space for himself beyond and on top of his commitments and obligations as a university professor. It might have come at the price of his personal well-being. However, there is a later document that shows how he embraced the in-between until the end of his life: In his acceptance speech of the Johann Heinrich Merck prize for literary criticism and essayistic writing, which he received in 1994, he embraced the queerness of his position between his Czech, Austrian, German and American belongings and called what he inhabits a »Winkelexistenz.« (Essays 2022; 165–167; literally: angle existence) This kind of existence, he argued, had political potency in so far as it operated with a certain degree of freedom from party manipulations and trivialized identification (ibid.). Invoking Susan Sontag, Demetz promoted literary reading, writing, and studying as a training field for honing aesthetic sensibilities, which, if practiced rightly, he implied, give access to a more truthful political existence than party politics. Demetz’s letter exchange with Paeschke grants insight into a scholar’s personal and professional life between the US and Germany. Read closely, the correspondence allows us to reconstruct a specific kind of American German literary studies that targeted academic and public circles and bridged not only the Atlantic but also audiences, genres, and administrative, creative, and academic assignments. Demetz’s success as a cultural mediator between the US and Germany was based on his professional and personal broadmindedness. With Paeschke as a key interlocutor, Demetz created and maintained bonds beyond national borders based on literary and academic work. With rising geopolitical tensions, Demetz’s transatlantic story may serve to inspire academic exchanges and reimagine US-German ties today.
[1] Demetz to Merkur, 10.1.1961; 20.8.1973; 23.2.1971; Merkur to Demetz 24.11.61; 11.12.1961, DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Committed to transatlantic communication and exchange, Cosima Mattner’s work focuses on building bridges between the US and Germany through academic, political and cultural channels. She completed her PhD on Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag at Columbia University in New York in 2024. Since then since, she has worked as a research assistant in Contemporary German Literary Studies at the University of Rostock and as a policy advisor to the university alliance German U15 as well as the German Research Foundation.
References
Demetz, Peter: Was wir wiederlesen wollen: literarische Essays 1960-2010, Wallstein Verlag, 2022.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter undated (before 29.09.1954), DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 10.01.1961; DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 23.04.1968, DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 01.04.1968, DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 06.05.1971, DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 23.02.1972, DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 06.06.1972, DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Demetz, Peter to Merkur, letter of 20.08.1973; DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Merkur to Peter Demetz, letter of 26.03.1954; DLA, D: Merkur HS, 1980.0003.
Merkur to Peter Demetz, letter of 29.09.1954; DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Merkur to Peter Demetz, letter of 24.11.1961; DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Merkur to Peter Demetz, letter of 11.12.1961; DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003. Merkur to Peter Demetz, letter of 15.05.1962; DLA, D: Merkur HS 1980.0003.
Die Veröffentlichung der Originalzitate aus der Korrespondenz Demetz–Paeschke erfolgt unter freundlicher Genehmigung des DLA Marbach.
Recommended Citation
Cosima Mattner: “Liftboy” and Professor: Peter Demetz’ Mode of Transatlantic Relationship Building, April 07, 2025. URL: https://transatlanticism.uni-muenster.blog/liftboy-and-professor/ DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.17879/93968666535.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Lizenziert unter der Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz.
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