Henry Caraway Hatfield

Henry Caraway Hatfield, an accomplished American scholar and critic of German literature, was born in Evanston, Illinois, on June 3, 1912 and, after a brief illness, died in Cambridge on December 10, 1995. His family roots were in the Midwest. His father, James T. Hatfield, was professor of German at Northwestern University. Henry went to public schools in Evanston, except for one year when the family lived in Freiburg, Germany, where he attended a classical Gymnasium. He entered Harvard College in 1929, intending to concentrate in the Classics. On the train to Boston, he met another Midwesterner on the way to Harvard -- Harry Levin, and so began a lifelong friendship. This included touring England by bicycle, when both were students there.

Early in his years at Dunster House, Henry read Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg which so entranced him that he changed his concentration to German. Decades later, in one of his books on Mann, he would call The Magic Mountain "the supreme German novel of ideas." He graduated in 1933 summa cum laude. His senior thesis on Stefan George was a solid, comprehensive study, and -- considering his later devotion to liberal democratic ideals -- surprisingly sympathetic to George's classical-elitist views. A Henry traveling fellowship took him to Oxford, after which he studied for another year at the University of Berlin. He then went to Columbia University to pursue graduate studies in German literature.

During a year's leave, back in Evanston, where he taught public school, Henry met Jane Stauff, a graduate of Northwestern. They were married in 1937. Jane stood by his side during later periods of ill health and his final illness. Henry is also survived by their son Robert, professor of art history at the Syracuse University program in Florence, their daughter Barbara Bazyn, by a grandchild and two great-grandchildren.

At Columbia, Henry wrote his dissertation under Robert Fife on the German scholar-philosopher-classicist Winckelmann and then became assistant professor at Williams College. During World War II, the government called on him to serve. He spent the winter of 1944-45 in London, de-briefing German prisoners of war and broadcasting to Germany for the Office of War Information. After returning to Williams for a year, he accepted an offer from Columbia where he advanced to professor of German and editor of The Germanic Review. In 1954, he joined the Harvard faculty. He chaired the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in the late fifties, served as visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin in 1960 and was appointed Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture in 1967. After becoming emeritus professor in 1982, Henry taught German literature in the Extension Division. He was a devoted teacher, unstintingly generous to the graduate students who wrote their dissertations under his direction. Appreciating his wit, students called him, among themselves, to be sure, "the fastest pun in the East." His views were passionately held and pungently expressed, his loathing of Richard Wagner being no less a point of honor with him than his determination to retain the department's Latin requirement for all graduate students.

In the twenty-fifth anniversary report of his Harvard class, Henry described himself, in 1958, as "an unrepentant (though not uncritical) Democrat" and "an unconfused liberal." Looking back fifty years in 1983, he singled out the experience of marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. through Montgomery, Alabama, as the supreme "non-academic" (his term) event of his life. "No hero, I was scared blue, but I shall always be grateful for the experience."

Writing was always part of Henry's life, done mostly during the

summers in his beloved house in Vermont, within reach of the Dartmouth College library. Columbia University Press published his dissertation in 1943 as Winckelmann and his Critics, 1755-1781. It remains a significant piece of historical scholarship to this day. It traces the reception of that neo-classical concept of the beautiful human figure, representing the harmonious personality, which was to become central to much of German literature. One of Henry's favorite courses was built around the history of this concept which he summed up, in 1964, in his book Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature from Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe. In a 1974 Harvard Press book, Clashing Myths in German Literature from Heine to Rilke, he followed the fortunes of German Hellenism into the early twentieth century where it faced competition from Christian and Germanic mythologies.

Most of Henry's publications were designed to acquaint American readers with worthwhile trends in past and present German literature. With Jack Stein, a colleague both at Columbia and Harvard, he brought out a textbook, Schnitzler, Kafka, Mann in 1953 and, with Franz Mautner, in 1959, The Lichtenberg Reader which assembles memorable aphorisms of that delightful eighteenth-century paradox, a witty German. He singled out Thomas Mann and Goethe for presentation in introductory volumes first published, respectively, in 1951 and 1963. The Mann book, brought out by New Directions, introduced a host of American readers, college students and their teachers to Henry's favorite author, of whom he once said "the proper study of mankind is Mann!" In the ambiguously titled book From the Magic Mountain (1979), he appraised Mann's later novels. Mann had already loomed large in his 1966 study German Literature: The Major Figures in Context. He turned to more recent writers in the 1969 Crisis and Continuity in German Fiction. What informs all these books is Henry's spontaneously good judgment and common sense, an entertaining conversational style, wit, understatement, and the critically ironic stance that implies both appreciation of and distance from his subject. Henry's times were not easy ones in which to be an American professor of German. In the post-war years, he found the right voice to help sustain German literary studies in America.

Respectfully submitted,

Donald L. Fanger

Karl S. Guthke

Reginald Phelps

Eckehard Simon, Chair

 

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Copyright 1998 President and Fellows of Harvard College