With the rise ofNational Socialism Auerbach wasforced to vacate his position in 1935. Exiled fromNazi Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wroteMimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), generally considered his masterwork.[8]: 4 He was chair of the faculty for Western languages and literatures atIstanbul University from 1936 to 1947.[9] Auerbach's life and work in Turkey is detailed and placed in historical and sociological context in Kader Konuk'sEast West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (2010).[9]
In the 50-year commemoration reprinting of Auerbach'sMimesis,Edward Said of Columbia University included an extended introduction to Auerbach and mentioned the book's debt toGiambattista Vico, writing: "As one can immediately judge by its subtitle, Auerbach's book is by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works of the past half century. Its range covers literary masterpieces from Homer and the Old Testament right through to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, although as Auerbach says apologetically at the end of the book, for reasons of space he had to leave out a great deal of medieval literature as well as some crucial modern writers like Pascal and Baudelaire."[12]
Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1929.
Published in English asDante: Poet of the Secular World. Trans.Ralph Manheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern: Franke Verlag, 1946.
Published in English asMimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1953.
Introduction aux études de philologie romane. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1949. The Turkish translation, published in 1944, appeared before the French original.
Published in English asIntroduction to Romance Languages and Literature: Latin, French, Spanish, Provençal, Italian. Trans. Guy Daniels. New York: Capricorn, 1961.
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays. New York: Meridian, 1959.
Chapters and papers published between 1944 and 1951, one written in English, five translated from German. Includes the 1944 version of "Figura".
Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter. Bern: Franke Verlag, 1958.
Published in English asLiterary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.
Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Ed. James I. Porter. Trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
^Haen, Theo d' (2009).Literature for Europe?. Rodopi. p. 54.ISBN978-90-420-2716-9.We should remember that comparative literature in the United States was also largely started by immigrants – the refugees who fled Nazi Germany ( principal among them Auerbach, Spitzer, Poggolio and Wellek).
^Hutchinson, Ben (2018).Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 78.ISBN978-0-19-880727-8.In the footsteps of pioneering figures such as Spitzer and Auerbach, the discipline of comparative literature began gathering pace in the 1950s largely as a transatlantic affair.
Bakker, Egbert. "Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter."Poetics Today 20.1 (1999): 11–26.
Baldick, Chris. "Realism."Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York:Oxford University Press, 1996. 184.
Bremmer, Jan. "Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis."Poetics Today 20.1 (1999): 3–10.
Calin, William. "Erich Auerbach’sMimesis – ’Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment."Style 33.3 (1999): 463–474.
Chihaia, Matei. 40 Years of Auerbach Research. A bibliography of secondary literature on Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" since 1984 [Data set]. Zenodo (2025).https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14685309.
Domínguez, César. "Auerbach y la literatura comparada ante Babel."Cuadernos de teoría y crítica 3 (2017): 137–149.
Doran, Robert. "Erich Auerbach's Humanism and the Criticism of the Future."Moderna: semestrale di teoria e critica della letteratura 11.1/2 (2009): 31–39.
Green, Geoffrey. "Erich Auerbach."Literary Criticism & the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach & Leo Spitzer. Nebraska:University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Holmes, Jonathan, and Streete, Adrian, eds.RefiguringMimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature. Hatfield:University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005.
Holquist, Michael. "Erich Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today."Poetics Today 20.1 (1999): 77–91.
Landauer, Carl. "Mimesis and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing."German Studies Review 11.1 (1988): 83–96.
Lerer, Seth,Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1996.
Lerer, Seth (2005)."Auerbach, Erich".Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2 ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press. Archived fromthe original on 30 October 2005. Retrieved13 January 2004.
Nuttall, A. D. "New Impressions V: Auerbach’sMimesis."Essays in Criticism 54.1 (2004): 60–74.
Porter, James I. "Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology."Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 115–47.
Said, Edward. "Fifty Year Anniversary ofMimesis," included in Fifty Year Anniversary edition ofMimesis. Princeton University Press, 2003.
Weinstein, David and Zakai, Avihu,Jewish exiles and European thought in the shadow of the Third Reich : Baron, Popper, Strauss, Auerbach. Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2017.
