Gildersleeve and Berve

So, here I am scribbling away on Thucydides, and I no sooner do I mention
Basil Gildersleeve's fine comment on Thucydides' subtle use of particles,
"A quiver in the face of Thucydides is always worth noticing," and contrast
him with later writers about Thucydides who often miss the "quivers"  -- no
sooner do I write that than I find that Gildersleeve was mentioned in the
San Diego SCS panel that I missed.

I haven't read Gildersleeve's writings on race and the Civil War, but I'm
quite ready to believe they're dismal.   I've read and been vocal about the
issues of his day, for instance Confederate statues.  He throve in the
years after Reconstruction was brought to a brutal end, and when the
Supreme Court annulled the progressive Civil Rights Act of 1875 (in 1883)
and ruled horribly on *Plessy-Ferguson *(1896) .  Having worked on Moses
Finley's Master's Thesis in Pubic Law, written at age 16 or 17, on the
opinions of the great Justice Harlan -- friend of DuBois, noted dissenter
in *Plessy -- *I have a longstanding personal and professional interest in
that period.  Gildersleeve seemed to typify the mentality of (white)
southerners who so decisively took back power that some historians say the
South was the real winner in the Civil War:  but he understood Thucydides'
prose better than many others, and I've long valued his comments.

How to deal with the work of horrible people? Hard question, but I think
professional obligation -- to advance understanding -- has priority.  In
the 1930s,  the wonderful art historian Meyer Schapiro found great value in
the formal emphasis and Gestalt psychology of the Vienna School of art
critics, but warned -- correctly -- that the school's emphasis on race and
"mentality" was dangerous.  As the world soon learned.  Some in the Vienna
School were Nazis, some were Jewish.  Schapiro was a committed anti-Stalin
Marxist who even in 1943 was criticizing WWII as an imperialist venture:
but he contributed to the Vienna School's journal and corresponded with
Nazi scholar Hans Sedlmayr, receiving this letter in 1934 (*Wiener Jahrbuch
für Kunstgeschichte* 59 (2010)):

What can a man who is an opponent of Communism and of Jews (as far as they
– in consequence of their history and the social structure of that nation
–- are preparers and allies of communism) – what can a man who believes in
peasants, religion and art be? I am astonished that you could not solve
this riddle. He naturally is a ‘conservative.’


(One focus of Riegl, the most famous Vienna school scholar was late antique
art, which they caused something of an uproar defending.  Riegl's aesthetic
defense of the often derided Arch of Constantine was one big issue. See
Elsner in this good book.
<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsmile.amazon.com%2FCambridge-Companion-Constantine-Companions-Ancient-ebook%2Fdp%2FB00A4A6BFY%2Fref%3Dsr_1_2%3FAdv-Srch-Books-Submit.x%3D0%26Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y%3D0%26field-dateop%3DDuring%26qid%3D1551553616%26refinements%3Dp_27%253Alenski%252Cp_28%253Acambridge%2Bcompanion%26s%3Dbooks%26sr%3D1-2%26unfiltered%3D1&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C7cc61b2d82d8439952d808d69f44df94%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636871515494045696&amp;sdata=stMmkWPdm8Y8poDOQX6ovGA0nVFT6QgDqOyIMtBJHg4%3D&amp;reserved=0>
)

Finally, there's Berve, arch-Nazi who condemned Victor Ehrenberg's 1938
book *Ost u. West *for treating "Juda" as "eine wesentliche Komponente der
europäischen Welt und ihrer Geschichte."  (Ironically, young Finley was
condemning the same book at the same time == from the left.)  Finley and
Momigliano both had harsh things to say about Berve, but Finley also, in a
letter to his German translator Andreas Wittenberg --  about Joseph Vogt's
dubious past, turned to others, including two from Munich.   Wolfgang
Kunkel, he said,  stayed in Germany in WWII as a legal officer and did what
he could to help men called up for court-martial for "defying
Schrecklichkeit orders" while Kurt von Fritz, who came to Columbia U, had
been the "most pernicious single figure in classical scholarship in
Germany."  People will judge them, Finley said,  on the basis of a shallow
reading of documents -- who stayed, who left? -- but that is the
"intellectually lazy way" to do things.  (Not all would agree about v
Fritz.)

"In the end," Finley wrote, "you cannot get away from Momigliano's early
judgmment that Berve was creating the best school of ancient history in
Germany.  That's a pity, but it is no less a fact for being an embarrassing
one."

In sum, these are all trying examples, unpleasant to deal with.  As in
other cases, horrible people have done worthwhile scholarship.  I really
mean it when I say Gildersleeve makes many contemporary Thucydides scholars
look like amateurs.  Using his work, I am not selling my soul: it would be
a far greater error to ignore him, at a time when we need every tool we can
find to wrestle with this historian's language.

Best,

Dan