Nadler, Josef

(1884–1963)

   An influential historian of German literature and essayist, Nadler was born in the kingdom of Bohemia when it was part of the Habsburg Empire. He taught at the universities of Freiburg in Switzerland and Königsberg in Germany before taking up a professorship at the University of Vienna in 1931. He held that position until 1945.

   In multivolume works such as Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften (The Literary History of the German Tribes and Provinces, 1923) and Literaturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes (The Literary History of the German Peoples, 1938), Nadler developed the idea that the history of German literature took place not as a series of literary movements represented by individual writers, but as the translation of the spiritual essence of the Germanic peoples from one “stem” to another. Thus 19th-century Romanticism was the result of the Germanization of groups whom he called the “new stems”—the Silesians and East Franks of the German east—by increased contact with the “old stems.” The latter were the Alemanic and Frankish peoples. The cultural high point of the latter had been reached in the 18th-century Weimar of Goethe and Schiller. The Bavarians, Nadler believed, played a unique role in mediating between the cultures of east and west.