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Although
many of his peers and elders, especially those of secondary rank,
felt threatened and unsettled by Simmel's erratic brilliance, his
students and the wider, nonacademic audience he attracted to his
lectures were enthralled by him. Simmel was somewhat of a showman.
Many of his contemporaries who left an account of his lectures have
stressed that it seemed to them that Simmel was thinking creatively
in the very process of lecturing. He was a virtuoso on the platform,
punctuating the air with abrupt gestures and stabs, dramatically
halting, and then releasing a torrent of dazzling ideas. What the
great German critic Walter Benjamin once said of Marcel Proust,
that his "most accurate, most convincing insight fasten on
their objects as insects fasten on leaves" applies equally
well to Simmel. Emil Ludwig describes him well, though with a touch
of characteristic vulgarity, when he writes: "Simmel investigated,
when he lectured, like a perfect dentist. With the most delicate
probe (which he sharpened himself) he penetrated into the cavity
of things. With the greatest deliberation he seized the nerve of
the root; slowly he pulled it out. Now we students could crowd around
the table in order to see the delicate being curled around the probe."
George Santayana, then still experimenting with New England terseness,
was given to less fancy modes of expression; but when he wrote to
William James that he had "discovered a Privatdozent, Dr. Simmel,
whose lectures interest me very much," he undoubtedly wished
to convey in this sober fashion a fascination equal to that experienced
by Ludwig.
In
view of Simmel's enormous success as a lecturer, it must have been
especially galling to him that when he finally achieved his academic
goal, a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg, he was
deprived of practically every opportunity to lecture to students.
He arrived at Strasbourg, a provincial university on the borderline
between Germany and France, in 1914, just before all regular university
activities were interrupted by the outbreak of the war. Most lecture
halls were converted into military hospitals. A man as alive to
the incongruities in man's destiny as Simmel could not have failed
to smile wryly on this crowning irony. His last effort to secure
a chair at Heidelberg, where the death of Wilhelm Windelband and
Emil Lask had created two vacancies in 1915, proved as unsuccessful
as previous attempts. Shortly before the end of the war, on September
28, 1918, Simmel died of cancer of the liver.
From
Coser, 1977:196-197.
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