Jas Elsner has directed me to Stanley Burnstein's edition of Werner Jaeger's first public address in the United States. "The Essence of Classical Culture" Its title reminds me of a discussion in one of Werner Jaeger's three seminars in which I participated, most likely the one about Longinus' Peri Hypsous, in which Professor Jaeger asked his students about the meaning of the word classical. I remember my saying what seemed obvious to me (as it does now) that "classical" pointed to a timeless standard of quality in literature and art. It was a definition which appeared to satisfy Professor Jaeger. It is emblematic of my egotism, that I have no recollection of the testimony of any other participant in the seminar.

"The Essence of Classical Culture" I interpret as Professor Jaeger's translation of "Das Wesen der klassischen Kultur," and I believe I understand what was on his mind, because the paideia of my childhood specified not faith, hope or charity, but Kultur as the target at which I must aim. In my experience, although the words are cognates, Kultur and Culture are not synonymous. Kultur is an imperative to ultimate spiritual (geistige) individual and social virtue. Culture, on the other hand, designates any identifiable pattern of social behavior, often ascribed to a nation, to a region or to a tradition, for example, to the Khoikhoi; they too have a Culture, which in the absence of prejudice, must be deemed at least as meaningful and as valuable as the Kultur of the ancient Athenians. To conclude that one Culture is more valuable or more meaningful than another, is to be racist. The differences between Kultur and Culture become evident in the use of their adjectival forms. My parents commonly characterized as kultiviert oder unkultiviert, individuals in Germany who were respectively congenial or uncongenial to them. I have yet to hear any of my American grandchildren speak of any person as cultivated or uncultivated. Cultivated as opposed to natural pearls, cultivated as opposed to invasive lilies of the valley, or cultivated as opposed to sporadic bacteria, are more colloquial contemporary uses of the term.

I read "The Essence of Classical Culture" as ideology, as rhetoric, as language not reflective of the experience of the speaker or of his hearers, but as the exposition of invented ideas and contrived ideologies that serve as props on the stage onto which Werner Jaeger enters as the "the most prominent classicist to come to the United States in the 1930s".

In Germany, Jaeger had been deflected first from philosophy and then from pure scholarship, by a perceived obligation, if not desire, to become an advocate protecting the university and its hallowed traditions against the onslaught of fascist revolutionaries. As a consequence of failure, he emigrated to the United States, and found himself once more in need of finding his place on an academic stage. The lecture on the Essence of Classical Culture was his attempt to reorganize that stage to meet his own needs. His initial success seems obvious to me. In 1939 he was promoted from the University of Chicago to a prestigious University Professorship at Harvard, with freedom to choose the courses he taught, with an institute specially created for him, and with extensive research support.

In the years during which I think I knew Werner Jaeger, I saw no evidence of any administrative success. There is at Harvard no Jaeger Institute analogous to the Courant Institute at New York University. This afternoon, I find no reference to him on the website of the Harvard Classics Department. Perhaps my surmise that Jaeger was liberated by administrative failures to be the lonely introverted individual whom I thought I knew, is but a projection of my own inadequacies, merely another brick in the wall behind which I hide from the fact that my own life is a failure.